Despite his misgivings, Albion couldn't quite bring himself to give up the good life at Harvard. He could have gone on like this for quite some time. But then he got the "wake-up call from hell."
Albion's mother, Leni Joyce, was on the phone. She arranged an urgent meeting with her son. "I have something to tell you," she said. "I have cancer."
Albion was devastated -- and also amazed. Despite her illness, his mother, who owned Leni's Inc., a high-end textiles company in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, continued to drag herself into work on a regular basis. "She would lie on the floor of her office, overwhelmed by fatigue," he recalls. "But the company and its people meant so much to her that she refused to give up."
He was stunned by the dedication his mother, now 71, displayed. Never in a million years would he do the same thing for Harvard. And that realization opened his eyes. What he needed in his life was to connect to his work in an elemental way.
Ultimately, his mother survived two operations, a round of chemotherapy, and the cancer itself -- a near-miraculous recovery. Albion realized that his mother's passion for her work, and her life, came from thinking of her work and her life as an integrated whole. At the same time, he knew that he'd never have a complete life if he didn't find work that mattered.
He shared his dilemma with several senior faculty members at Harvard -- friends (and one mentor) whose respect and opinion he valued. Their feedback came as a shock: They too had experienced many of the same doubts about teaching MBA students, and they wouldn't blame him if he bailed. "For the first time," says Albion, "I felt I wasn't crazy or just a big whiner."
Albion left Harvard University in the summer of 1988. No longer was he "Professor Mark Albion, Harvard Business School." Now he was simply "Mark Albion." He was on his own.
"I knew that nothing would really change until I looked inside myself," Albion says. "What did I want to do? Something that would make me happy? Yes. Something that would prove fulfilling? Yes again. Once I allowed those thoughts to surface, I ran up against the usual fear and doubt: Great idea, Mark, but how will you make a living?"
Albion knew he wanted work that would mesh with his personal values. And he suspected that such work would somehow involve combining business with some kind of service to a larger community. He decided to use a training program that he'd created at Harvard as his escape hatch. A few years earlier, he'd developed seminars to teach senior executives how to leverage their PCs to help them make business decisions.
Albion decided to continue those classes, but with a twist: He included interactive video disks (then a new innovation) in the curriculum. This was not exactly a project worthy of Albert Schweitzer. But he thought that it would make a good exit strategy.
Albion was in for a rude awakening. To round up business for his new project, he began calling all of the CEOs who had once sought him out when he was a hotshot at Harvard. But now that he was a hotshot without a portfolio, his messages weren't being returned.
But while searching for backers, he was introduced to the Social Venture Network (www.svn.org), a group of 400 socially conscious business executives, investors, and entrepreneurs. There, Albion discovered a core group of like-minded people with whom he could trade ideas, find inspiration, and not feel like a complete misfit.
His new network of contacts introduced him to a video producer who had invented a character to promote antidrug messages. Knowing a marketing opportunity when he saw one, Albion believed that he could transform the character into a big-time brand. "It was the ultimate win-win situation," he says. "I'd get to run a profitable business that had a socially constructive mission." He worked up a business plan, recruited a management team, and nearly launched a company called Children Against Drugs Inc.
But despite his great expectations, things quickly fell apart. After a year of work, Albion was back to square one. "That company was the ultimate platform for me -- it became my real passion," he says. "It was an incredible setback when it failed."
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