The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living (16 page)

“I'm not sure,” I started to say.

“How smart do you have to be,” Allison jumped in, “to sell caskets cheap on the Internet? Come on, Lenny.”

At first embarrassed, Lenny then glared at her. His entire face glowed red.

She looked at me again and made some sort of decision to go ahead. “Selling cheap caskets isn't what we started out to do,” she confessed.

“Wait a minute. We'll get to all that later,” Lenny cut in sharply. “Once we land the money and Funerals.com is up and running, then we can evolve the business to content and community. One step at a time. We've talked about this.”

“What if we never get to it, Lenny?” she asked. “Things change. Priorities change. The market changes. We'll have our hands full just delivering the e-tailing business. Now is our opportunity.”

This turn of discussion clearly made Lenny uncomfortable, but he did nothing to stop it. He knew he needed Allison.

“Let the funeral homes dispose of the remains,” Allison continued. “The Internet's never going to take care of that. Let us focus on the emotional needs of the people left behind. That was our starting point for this entire idea, and that's still what we should focus on.”

In their early brainstorming, Lenny had convinced Allison that the Internet provided an opportunity for them to address those emotional needs, especially for survivors and friends spread around the world. Many of those people, Allison claimed, want a way to communicate with each other, to remember their loved ones, to come to terms with and sort through the meaning of the death. There were ways to do that on the Internet. Just because family and friends live apart, doesn't mean they have to grieve alone. The core of the business that excited Allison was community, and into the community areas of the site they could build content—information about funerals, about the process and arrangements, the law and regulations, information that would demystify all of it as well as arm consumers.

“Right,” Lenny said sarcastically when Allison was done. “And how exactly do you make money with that?”

“If we provide information about counseling services, referrals, places you can go to talk about grief,” she added, “that's real value.” She hesitated. “Maybe there's a way for family members to share their memories on-line, and some way for people even to address the person who's gone. If we make the site useful, people will return and rely on it, and advertising and commerce opportunities will follow those people.”

“On-line séances,” Lenny commented, looking at me. “What a great idea.”

“Lenny.” She was impatient. “Say what you want now. But we talked about all of this, and I thought we agreed.”

“I just don't think it's a business,” Lenny said.

“And I am not interested in selling cheap caskets and liners,” she retorted.

That got Lenny's attention. I suddenly realized he had assumed, despite Allison's reservations, that she would come along if they could raise the money, that she would suspend her hopes indefinitely while they nibbled at a morsel of the original idea.

“I don't think, if we pursued all those ideas we talked about,” he said almost belligerently, “we would have gotten even this far.”

She was talking about some sort of social agency, he claimed, some not-for-profit meant solely to help people, not make money. They couldn't get funding for that. Who would put up money for that? he demanded to know. She had no ready answer.

“For all the problems with Funerals.com,” he went on, “they didn't laugh at us, and we would have been laughed out the door today if we'd come in saying we were going to help people, we were going to fill needs that churches used to fill. How are people going to pay for that? What's the economic model for that?”

He waited for an answer.

“What's it cost to run a site like that?” he went on when she clearly had no answer. “What's the content cost, the infrastructure? How do you find customers? What's your relationship with funeral directors and funeral homes?”

I smiled inwardly because his litany of questions probably echoed the very questions Phil had shot at him that morning.

Allison simply listened to all this with jaw set, shaking her head in incredulity. Obviously she knew Lenny well enough to let him run down a bit before jumping back in.

“Al, I'm not saying we will never do what you want,” he offered finally, in what sounded like a closing. “I think we can do it eventually, but I don't believe we can get funded by promoting a business aimed first and foremost at helping people. We have to focus on products, revenue, growth, profits. Your ideas are too squishy. You see this utopia, this company with no structure and a bunch of eager beavers who work for the love of it. What you want is unrealistic. If we win on the bottom line, then we can consider new ideas and directions. Hey, if we're a big success we can even endow a foundation to deal with the virtuous, people aspect of death and dying.”

“Lenny, I'm not going to wait a lifetime to bequeath some foundation,” she said. They had known each other a long time and didn't pull punches. That could be a good trait among cofounders.

“Besides,” Allison continued, “I'm not interested in
funding
a service. I want to spend my time being involved. I want to work in an organization that cares about people in trouble, that”—she waved her arm—“that cares about people, period. This is a chance to change what we don't like.” She paused for a moment. “And you're right. I want to build a legacy company, a place we can be proud of, where people work hard, and care about what they do and respect each other. I want a place I can believe in, in every way—what it does, what it stands for, how it works. I don't want to wait for my ship to come in before I can afford to start. Why wait when we can do it now?”

Clearly Lenny had failed to sell her one of his Deferred Life Plans.

They were an even odder combination than I had imagined: Lenny with his one-dimensional, bottom-line view of business, and Allison with her lofty ideals about people.

Lenny glanced at me—clearly fishing for support. Now, as Allison finished her rejoinder, he simply turned to me, shrugged, and held his hands out, palms up, as if to say, “Hopeless. What can I do?”

“I don't think I can help you with this one, Lenny,” I said. Maybe ten years ago. Not now.

It was another instance in which, were I still Lenny's
age
, I would have agreed with him. Sure, business was about money. That's what makes it business. But first and foremost, to be successful, business is about people. It took me a while to learn that lesson.

I
STARTED MY BUSINESS
career as a negotiator, a deal guy. I was trained to take advantage, to get the upper hand, to beat down the other side. I was an assassin. My job was to win at any cost, and I took some satisfaction in doing it well. I didn't understand much about the human side of business. In my mind, there was not much room for humanity on the bottom line. That point of view didn't particularly comfort me, but that's the way business worked, I thought. Given those constraints, I also figured my days in the world of business were numbered. But before I decided to chuck it all and become some freelance tour guide, I met Bill Campbell.

I was working at Apple, but was on the verge of leaving the legal department because it was restructuring. My boss encouraged me to meet Bill, who, at the time, was leading a spinout of Apple's software applications business. The purpose of the spinout was to reduce Apple's dependence on Microsoft software.

Bill was moving like a lightning bolt to arrange things. He corralled me into an empty conference room, didn't bother to turn on the lights, gave me the three-minute pitch, said I'd come well recommended, and asked whether I'd join him. Now. Given no time to think, I checked my gut and heard myself say, “Yes.” Without any details about the job, my title, or my compensation. As Bill marched off, I heard him say, “Great. You're the first cofounder. Let's get moving.” It turned out to be one of my best decisions ever.

We called the company Claris, and we had big dreams. We were going to beat Microsoft by employing the philosophy of the Apple computer and operating system: making the power of the technology accessible by creating great software that was easy to use, not just stuffed with complicated arcane features few people wanted or needed. A key part of my job at Claris, of course, involved doing deals. I negotiated the spinout agreement with Apple, and I negotiated Claris's acquisitions of technology and of numerous software companies, both of which were key strategies for building the business.

I barely knew Campbell, but others called him “Coach,” ostensibly because he had been the head coach of Columbia's football team, but in reality because of his dedication to mentoring his people. He was in his mid-forties, stern to eye, but warm and caring through and through. He wore his countless football scars and rugby wounds like badges of honor. You'd follow this guy anywhere.

And we did. What you noticed about Bill, after you worked with him a bit, was that he spent a lot of time talking about people. He ate, drank, and breathed people. You couldn't talk about anything at Claris without the issue coming up. I found it irritating at first, a distraction. Whenever we sat down to make decisions, somebody always asked, How is this going to affect that individual, or this group of people? What are they going to say? To feel? Will they know why you made that decision or will they think you did it arbitrarily? When we talked about product support, it wasn't evaluated as an expense line. It was a service—for people. The focus was always on the value you could deliver to your customers, employees, partners, and shareholders—and what they and others thought about it and about you. You might not hear it in the first session. You might not hear it in the second session. But, unless you were deaf, by the end of the first few months, you heard the theme loud and clear. Bill had an underlying faith that if we focused on the people issues, worked hard, and did a great job, the business would take care of itself. That was Campbell.

In the beginning, despite my respect for him, I resisted Bill's philosophy. I strongly believed in the notion of business as a manageable, predictable, and quantifiable process. I believed everything should be crisp, clear, and buttoned down. Managers made the trains run on time. Campbell's approach seemed inefficient to me. Too many soft, murky, and complicated issues to grapple with. Let's just focus on the stuff we can measure, I contended.

For some reason, Campbell, thank goodness, didn't give up on me. There were times he probably should have fired me because I was such a pain in the ass. My work brought me in contact with all parts of Claris, and I would outspokenly and constantly challenge anything that didn't appear to contribute directly to the bottom line. I was often out of step with Bill and the rest of the executive team.

But I gradually began to internalize Campbell's frame of mind, and some of my own personal values, long subordinated to the bottom line, began to resurface. I couldn't argue with Bill's results: What appeared to be a sometimes inefficient process was creating extraordinary success. Our customers liked us. They valued our products. Our partners respected and trusted us.

Our employees were highly motivated and committed. Often I would be working late, and I'd look up from my computer at eleven or twelve at night to see a crowd, all working just as feverishly. Why was I there late? Because I needed to finish my piece of a project, so I could hand it over to somebody else, so she could get on with what she needed to do, so the next person could do what he needed to do, so the company could achieve its objectives. There was an intense sense of loyalty, responsibility, and camaraderie; a locking of elbows with everybody around you.

The change in my perception of Campbell is summed up by one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” Likewise, in a short time
I
had learned what wisdom Campbell carried; he could do things I couldn't quantify. He had a highly intuitive sense of people. He could inspire them to be better than they already were and to work together as a whole to create something greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Still, some lessons came hard. We had an opportunity to buy a company called Quark, a pioneer in the then-new software category of desktop publishing. I stayed up all night and flew to Denver to get a letter of intent signed. It would be a great deal. But subsequently, when we entered into definitive negotiations, we stumbled on the issue of warranties. They wouldn't give me something I believed they should. I was indignant. I remember telling them, “I'm paying you good money, you're selling me the company, and you've got to agree that what you're selling me is yours to give.” They were offended. They thought they were joining the Claris team; that's what they said they wanted to do. But my focus on the warranty issues—on the cold, hard facts of business, on getting the best deal—estranged them and made them feel like outsiders. We went back and forth a bit, and then they simply refused to work with me anymore. Bill stepped in to try to save the deal, but it couldn't be saved. I had blown it irretrievably. The disagreement could have been mitigated with other legal remedies, but I had adamantly opposed them on principle, and there was no backtracking. That was a dumb mistake. Quark would have been an incredible asset for Claris.

In addition to a sense of professional failure—this was the first time I had ever blown a deal—I felt I had let down
my
company. I had let
us
down. It was
our
deal, and I dropped the ball for everybody, including myself, in the process.

I started to pay attention. I made a break with my old legal habits. I began to apply Campbell's thinking to doing deals. My job was to find intersections of interest between the negotiating parties—not differences, but commonalities—and to build them into a solid relationship and transaction. I started zeroing in immediately on those requirements of the other party that were consistent with my requirements, and I threw my energy into bringing them into the deal, instead of ignoring them or reactively opposing them in order to use them as bargaining chips later. My focus became less on just satisfying myself and my company and more on satisfying the other party as well. Sure, certain points were bound to be contentious, but negotiating became a creative opportunity for me to solve problems and build relationships, not to play poker.