It turns out that fun doesn't play as big a role in creativity as Hall originally thought. The exercises clients liked best didn't correlate with the best results.
Hall cross-trained like an Olympian, employing a handful of trainers to help him build his stamina and tone his out-of-shape body. He worked with a weight-lifting trainer, a kayak instructor, a swimming coach, and a Boxercise trainer. He regularly roller-skied 10 miles out and 10 miles back on a nearby bike path. He pedaled like a madman on a stationary bike with a torturous resistance wheel. He titled his 1998 Christmas letter to clients and friends "A Transformational Holiday Wish." With only four months until he set off for the Pole, he wrote:
Nineteen ninety-eight was for me a year of great transformation; a year when my eyes opened to wonderful new possibilities, insights and wisdom; a year for growth in my personal life, professional life, and, for the first time, dramatic transformation in my physical condition and health....I've gone from having borderline high blood pressure and 31% body fat to healthy blood pressure, 19% body fat,...and the maximum heart rate of the average 29-year-old.
"My advice to anyone going through a business transformation," he says now, "is to go through a physical transformation concurrently. Many of the different dimensions we've added to the business were created as I was roller-skiing or swimming around the lake." For instance Hall typically swam twice around the shoreline of the lake behind the Mansion and Ranch, and one day, just as he'd begun the second loop, the term capitalist creativity popped into his mind. "That's what we're all about," he realized. Hall filed for the trademark on it before the sun set.
Equally important, his vigorous training for the trip to the Pole, which in the weeks just prior to the expedition reached three hours a morning before client sessions, drove home the lesson that significant transformation doesn't come without pain. Working out on roller skis, he gradually upped the weight in his pack until it reached the 50 pounds he'd be carrying across the frozen Arctic. One morning, with the wind whipping across the lake and the wind chill creating conditions of about 25 degrees below zero, Hall lugged his stationary bike outside to train in arctic conditions. He pedaled furiously, on and on, his fleece jacket taking on a white crust -- not from windblown snow but from his sweat wicking to the surface of the garment and instantly freezing. The ancillary message to his young employees watching wide-eyed through the windows: here was a man committed to change, to staying the course.
In April 1999, Hall set out on the polar expedition. The parka he donned for it carried as many sponsors' emblems as a NASCAR driver's racing suit: American Express, Johnson & Johnson, Mars -- nearly two dozen in all that had donated a total of $1 million in cash and services. He'd survive a potentially fatal fall through the ice into the Arctic Ocean and, soon after an exhilarating two-mile ski sprint, reach his goal with his heart pumping. "You really look at your life when you're standing at the top of the Earth, 90 north, where there's no such thing as time. You're in all time zones," he says. For Hall, whose mother was being treated for cancer at the time, it was hard not to consider his own mortality and what kind of legacy he wanted to leave. Though distinctive, epitaphs such as creativity guru and corporate miracle worker came up short.
On dogsled and skis, hall was guided by global positioning satellites. He also had veteran explorer Paul Schurke at his side, and his destination was fixed. At the Ranch, the business odyssey had pushed on much more arduously. Moving from a practice to a business, Hall had to chart his own course. There was no tangible finish line. So whom did he pick as his guide? An inventor, businessman, and civic leader more than 200 years in his grave -- Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's wisdom has long guided Hall's personal and business decisions. Franklin's abhorrence of debt led Hall to pay off the mortgage on the Mansion and fund the Ranch and current expansion entirely from cash on hand and revenues. Franklin's admonition "Up sluggard and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough" has rung in Hall's ears throughout the transformation. "What would Franklin do in this situation?" Hall often asks himself.
Anticipating corporate growing pains, Hall installed in the Ranch's great room a life-size sculpture by Andrew DeVries called The Other Side of Eden. The bronze depicts a dancer pushing through a wall, one eye closed on the side he is leaving, the other eye open as he emerges on the other side. The wall is distended by the dancer's effort. "People want to change but have to accept that transition causes pain," says Hall. "If you wait until it won't be painful, it will never happen."
