Howard's Gift: Uncommon Wisdom to Inspire Your Life's Work - Softcover

Sinoway, Eric; Meadow, Merrill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250005108 ISBN 13: 9781250005106

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2013

Synopsis

"A timeless classic . . . This is a book of head and heart, of wisdom and emotion . . . Tuesdays with Morrie meets What Color is Your Parachute?" -Mindy Grossman, CEO of HSNi

With forty years at Harvard Business School, Howard Stevenson is renowned as an entrepreneur and business strategist, author, philanthropist, and professor. He has mentored more than ten thousand business founders, CEOs, professionals, and top business school faculty around the world.
Written by his student and successful entrepreneur Eric Sinoway, Howard's Gift offers Stevenson's timeless lessons on life and career. Full of personal and professional insight, this guide presents savvy practical strategies that can be applied to professional decisions on any scale. Through warm and engaging conversations with Sinoway, Stevenson focuses not just on business success, but on deep personal satisfaction through self-defined benchmarks for development and accomplishment. Stevenson's lessons include: - Create a vision of your own legacy through a process called "business planning for life.

- "Be entrepreneurial in driving your career ahead (even if you're not an entrepreneur).
- Exploit the inflection points in your life-whether "friend," "foe," or "silent."
- Cut risk in tough career and life decisions by shining the "light of predictability" on them.
- Plan for the ripples, not just the splash from your actions and choices.

About this title

About the Author:

ERIC SINOWAY is an entrepreneur and seasoned executive with experience in for-profit, academic, and non-profit organizations. He is the cofounder and president of Axcess Worldwide, a New York-based partnership development company that works with companies ranging from Rolls Royce and InterContinental Hotels & Resorts to Target and Delta Air Lines. Eric lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER ONE
Business Planning for Your Life’s Work
 
 
WE CAN ALL USE a wise man or woman in our lives. Someone who helps us make sense of the challenges we face. Who guides us as we navigate times of change. Who counsels us as we move along life’s path.
Who among us wouldn’t want to call on a person with wisdom and experience when we have to make important decisions about our careers and our personal lives? Especially when those decisions are fraught with risk and uncertainty, and complicated by fundamental changes in the world around us.
And let’s face it, wisdom is at a premium, as we’ve experienced an unbelievable amount of change over the last few years.
When I first had the idea of writing this book, the stock market was at an all-time high, prosperity was increasing all over the world, and megamillionaires were being created every other day. It looked like the economic good times would never end. Quite frankly, it was an environment in which many people who weren’t getting rich—and that’s most of us—were wondering why not, and whether we should be approaching our lives and careers in a very different way.
The assumption, of course, was that wealth equaled success and success equaled happiness. The initial concept for this book was to help people think through how to achieve happiness and meaning in their lives within that environment.
And then things changed, seemingly overnight.
In a breathtakingly short period of time, the economic world as we knew it imploded. A company that was once synonymous with American economic success, General Motors, went bankrupt. The disintegration of a single Wall Street icon, Lehman Brothers, threatened the entire global finance system. Average people—like you and me and the folks across the street—unwittingly helped overzealous lenders drive the nation’s mortgage industry and housing market over a cliff.
As a society, we ran headfirst into an inflection point.
What is an inflection point? It is what Andy Grove, the founder and former CEO of Intel, defined as an event that fundamentally changes the way we think and act. Usually, an inflection point isn’t a little change. It is a moment when—by choice or not—we pivot from the path down which we are traveling and head in an entirely different direction.
During the past dozen years, we’ve gone through several extraordinary inflection points. We have experienced a series of economic and political events that caused the future to look very different from what we’d expected it would.
Until not too long ago, a whole generation of college graduates believed they were destined to follow the path of the founders of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook and become multimillionaires before they were thirty. Investment banking was seen as the guaranteed path to becoming a “master of the universe.” People were celebrated as heroes for running companies based on business models that, in any other time, would have been considered laughable. Policy makers in Washington, DC, were so confident that the stock market would keep rising—seemingly forever—that they considered privatizing Social Security, the economic safety net of the American working man and woman.
Beginning in 2007 and continuing to this day, we’ve been reminded of two rules that we’d apparently forgotten: (1) what goes up does eventually come down, and (2) businesses built on a foundation of smoke and mirrors will surely fail.
At breakneck speed, discussions about the stock market turned to preserving capital, not growing it. People with jobs were satisfied just to keep them—forget about promotions and raises. Homeowners went from visions of windfall profits to hopes of avoiding foreclosure. Folks with newly minted college and graduate degrees suddenly faced a frozen job market.
Even those people whose financial lives did not collapse had a tremendous scare. And we’re all trying to guess if there’s a new problem just over the horizon.
In times of extraordinary challenges and dizzying change—whether it’s happening around us or to us—we can all use a wise guide. A person who helps us think through our basic assumptions about what we want and need in our lives, about what “success” means to us and how best to navigate our lives during unsettling times.
Wise men and women come in plenty of flavors and sizes, and with varying degrees of insight. Like beauty, wisdom is often in the eye of the beholder. And the wisdom you find depends a lot on the kind of wisdom you may benefit from at a particular moment. For some, the ideal wise person looks like Abraham Lincoln or Mother Teresa; for others it’s Warren Buffett or Oprah Winfrey.
The wise man I’ve found is a mixture: he has the business acumen of Warren Buffett, and the warmth and spirit of Morrie Schwartz, Mitch Albom’s professor in the book Tuesdays with Morrie. He also has a rather humorous resemblance to Yoda, the wise, skilled, and experienced Jedi knight of Star Wars fame.
Although my wise man looks a bit like Yoda, in place of a light saber he wields razor-sharp logic and scalpel-like insight. He is a real-life teacher, mentor, and guide through challenging, risky, and downright scary adventures. His name is Howard Stevenson.
Howard is an entrepreneur, an author, and a philanthropist. And for forty years, he has been one of the most important and respected professors at Harvard Business School. He possesses an amazing combination of business brilliance, keen psychological perception, energetic spirit, and long-term vision. He has an endearing perspective on life, something I didn’t fully appreciate until it was almost gone.
Howard is exactly the kind of person that so many of us would like to be able to turn to when important decisions are to be made or challenges met. One whose wisdom and experience have guided thousands of men and women through the inflection points in their lives.
Over the course of four decades, Howard has taught, mentored, and counseled thousands of Harvard MBAs, graduate students, and global business leaders. His students have included world leaders, CEOs of major corporations, and entrepreneurs whose visions have changed our world.
Numbered among Howard’s many students, friends, and confidants are some of the most successful businesspeople and philanthropists in the world. They have included people like Jorge Paolo Lemann, the Brazilian billionaire co-owner of the international beverage conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev, William Bowes, one of the creators of the U.S. bio tech industry; Hansjörg Wyss, the Swiss medical appliance industry pioneer and mega philanthropist; the late Frank Batten, who created the Weather Channel; and Arthur Rock, the legendary investor who helped launch Intel and Apple.
Why have business icons like Lemann, Bowes, Wyss, Batten, and Rock—people who have reached the pinnacle of professional success—continued to look to this remarkable man? For the same reason that I do: to benefit from the insight, wisdom, warmth, and pragmatic perspective that this rumpled Harvard Business School professor shares with everyone whose life he has touched.
This book is my way of introducing you to my friend and mentor Howard Stevenson.
*   *   *
Every book has a catalyst, something that makes an author believe, “It’s essential that I tell people about this.” For some authors that moment feels like an earthquake or a thunderclap; for others, it’s a slowly dawning realization or a voice whispering in the mind’s ear.
To me, that moment felt like a punch to the gut and the urge to vomit.
I was standing in the parking lot of Harvard Business School one mild winter day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, staring dumbly at a colleague who was telling me something I didn’t want to believe. I heard his words, but I couldn’t absorb their meaning. “Howard had a heart attack two hours ago. It’s bad.”
At age sixty-six, Howard Stevenson was a legend at Harvard Business School. An iconic teacher, he was an innovator who defined the academic field of entrepreneurial business. He was a successful businessman who’d made a fortune several times over, and a philanthropist and philanthropic adviser of the first rank. A towering figure among corporate leaders, he was a warm friend and a generous mentor.
Howard was considered the father of entrepreneurship at HBS, and he was like a second father to me.
We had first met when I was a thirty-something “mid-career” graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School and he agreed to advise me on an independent study project. From our initial conversation, I found myself oddly connected to this Ivy League scholar with a quirky smile. His ruffled hair, piercing gaze, and slightly hunched posture were an amusing contrast to the interior man: brilliant, witty, playful, and endlessly curious. I came to adore his unique spirit.
And now … “They had to give him CPR. He might not make it.”
Despite getting a clean bill of health from his doctor only weeks earlier, Howard had collapsed in cardiac arrest as he walked across campus after lunch. It had been an otherwise typical day until his ticker simply stopped ticking.
I was frantic at the news and spent the next several hours calling colleagues and rushing from one office to the next, vainly trying to get some update on Howard’s condition. It was only days later that his assistant, Bobbie, could give me good news. Howard would be all right—but only because of amazing good luck: he had collapsed next to a building that had a portable defibrillator, and someone immediately brought the device to his side; plus the HBS campus is just two miles from a good hospital. (That evening, when I saw my friend Josh Silverman—a brilliant surgeon and scientist—I learned that the survival rate for “unattended cardiac arrest” is about 1 percent. So in any other circumstances, Howard likely would have died there on the manicured lawns of Harvard Business School.)
Even when I knew that he’d fully recover, my stomach clenched at the thought of Howard lying flat on his back, staring up at the clouds, wondering if he was headed to what he’d once called “the great business school in the sky.” I realized that during the endless hours we’d spent joking, debating, and analyzing together, I hadn’t stopped to tell him what he meant to me. Hadn’t thanked him for making me think about things differently, for challenging my assumptions about business, about my career, about my life. I hadn’t expressed my gratitude for the wisdom he showered on me each time we spoke. And I hadn’t told him that I loved him.
Ironically, when I went to see Howard in the hospital, he was in remarkably good spirits. So good, in fact, that when I asked him what he’d been thinking when he first woke up after his heart attack, he gave me a deadpan answer that made me laugh out loud.
“Well, first I thought, ‘Damn, I bet they ruined the favorite sportcoat I was wearing when I collapsed.’ Then, seeing all the equipment they had me hooked up to, I thought, ‘Gee, I’m glad I gave the hospital a nice-sized gift last year.’”
His humor was encouraging, but something in me wanted a more serious answer, so I asked, “Howard, when you were lying on the ground, knowing you might die right there in the middle of the campus, did you have any regrets?”
“You mean like regretting that piece of cheesecake I ate at lunch just before I collapsed? Or kicking myself for not ordering that expensive bottle of wine at the restaurant the night before?”
“I was thinking of something more significant,” I said. “Like, ‘Boy, there are sixty things I’d do differently about my life, if I could,’ or ‘If I survive, I’m going to change things in a major way.’”
He thought about it for a minute, then answered, “They tell me I was unconscious when I hit the ground, so—technically speaking—I had no time for regretting anything. But I understand what you’re asking. And the answer is nope.”
“And in the days since—any regrets?”
“Not a one.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Look, Eric, a person has regrets when his life doesn’t match up with his expectations, or when he has dreams he hasn’t vigorously pursued,” Howard said in his smooth growl. “I’ve lived the life I wanted, and accomplished more than I could have wished. I have an amazing wife and a loving family. I’ve been surrounded by wonderful friends. And I think I’ve left a little piece of the planet a bit better for animal and man.”
“So you would have died happy and satisfied?”
“Well, not happy about dying. But satisfied with the life I’ve lived,” he replied. “No one can say that he or she hasn’t made mistakes or had faults—we’re human, and you’ve got to accept that. But I would have gone with no major regrets over things I’d done or not done.”
For a reason I didn’t immediately understand, I left Howard’s hospital room feeling worse than I think he did. He was upbeat, encouraged, joking. I was reflective, brooding, confused. I couldn’t figure out why. Instead of heading home after that first hospital visit, I drove back to the Harvard campus and spent a few hours that evening wandering around, alone with my thoughts.
I remembered my first meeting with Howard several years earlier, and how he had challenged me—right off the bat—to think differently than I had been doing to that point. He’d done it in a way that was hard-nosed and stimulating, insightful, and warm and caring, all at the same time. As I continued to walk aimlessly around campus late into the evening, I realized that while I was incredibly grateful that Howard had survived and had lived his life with what he described as “no regrets,” there was something eating at me. A thought sitting, annoyingly, just beyond my mind’s reach. Then it came to me: Howard’s experience had made me realize that I had a giant regret of my own.
For the last three years, Howard and I had been spending a few hours a week together—in his office, at his home, or simply walking around the Harvard campus. In that short time, he had evolved from my professor to a mentor to a dear friend. We had talked about many things, some frivolous, but most serious. Our conversations had touched on music and books and travels, on politics and economics, on family and philosophy, on business strategy and professional development, on the value of education versus experience, and on the many ways one could make a difference in the world. We talked about pursuing success and recovering from failure. About setting goals and setting out to achieve them.
If I had to sum up the topic of all those conversations in one sentence, it would be this: we talked about how to chart a satisfying path through career and life—about pursuing what Howard called your “life’s work.”
“Life’s work” was a term I had heard in several different contexts. Most often for me it conjured images of deep and long devotion to great causes and difficult, admirable labors. The phrase brought to mind Mother Teresa and her work with India’s poor and sick, or Paul Farmer and his efforts to heal and rebuild Haiti. Or it made me think of the anonymous struggling artist, or the inventor determined to bring her mind’s vision to reality. When Howard talked about people pursuing their life’s work, he was certainly referring to all the saints and visionaries, but not only to them. He was talking about everyone and anyone who got up each morning hoping to achieve something of substance with their lives. He was talking about accountants and engineers, teachers and Web designers, lawyers and social workers, business owners and nonprofit executives. He was talking about you and me and the folks living two doors down.
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About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1250005108
• ISBN 13: 9781250005106
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288