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The Considerably
Longer Version, Page 2
Conflict:
Helping People, or the Achievement
Treadmill?
How to Avoid a True
Love
More Law and
Business
A Good
Place to Be
Conflict:
Helping People, or the Achievement
Treadmill?
In Western Colorado my
mother struggled for decent work while trying to raise
two children. In the summers I worked eighty-five hours
a week, oil field or construction work by day,
pizza-maker or dishwasher by night, and she gave me her
’76 Cutlass Supreme for helping out -- the good ol’
Gutless Supreme whose transmission I dropped once or
twice. I caught the vector of public service when her
employer caught a whiff of a wisp of a rumor that she
might have breast cancer. He fired her to avoid paying
insurance. It wasn’t fair, she pointed out. Probably I
was vulnerable to something unspoken: People should
listen to each other.
So, already bored with
engineering, a naïve vision of public service gripped
me. A lot of congressmen had gone to law school, hadn’t
they? There was no one to ask. Driven by a lifelong
anxiety about money, for pre-law I switched to the
College of Business, which apparently meant that I would
have to educate myself later. I had two new goals, and I
poured everything I had into achieving them. I hoped
against hope to get into a top-ranked law school, and I
also set my sights on a Rhodes Scholarship. (A voice
even then wondered if I wanted it in part because it was
the highest honor a collegiate could attain, but I held the voice
under water until it stopped kicking and went
away.)
The Rhodes, as I
found, wasn't so realistic. The Rhodes
Scholarship, oddly enough, was for scholars. Study in business administration, I sensed, would put me
at a disadvantage. So, back in the time when the
only coach I had was me, I developed a strategy for this. I
prevailed on professors for independent study, took
Honors classes in arts and sciences, and wrote a thesis,
though of course one wasn’t required: “The Business
Mind: What They Don’t Teach You at Business School”. I
had run track and played rugby, done student government,
collected awards, had a 3.97g.p.a., and in my senior
year, I made the state finals for the Rhodes.
In the state finals, I
was the only candidate of 13 called back for a second
interview to determine the two spots reserved for
Coloradans in the national finals. But in one of the big
early disappointments that I can only hope built character
as consolation, both of those selected in my
place went on
to win one of the scholarships awarded to only 32 of the
100 national finalists. So close! After three years of
work and hope, I was crushed. I would later be told by
the Rhodes committee that I might have gone to
Oxford, too, but for having had the dubious judgment to
major in business administration, and having declined
the advice to apply again. Here, in my lack of it, is
also a small illustration of my belief in the power of
coaching.
I didn't apply again
because by the following year I had somehow found my way
into Harvard Law School, thus prompting my misbegotten
familiarity with the old riposte –
Q: Why did
you go there?
A: Because they let me in.
--
and making me a better
life and career coach for
it. (See the recent
breakthrough coaching conversations).
But in college I began
to re-discover that there was more to me than what I
could see. I began a life-long practice of growth
-- inward, outward, deeper. Outside of any
classes, I read widely in philosophy and theology,
religion and meditation. I studied Pranayama yoga
and meditation. I was introduced to Zen
Buddhism. My studies never ended, but my practice
lay fallow during most of the law school years and for
many years afterward. But my spiritual practice is
flowering now and I couldn't be happier about it.
The fourth time I
saw my father I was twenty-two and it was a late-spring
day of graduation. I had for many weeks bent to the task
of composing an eight-sentence invitation that held no
false words.
I graduated with a B.S. in Business
Administration (Finance and Human Resources emphases),
summa cum laude and valedictorian. The College of
Business had missed my file and, at the public ceremony,
presented the award to someone else. They made a
correction later, quietly.
In law school, people who
barely knew me called me “Gov’ner” and confirmed, it
seemed, that my destiny was manifest. I studied
governance and public policy, political theory and
democratic process, and I was a rapt pupil. My peers
elected me president of our class. In the summers I
worked for the Colorado Governor’s Office on public
policy matters, and for the Alaska Attorney General’s
Office, on the Exxon-Valdez spill, as well as for
international law firms in Washington, D.C. and
Brussels, Belgium.
Oddly enough, it was in the
largely ceremonial (read: extraneous) role of class
president that I had another hint of what I really
enjoyed. It wasn’t while organizing bottles of honestly
undrinkable wine with HLS 1992 labels on them, or
getting clever t-shirts printed up or planning the
commencement that did it. What gave me some fulfillment
was, rather, serving the role of intermediary and
sometime diplomat among my classmates, and between class
factions and the administration, during a particularly
troubled and politically charged period in the school’s
history. Something about working with and for people . .
.
Following law school, the six-year-old
political aspirations quietly died – from the taint of
money, from the malodorous intellectual dishonesty of
demagoguery and partisanship. Politics, an
outward-directed process of compromise, began to seem
increasingly less a reflection of my personality than
was my growing engagement with the uncompromising
businesses of understanding my self and others, and the
internal, lonely pursuit of writing.
But my
convictions about democracy, meritocracy, leadership,
generosity, and due process remained. All my life, I see
now, I have railed against institutions that lacked
these values. In the years since, I have wrestled with
whether it was possible to do work in furtherance of
these values without being in
politics.
How to Avoid a True
Love
I wouldn't, however, use the word
mistake for business school, law school,
political aspirations, legal practice. I’ve learned not
to regret what I’ve not known how to decide differently.
The diversity of my experience has made of me something
I like. But I began tacking in a different direction
some years ago, setting course for greater proximity to
the written word, to marry the writing life that I
realized had been one of my earliest and most faithful
loves to the life of art and culture, the human mind and
spirit, and the furtherance of democratic processes
large and small that are my adult passions
In
response to some childhood trauma that now lies beyond
the reach of memory, my mother encouraged me to write.
(Ah, the Memoirs of a Nine-Year Boyhood).
Diminutive, bespectacled junior-high teachers were fit
subjects of later narratives (“At the tender age eight
Mr. Dwire killed a dog with a fork. When he was twelve
he killed his first man and that night his mother wept
as she packed his bag.”) In my first teenage year I
began writing a novel, the events of which took place on the planet Jupiter, in
the only sensible way I knew: exactly like Edgar Rice
Burroughs. I have kept a carefully observed journal
aimed at self-understanding since I was nineteen. And
all along I have read as if starved for words: I have
always been an autodidact.
I enjoyed writing
assignments in high school and college, but the idea of
being a writer (coaching did not exist then) was
as foreign to me as the idea of being an artist
was alien to the people among whom I grew up. I
shouldn’t doubt there was an unspoken assumption that
connected all creativity to sexual deviance. In any
event, I had too much ground to make up, financial
security to achieve, more visible achievements to
conquer. The idea of permission to pursue what I enjoyed
never entered my mind.
But just before my law
school graduation, a close cousin and once my best
friend, who until recently had been so reminiscent, in face and body,
of Michelangelo’s David, died of lupus. He was 23. As
writers will, I turned to writing about our time
together to bring order out of chaos. I’ve been writing
ever since. Short stories, novels, essays: my affair
with writing, with both fiction and what Richard Rhodes
calls “verity,” had begun the long trek out of the
dessert. Thus also began my work in creativity
coaching.
More Law and
Business
The inner voice I’d heard a
number of times was still too quiet, certainly not
boisterous enough to overcome the hum of the kind of
Stairmaster I was on. And, lacking a coach myself, I
probably wouldn’t have known how to act on it had I let
myself hear it, so onward I went.
Following
graduation from law school, I served as a judicial clerk
to a chief federal judge, and then, still aiming for
public service, I was accepted into the apparently
prestigious and very secure (you are seeing a pattern,
yes?) U.S. Attorney General’s Honor Program for young
lawyers, in which I performed as a negotiator and trial
lawyer for several years, earning a number of
commendations. But opposing counsel! The proctologists
of the law. I left Justice and, in the next chapter,
developed expertise in intellectual property law (which
seemed vaguely connectable to publishing) while at the
nation’s tenth-largest law firm, Foley & Lardner,
started up a literary agency (look! a true love is
roused from its slumber), and taught copyright and
trademark law at the nation’s top IP law school, The
George Washington Law Center. I wasn't satisfied. I
could have checked off quite a few of the items in Top Signs You Could Use a
Career Coach.
Then came the first big move. I
left the law and went into business. A headhunter
brought me aboard the Corporate Leadership Council as an
associate director and speaker. CLC was the leadership
and employee practices division of a best practices
consultancy called the Corporate Executive Board (NYSE:
EXBD), then a 550-employee, $500 million company serving
over 1300 Global 2000 corporate members. While there I
absorbed best practices in leadership and other aspects
of business from the company’s membership of hundreds of
Global 2000 companies. In the United States, Canada,
South America, New Zealand, and Australia, I coached
executives in over 120 corporations on best practices
dealing with:
• Leadership
development
• Leadership succession planning
•
Onboarding of new leaders
• Employee retention
•
e-commerce
models
• Strategic and workforce implications of
e-commerce
• Strategic planning alignment
•
Leveraging IT
• Fomenting creativity
Clients I
was honored to serve directly included:
Sun
Microsystems, Anadigics, Autodesk, National Computer
Systems, DaimlerChrysler, Amgen, The Vanguard Group,
Lockheed Martin, KLA-Tencor, ADP Inc., Rockwell, Chase
Manhattan, SmithKline Beecham, Genzyme, Lexmark,
Anixter, Litton, Mobil, Bell South, Wang Labs, and
more.
Already an avid traveler, I got to travel
extensively and meet regular folk and business people
all over the world. By 2000, through business and
personal travel I’d been to over 30 countries (some more
times than was strictly necessary) and 49 states. What
was next, said my inner coach, but some concrete
experience as a business executive?
Are you still
with us?
A Good Place to
Be
So I packed up a fine life in
Washington, D.C., where I had a lot of good friends, and
took myself back west, to Austin, Texas, and then
Portland, Oregon, where I knew no one but became an
entrepreneur because I’d always wanted to do something
in French. I helped start or co-started several
companies, Internet and otherwise (see
The Really Short Version for details). It was fun, and then,
not so much.
And in an agonizing
process that I'm now happy explain to any career
coaching clients, I finally decided what I really wanted
to do was help people become successful and
fulfilled. I could give of myself, read, think,
write, and learn from others. I’d done that informally
over the years, catch as catch can, and it was immensely
fulfilling to me. Surely you couldn’t make a living
having so much fun and learning from so many fine
people?
Well. Apparently you can.
Now, in
the Pacific Northwest, I play-as-work, read, write
fiction, hike on volcanoes, gorges, and coastlines, mountain-bike, ski, dance to Latin and
swing rhythms (and others no one else hears), meditate,
do yoga, sing (i.e., mimic), and travel
elsewhere.
Contact us about
coaching now.
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