* * *
GOLDHIRSH: If you could have predicted that what happened was going to happen, would you have taken a different course?
* * *
MORGAN: The culture issue is something you think of only later. That culture didn't start with your employees, you developed it. You developed a theme as to how people related to you. It fed down to your employees, they liked it, and those employees attracted other employees. If I had left the company with a powerful leader in place, the culture would've continued, I think. I can't blame Dynatech that it didn't.
* * *
KRISS: The culture I miss is going to work in the morning and being around four or five people I enjoy, and spending time with them during the day in a social/work environment. You can't re-create it outside, you can't have reunions, you can't get it back through dinner parties. It's never the same after you're not in your role and they're not in theirs. It's gone forever.
* * *
INC: Didn't they resent your selling the company and abandoning them?
* * *
WURTS: Somewhat, but half our people owned stock. The sale created seven or eight millionaires.
* * *
MORGAN: About five, in mine.
* * *
WURTS: If I had found a way to get my money out and felt I wasn't deserting my people, I might've left sooner. In any event, everyone in the company expected it to be sold. They had stock in it. We couldn't not sell it. I had this very high offer -- $50 million for a company with $27 million in sales that hadn't had a very good year that particular year. And it looked like almost all our people would find good roles in the new company.
* * *
INC.: Now that you've all accomplished enviable ends, why not take off and essentially just poke around?
* * *
GOLDHIRSH: I couldn't bail out and be a wanderer.
MORGAN: One of the problems of how you end up after the sale -- and I'm getting used to it now -- is doing a number of things poorly, rather than one thing well.
* * *
INC.: Can you elaborate?
* * *
MORGAN: When you're in your company, you're doing that one thing well to the exclusion of everything else. Now I own a newspaper in Maine, that takes only a day a week. I'm on the board of a small boat-building company, that takes a little more time. These things are like part-time jobs.
* * *
KRAVETZ: Why do you feel you're not doing them well? They're just not as big.
* * *
MORGAN: I sit there and spend maybe 15 minutes on an important subject, and I don't treat it very thoroughly or very well. I leave each one saying "I really didn't do that justice." I'm happier on the line.
* * *
GOLDHIRSH: When you were running Controlonics, it reached a size where you really weren't on the line. You were directing others who were on the line.
* * *
MORGAN: Aah, but then I had the same vision every day.
* * *
GOLDHIRSH: And now you're reacting to someone else's vision.
* * *
WURTS: That's the difference! I spent two years and five months not working, and I learned a lot about what it's like. In particular, that you can't schedule every minute. If somebody canceled a meeting, I had nothing to do that day! That's when I told myself I absolutely, positively will work full-time again. I'm not going to run the risk of ever having nothing to do.
* * *
KRAVETZ: It's stupid, but I recognize the mind-set. You generate such a high level of activity via your business that you can't slow the pace when you're away from it. When I was putting together a deal in Switzerland, I went to Zurich for two or three days a month for four months. I love to ski, but I never took even one stinking day off. That left an indelible mark; it was one of the motivating issues for selling.
* * *
MORGAN: I recognize that mind-set, too. It's a spiritual thing; it has nothing to do with money or power. The values we're talking about aren't measured by any standard unit of exchange.
* * *
KRISS: When I was with MediVision, I was thinking about that company, dreaming about it, without stopping. I thought about it in the shower, going to sleep. I might not have been at my desk or by a telephone, but I was constantly, totally immersed in it, to the extent that everything else -- a conversation when it wasn't about the business, for example -- was interference.
* * *
MORGAN: You weren't a very desirable guest, I guess.
* * *
KRISS: Probably not. But what's happened since is the pendulum is going in the opposite direction. Instead of a unilateral, single-minded focus, my focus is fragmented. I'm doing maybe 30 different things. I see it as an exercise to explore a lot of alternatives.
* * *
GOLDHIRSH: Everyone needs a medium -- especially entrepreneurs. When a business owner sells out, it's like taking clay away from a sculptor. How do you use incidental business vehicles as a medium for creative expression?
* * *
MORGAN: The only way to do it -- and I'm beginning to learn how -- is to be satisfied by seeing others engaging themselves in that same dream and to help them stay out of trouble. My job there is support -- a cheering section -- for the people who are new at running companies. I hope I can add some value through my experience. A teaching function, now, rather than a doing function.
* * *
WURTS: Helping start-up companies by bringing them the benefit of your experience is useful. People I talk to who sold and went totally cold turkey to doing nothing suffered a crisis of self-confidence after about a month, saying "Gee, I must have been lucky. I could never do it again." I never had those doubts, in part because I was helping start-up companies and I'd get a shot of, "Yeah, I've still got it. Maybe I'm not doing it right now, but still, I wasn't just lucky, I know something."
