Never, Ever Quit

Bob Basten swept into the meeting just moments before it was scheduled to begin. Ordinarily, he would have showed up early for some sociable small talk. But this was no ordinary gathering. It was August 8, 2002, and it was Basten's last day as CEO. The board members, outside investors, and senior executives had gathered in a large, windowless conference room in Washington, DC. Basten, a 6-foot-5-inch former football player with intense blue eyes, looked down the table at the line of faces staring back at him. "I'm dying," he said wryly, "to get this meeting started."

And that's how Basten began to talk about his own death sentence. Two months earlier, he had received a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. There is no cure, no treatment to halt the steady progression of the debilitating illness; life expectancy for ALS patients is typically between two and five years. As a result, Basten told his stunned colleagues, he was stepping down at once as president and CEO of Centerprise Advisors, the company he formed in 2000 by combining several business-services and accounting firms.

At first, his delivery was swift and methodical. Basten, just 42 at the time, had anticipated every possible question. What he hadn't anticipated was breaking down and crying, choking out an apology, toward the end of the all-day meeting. "I was sorry that I was stepping down and couldn't do what I promised I would do," he recalls. "They bet on me--they bet on themselves and their companies, too--but they certainly bet on me, and I was a bad bet."

Then Basten reminded his colleagues that board meetings are confidential, and he jokingly asked them not to tell his family that he had wept. "I'm crying here, and I didn't even cry when I told my family," he told them, with a smile on his tear-stained face. "Let's just make a pact." It was classic Bob, cracking a joke to lift heavy spirits. But it was also revealing: For Basten, work was more personal than his personal life.

Scott Lang, an investment banker whose firm had backed Centerprise, was in the room that day. "It doesn't get much sadder in business," he says. Nor does it get much more challenging for a business, or for a leader who must relinquish, bit by inexorable bit, the company and the life he loves.

Many people contemplating such a fate probably imagine they'd immediately stop working, that they'd pare down and focus on the most essential things in life. But to Basten, work is the most essential thing in life, and facing his mortality hasn't changed that. Although ALS forced Basten to give up his title, he remained largely in control of the company for months afterward. And when that was no longer possible, he focused on a foundation he had created to fund ALS research. "If you were to ask my friends if I have any regrets, I'd bet they'd say, 'If he could do it all over again, he wouldn't have worked as hard,' " he says. "But I would have. And if I got well, I'd work better, smarter, for bigger dough, but I'd still work hard."

Living to Work

Basten began to fear he had ALS in early 2002, after tests ruled out other causes for the growing numbness in his right foot. At the company's national conference in Las Vegas that May, people noticed that his leg seemed to be bothering him. In early June, he went to the Mayo Clinic, where his ALS was diagnosed. The following month, he went on his first real vacation in years--two weeks, with the family, in Europe. That's when Dennis Bikun, the company's CFO, knew something was up. Basten had never taken so much time off.

He was quietly wrestling with the idea of transition. "I loved the company," Basten says. "I found purpose in work--seven days a week, phone ringing constantly. The idea of stepping down was scary. All of a sudden, I was letting go of the only purpose I really understand. I love my family, but they don't drive me."

Basten attributes much of his drive to the only real mentor he ever had: John Gagliardi, his football coach at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. (As Gagliardi heads into his 51st coaching season at St. John's, he is expected to break the all-time collegiate win record this year.) After college, Basten signed on for a season with the Minnesota Vikings' practice squad. "He was one of the great ones," recalls Gagliardi. What separates the great players from the merely good, the coach says, is their ability to "bounce back from a bad break."

Bouncing back from bad breaks is something Basten learned long before he became a linebacker. His father died when he was a fourth grader in Northbrook, Illinois. When Basten was 16, his mother died of cancer, and he went to live with relatives in Minnesota. As Lang, Basten's investment banker buddy, puts it: "Some kids can take that and be angry for the rest of their life. He took it as a challenge."