Black-Belt Boss

Here's a look at a day in the life of one of the most physically and psychically prepared CEOs around.

By Robert A. Mamis | 
 

A day in the life of the most physically and psychically prepared chief executive we know

About 10 years ago Moses Joseph's karate teacher told him, "It's time to break a baseball bat with your shin. I know you can do it -- you have the shin and the strength and the will." Joseph bought the first two properties, but as for the third, he wasn't sure. "All you have to do," the teacher went on, "is think it in your mind, execute it in your mind. If you can't convince your inner self, your outer self will break its leg and be seriously injured." Joseph fretted: "When I picture my shin versus your bat, it's my shin that snaps." He paced for a few minutes, enjoying both legs while he could. Then he turned and kicked. The Louisville Slugger shattered in two.

* * *

4:15 a.m. No wimpy snooze button for him. Moses Joseph leaps out of bed at the alarm's first ring, rising to meet the business day at an hour when some CEOs leap into bed. "If I dawdle, I'm lost," he explains. "I want to feel like I'm on top of the day, rather than have the day control me. I mount a mental attack on time from the first minute on." Joseph's wife, Cathy, a confirmed sleeper, affectionately brands him "an aggressive nut." His business competitors hold much the same opinion.

* * *

4:20 a.m. For breakfast Joseph chews an apple. He dons a loose uniform called a gi in Japanese. Around his waist the Clark Kent-ish, five-foot-nine 37-year-old wears the black belt he's earned in kyuku shinkai karate, the most brutal of modern martial arts. Joseph tells no one with whom he does business that he's ranked among the world's best karate fighters. But he may be too cautious: a Japanese businessman on whom he paid a sales call at Mitsubishi Electric recognized him as having been a final four contestant in a ferocious fight-to-the-end championship in Tokyo. He gave Joseph a million-dollar contract on the spot.

* * *

4:22 a.m. Joseph assumes the lotus position and meditates on the wall-to-wall carpet in the family room of his new $700,000 home, which recruiters used last fall to help lure him from a vice-president-of-marketing post in sunny Silicon Valley to a chief executive officer's position in frigid Minneapolis. Abrupt climate changes are nothing new to him, however. His father traveled the globe on missions for the United Nations and, says Joseph, who by the luck of the draw was born in Japan but ethnically is Indian, "it's easier for me to name the countries I haven't been to." For 10 minutes he remains unmoving, meditating so hard that sweat drips down his face. When you meditate, "you become intensely in tune with the aspect of things. I'll make good decisions," he predicts, "because I'm tuned to everything that's going on."

While the body always recharges in sleep, the mind seldom does, notes Joseph, who has lowered his pulse rate to 47 beats per minute. In layperson's terms, meditation's disciplined serenity gives the mind a chance to grab some z's and regain the upper hand over the body. It works, judging from Joseph's six-month revivification of sluggish B-Tree, in Minnetonka, Minn., a developer and marketer of devices that test and verify the functions of such can't-afford-to-fail particulars as heart pacemakers and jetliner controls.

* * *

4:32 a.m. Shhhhk! Shhhhk! The cotton garment comes to life, crackling like indoor lightning as Joseph performs traditional karate katas, gestures as graceful as a ballet dancer's but choreographed to destroy things -- clay bricks, wooden slabs, human bones. And they do: once Joseph was set upon in Manhattan by a trio of youths who demanded his change. No way, he advised them in so many words. One member of the gang swung a club at his head. "I practice a knockdown style of karate in which we try to break people's thighs and legs with kicks," Joseph explained to the city's finest about the havoc that followed. "I was fighting for my life in a strange place, so I aimed low kicks at their knees, full force."

How to waste three guys in two New York seconds was not exactly what Joseph's father had had in mind as a course of study for his offspring. The intelligentsia, his father had believed, do better playing tennis. His 15-year-old son saw karate as more globally useful, however, and skipped school to fit in lessons on his own. The first that the elder Joseph knew about that turn of events was when Moses' karate class staged a demonstration and his father was invited to the show. He was there, with a neurosurgeon friend, when Moses' turn came to break a block of ice with his forehead. The youth jumped up, came down hard on the 100-pound cube, bounced ineffectively off it, and saw stars. Back home, Moses expected his father to sympathize. Instead, the neurosurgeon friend drew a picture of the skull. "The brain floats in the cranial sack," the doctor explained, showing him. "When you hit the front of your head hard, your brain bounces. If this happens too many times, you become punch-drunk. Son, your dad intends that you stay sound enough to earn a Ph.D." Twenty-two years later, Moses Joseph boasts both advanced degrees and a forehead like a steel-belted radial.

The karate he practices in his middle age is a wellspring of coolness and rationality. "Even when someone hits me as hard as he can, there's no violence, no pain. Your mind transcends them. It's a test of will. You don't let it bother you. Because of karate, everything I do in business and in my outside life can be gentle. I get more out of people by being gentle than by being aggressive. But I'm not meek," he adds. "There's a difference."

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