The Curse of the Hopeless Romantic
October 3rd, 2007
Is actually a blessing. Why? For a zillion reasons but let’s look at one of those reasons with a billion implications. All positive. All life affirming. All for the greater good of the romantics and the world they inhabit.
More CEOs have graduated from Princeton than any other school. And guess what, this grand dame of the Ivy League doesn’t have a business school nor will it permit undergrads to major in business. That may be because it offers virtually no business courses.
So how does it cultivate CEOs? Because it germinates romantics. By this, I mean young men and women who read poetry, contemplate art, study architecture, drink too much, read Catcher In The Rye 100 times. They are the dreamers. They are the ones who come up with every earth-changing idea in the world. Hold on. Zig zag. I just happened to see an interview with opera legend Luciano Pavarotti who died recently. I am not an opera fan and knew little about him. And then I see and hear him talk about life, love and success and I, who think of myself as a romantic, see the real thing and I feel like an aluminum siding salesman next to this Italian giant. He ruled opera, yes, but he could have taken Dell to the next level when the founder stepped back. One reason the PC maker has been slumping is that its PC’s are dull. They’ve lost their sheen. Gone commodity. Pavarotti, with no business experience (like those liberal arts CEO’s) would never allow dull in his world. Fallen in love with a woman who entered his life out of the blue, he is asked by Mike Wallace, why he is in love with her. “If you know the answer,” Pavarotti says, “you are not in love.”
Today, Roger Federer won the US Open Tennis championship for the forth time in four years. A modern record. And he may be the greatest player of all time. And he is not a tennis machine. Not a tennis engineer. He is a European romantic. He attends the Open with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. He refuses to study films of his opponents. “I watch their games for 15 seconds and that’s all I need.” A legion of would be tennis stars are deeply engaged in tennis physics. You have never heard their names. Federer is an artist. You know this. So will your grandchildren.
Einstein was the greatest romantic. Loved women. Loved music. Loved everything. He said that his scientific knowledge was important, but “my imagination enables me to encircle the globe.” And he arrived at relativity by allowing himself to fantasize about the impossible and work backwards to the possible. Precisely what Pavarotti’s woman said.
The world is built for crowd control. It can’t take too many romantics. So it sets up a system that tells us how to think and act. That way, there is order. And the engineers, actual and virtual engineers, breathe order. It is their oxygen.
And it is the vampire cross to the romantics. Look forward. The nerds won’t inherit the earth. The engineers won’t build the next great companies.
It will the Picasso’s, the Pavarotti’s… the Romantics.
Mark Stevens
CEO
October 4th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I love you. Everything you write is so on point. I’m emailing ‘The Curse of the Hopeless Romantic’ to all my friends who get it. Thanks for making my day.