Today is Pub Day for My New Book, FALLING UP: A Memoir of Second Chances

"Steve Jobs is dead," I said.

So begins my new book, Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances, which drops today from Homebound Publications as part of their Little Bound Book Essay Series.

When I spoke those words, I was speaking to an audience at the SXSW Eco festival on that fateful morning in October 2011. Jobs had just died and many in the crowd had not heard the news. He was fifty six. (Readers of this blog may recall I wrote about it here and here and here back in 2011.)

"Fifty-six," I write in the book. "As I stood on the stage that October morning in 2011, a couple of years shy of fifty myself, I couldn't help thinking--as perhaps many in the room were thinking, too, in the wake of the example of Jobs--what have I done with my life?"

(You can read more from the opening of the book here.)

Falling Up, my most personal book to date, tells the story of several "second chances" I've had in my life, starting with a fall at Letchworth Gorge as a teenager in upstate New York through my most recent change of life, leaving EY after my job was eliminated despite the successful launch of a global technology-as-a-service solution that I led.

Along the way, I explore my original second chance in the wake of that fall in the gorge, my pursuit of art and writing throughout my life, learning to experience nature through the eyes of my children, as well as the story of several entrepreneurial endeavors--successes and failures--and, finally, how I found real and lasting love late in life and learned to embrace it.

Falling Up is about the struggle to become authentic, vulnerable, purpose-driven man in the 21st century and, ultimately, about making one's dream a reality.

Mark Tercek, the former CEO of The Nature Conservancy--an organization for which I worked over fifteen years and that serves as part of the backdrop for several stories in the memoir--called the book, "An inspiring read for anyone seeking meaning in their work or in their life."

I hope my little book--only 84 pages and around 10,000 words--lives up to the promise of that advance support and that it helps readers find a way to "fall up" in their own lives.

You can order the book directly from my publisher, Homebound Publications, or through Amazon, and wherever books are sold.

And if you do, please let me know what you think of Falling Up and share your own story of your second chances.

The Coming Disruption: Lead It or Lose It

I feel like our economy -- our very way of life -- is in a simultaneous state of suspended animation and free fall.  Like a cartoon character that has run off a cliff and hasn't yet realized there is no ground beneath it.

As I said in my talk at SXSW ECO a couple of weeks ago, I don't know whether we're going to go all the way down or we're going to catch ourselves and scramble back up top.

It seems clear we're headed for a major disruption. The question is, will we instigate that disruption or will we let it happen to us?

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests are indicative of this coming disruption. In many ways, it's a welcome and refreshing sign that Americans are no longer complacent, apathetic, hedonists whose sole purpose is to consume.

My fear is that OWS gets co-opted and becomes a kind of anti-Tea Party movement for the left.  I fear that when I see folks like MoveOn.org, the unions, and extreme environmentalists jumping on board and trying to grab the reins.

Partisan ideology on both sides is getting in the way of facing the systemic problems of our way of life.

Our country is failing because we reward people who fail, cheat, and game the system.  We bail out institutions that fail to add value to the world.  And we let others create the world they want for us.

It's a perfect storm of deeply entrenched special interests, leadership incompetence, and redistribution of wealth. (Yes, that's right, I'm against redistributing wealth -- to either the one percent or the 99 percent. Wealth needs to be earned the old-fashioned way: by creating value and hard work.)

Some are calling for stronger regulation, which would inhibit financial institutions being innovative. Meanwhile, banks sit on their money and make big payouts to incompetent managers who are asked to leave and start charging fees for purchases made with debit cards to squeeze more revenue from customers.

How is that going to grow our economy?

Unfortunately, innovation in financial services is getting a bad name.  The innovations of the past decade or so -- much of what got us in the mess we're in -- were driven by regulatory or credit ratings arbitrage, and were increasingly complex, opaque, and focused on quarterly results or success for those who could manipulate the game.

Now it's time for financial innovation that is conducive to sustaining economies – to value creation rather than value destruction, and that drives a new kind of prosperity.

I've been thinking about financial services as an engine of change because we're not going to make real and lasting change – or build a new economy – if money can’t be made while doing it. Altruism is great, but it won't trump greed.

So what if financial services firms clearly demonstrated their community, social and environmental impacts?

What if banks told their customers what they did with their money?

What if customers were rewarded for making sustainable choices?

What if there was a greater connection between money and values, and management was compensated for maintaining or growing that connection?

What if profit and purpose were more equitably connected?

What if sustainability wasn't an add-on, but was part of the DNA of our enterprises?

What if, instead of a triple bottom line, we talked about a single, redefined bottom line that encompasses all three: profitability, environmental health, and social well-being?

Is it even possible for us to make this shift without regulation or with better regulation or, better yet, with self-regulation?

Whatever the answer to the above questions, it's clear a disruption is coming.  We need to decide whether we will lead it or lose it.

ECO-nomics: Re-envisioning Financial Services; My Talk at SXSW ECO

Last week I gave a talk at the first SXSW ECO in Austin, Texas. 

Here is the slide show from my talk, available on SlideShare:

and here is a transcript of my talk on Scribd:

ECO-nomics: Re-envisioning Financial Services for the 21st Century

A video of the talk will be available at a later date.

Related articles

• SXSW ECO: How to Make a Difference (incl. brief video) (ecoleader.wordpress.com)
• SXSW Eco: Interview with Scott Wilcox, SXSW's CTO (treehugger.com)
• SXSW Eco: Replacing Unsustainable Language To Tackle Climate Change (huffingtonpost.com)