For the last fifteen years, my professional home has been at Casella Waste Systems. When I showed up in 1995, we were a $21 million company with about 135 employees; today, we book about $550 million in revenues annually and employ over 2,700 people in a little more than a dozen states east of the Mississippi River.
Like all others, it is not a perfect company, but I love working there, and love the people I work with. In fact, the company’s imperfection is what makes it so much fun; there are plenty of delightful, interesting problems and challenges to address every day. Some of them originate in the inefficiencies of process and structure, as well as external realities; most of them spring from the most vital, yet charmingly inefficient, parts of the organizational “machine”: human beings. These are the most interesting challenges. All in all, we’re having a lot of fun, and we’re making a contribution to society.
I am a vice president. I don’t know how meaningful that is, since it’s not as if I become the president if the guy who currently holds that office dies, right? Besides, I’d have to fight off ten to twelve other vice presidents for the job and I know for sure that I can beat the stuffin’ out of only eight of them.
Anyway, I have a great job, in which I can completely indulge most of my talents, passions and personal idiosyncrasies.
My role there began more traditionally — creating a corporate communications function for a rapidly growing company, and so I spent a lot of time in the areas of public relations, marketing communications, and media and government relations. During and after our initial public offering in 1997, I built and managed an investor relations function as well.
My own experience, in both politics and business, has been that you can’t talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into. As time passed, I realized I had a deep interest and desire to help build a great organization by focusing nearly exclusively on the “behavior” part of the equation.
My current focus is to liberate our leaders to be great at work and life, to help them build themselves and others to perform as well as humanly possible. I try to motivate them, inspire them. I help them think more clearly, communicate more honestly, and realize their success depends on their ability to make everyone around them great at solving problems. I get paid to think about that, write about that, and talk about that. I do a lot of teaching and coaching. People ask for my advice. Sometimes they listen. I am deliriously happy.
I am also deeply privileged to serve as a Fellow of the Bell Leadership Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a wonderful organization led by a national treasure — Dr. Gerald Bell. The Institute is a world-class leader in executive education and development and whose work represents the most deeply genuine approach to personal and organizational mastery I have ever encountered.
Prior to 1995, I spent a little less than a decade in what you might euphemistically call “politics” in New York state; there was rarely anything “politic” about it. I spent a few years as a partisan propagandist in the subterranean political apparatus of the state legislature, ultimately winding up as a political and corporate communications consultant working for clients throughout the northeastern U.S. My closest brush with fame (and, at the same time, the truly criminal) came when I was retained to help re-elect Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci mayor of Providence, Rhode Island after his first felony conviction forced him from office. Receiving national media attention, the campaign was called “the greatest political comeback in American urban politics.” Though a deeply flawed man, Buddy was the best, most purely instinctive politician, and the most charming individual, I ever met. I consulted on two of his campaigns, and had more fun than I could stand. Buddy was released from federal prison in early-2007 after again being forced to resign from office upon his conviction for running a racketeer influenced and corrupt organization (RICO). Mmmm…good times.
I attended Washington & Lee University, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University at Albany. My concentration was in the foreign policy of the Soviet Union; shortly after receiving my degree, the Soviet Union collapsed rendering, on paper, this academic effort somewhat useless and fleeting. Just like that, four years of…chasing women and drinking beer — down the tubes.
Actually, chasing women and drinking beer was an excellent preparation for a career in politics.
I was born in upstate New York, along the Erie Canal, in 1963. I had a wonderful upbringing, full of opportunity, encouragement, and optimism. My parents raised my younger sister and me to say “please” and “thank you,” and to shake hands firmly. My mother was an office administrator, and my father was a teacher, principal and superintendent of schools over his long career.
My wife, Christine, and I have been married for twenty-one years. We have a son, Andrew, and a daughter, Katie. My wife teaches high school literature; my kids think I’m an ATM machine. We all live in Vermont with our dog, five cats, and my mistress.