My start was during a blizzard. It was February, 1967. I entered this world oblivious, plump and bald. Not surprisingly, the weather subsequently improved, I grew hair, a couple of sets of teeth, endured 12 years of a New York City public education, one junior high school crush and a few high school crushes.
But I better spare you the painfully boring details and fast forward to when things started to get at least a tad bit interesting.
I experienced a profound sense of discovery, almost rising to the level of an epiphany, shortly after entering Columbia University as a bushy-haired bright-eyed freshman: Thinking differently isn’t a curse, despite all evidence to the contrary during the prior twelve years in purgatory (better known as elementary school, junior high school and high school).
In fact, thinking differently, seeing problems everywhere, questioning everything, indulging my insatiable curiosity for discovering the yet undiscovered, enabled me to do something really neat — solve problems before most people even discover that there are problems.
The net effect was an academic blossoming, as I become ever more confident to dissent when I felt justified by a compelling alternative hypothesis.
And then it happened, again. I experienced another profound sense of discovery, but this time it was nothing short of a textbook example of the life altering variety of epiphany.
I realized that I had become a sort of inadvertent academic flavor of entrepreneur, doing essentially what one would do in the startup world -- conceiving plausible and hopefully impactful research projects, evangelizing those projects, scrounging for funding, often aggressively, while trying to balance egos of academic magnitude for the sake of productivity. And, on the side, I was recruiting students for organizations I founded and trying to earn enough money to make it through school without debt.
And I loved it. I had found my true passion, not in the academic aspects of my daily life, but rather in the entrepreneurial twist of pragmatic dreaming and dogged insistence on reducing imagination to demonstrable practicality.
With the realization that my passion was to break new ground, to build from scratch and to explore for yet undiscovered potential, I ventured into the “real” world dedicated to the entrepreneurial path. The only problem was capital. Though I had managed to avoid incurring debt while in school, pragmatism, driven by a dearth of working capital, mandated a conservative approach. And thus my professional life started by licensing smartcard technology I had developed to ADT and working to productize the device as a senior engineer.
It took approximately eighteen months, but with the project completed and a bit of working capital, I started my first company, a boutique consultancy, focusing on the emergence of trading floor infrastructure and, later, more broadly on technology and management consulting.
But one was not enough. I started my next company to address the progressively complex issues of electronic security. And then the next and the next and yet another. By the time I stopped long enough to take stock, I had started six companies in five different industries, I’d run five of those companies and served on the board of eleven companies, leading to seven acquisitions totalling over $680 million. I’d raised venture capital as well as strategic capital, I'd bootstrapped companies from early revenue, I’d invested in companies. I’d worked in the States, Europe and Asia.
I had a great deal of fun, but I came to understand over time it wasn’t the startup process itself that I was enjoying the most, but, rather, my role as an evangelist for different thought, interjecting my unique perspective on boards, towards the notion that business done better is a relentless pursuit worth the effort.
And then it happened, yet again. I realized that I had become a sort of inadvertent executive coach, driven by the maturation of my passion for business done better, as a function of thinking differently.
Not surprisingly, with this realization I decided to migrate towards the core of my evolved passion and embrace executive coaching as my “adult” profession. The decision, which came exactly twenty years after embarking on my entrepreneurial path, induced a type of awaking best described as a pronounced sense of excitement that innervated me to the core.
And as time passed and I became progressively immersed in the minutiae of the practice, I realized that I had found my true calling in life. The perfect fit. The ideal merge of my academic days and my prior two decades in the trenches of the entrepreneurial experience. The magic fit to personality.
The net effect is that my passion, my journey, my experiences, my pleasure in practicing the art of executive coaching, done right, translates into remarkable outcomes for my clients. And those outcomes feed right back into the pleasure-reward cycle that continually upregulates my passion for coaching and my relentless pursuit of business, done better.
