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Keeping Michael Dell in Business

May 7, 2003

Yesterday I received a concerned phone call from Ed's boss. Ed, a merchant banker, had done it again.

Randy Johnson tosses baseballs. Rich Gannon tosses footballs. Ed tosses PC monitors. (Against the wall of his office.)

When frustrated, Ed usually chooses to throw a ballpoint pen, a wad of paper, a book, even a chair. But sometimes - including yesterday - he prefers a PC monitor.

Clients go to Ed because he's brilliant. When they're up against it, they can rely on him to chart the way forward with cool, calm, ruthlessly dispassionate logic. They don't realize he's a monitor-tosser. Only his colleagues and family have seen this side of him. Intellectually he's a Ferrari; emotionally he's a Ford Pinto.

What lies behind this behavior? Stress, of course. And behind the stress lies despair. Ed hates himself for not having mustered the courage to change course in his career, which he needs to do if he is to live authentically.

Rachel Naomi Remen knows plenty about stress. She has worked for over 20 years with people with cancer. She writes (in the foreword to Brian Luke Seaward's book Stand Like Mountain, Flow Like Water):

I have come to realize how much stress is caused by the sad fact that many of us believe in one way and live in quite another. Our stress may be more a question of personal integrity than time pressure: a function of the distance between our authentic values and how we live our lives.

Ed believes in one way and lives in another. Hence his despair. He could conquer it by taking time for reflection, developing what Remen calls "a profound sense of what is most important to him," and, bit by bit, aligning his life with that.

But he prefers his alternative strategy. This involves taking anti-depressants, yelling at the family - and tossing PC monitors. So far, it ain't working.

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