Never, Ever Quit

Basten needed that same resiliency in business. Early in his career, he joined American Express and rose to become CEO of its tax and business services group, which was acquiring regional industry players. He left AmEx in 1998 to pursue his own consolidation strategy. His first effort to create an accounting powerhouse came in 1999, when he tried to combine 11 firms into a publicly traded company. But the IPO wasn't getting a high enough price, and he was forced to pull the offering at the last minute.

Within hours of calling off the deal, however, Basten was working to make the same idea happen, this time as a private company. He persuaded five leading regional accounting firms and two business-services firms to merge, and in 2000 orchestrated one of the largest consolidations in industry history. Today, Centerprise, based in Chicago, is a $165 million company with more than 1,100 employees nationwide.

"All of a sudden I was letting go of the only purpose I really understand," Basten says. "I love my family, but they don't drive me."

Letting Go

Now, nearly two years after Basten formed the company, he finds himself playing down the very role he had spent so much time building up. "The company is not great because I sped around on airplanes," Basten recalls telling colleagues. "I mean, what did I really ever do? My being gone isn't going to be a big deal."

For the first few months after he stepped down, though, he remained as involved in the business as ever. (Playing to Win for Life, his foundation, didn't really take off until September.) Even though he was now chairman of the board, he stayed involved in all the operational decisions at Centerprise. He cut back modestly on travel but kept up his speaking engagements. Richard Stein, who had been managing partner of one of the original firms, came on as interim CEO, but Basten remained the primary leader, colleagues say. Stein's interim stint, expected to last two months, stretched to a year.

In the days and months after Basten's announcement, some of the great undiscussables in any workplace--death and dying, loss and living--were talked about, in the open and behind closed doors, and there were tears, lots of tears. That first month Margee Elias, the company's senior vice president and general counsel, cried in every meeting with Basten. "I would just bring Kleenex if I came into Bob's office. The tears didn't stop. At one point he asked, 'What can I do to help you?' I said, 'This is pathetic. You have ALS, and you're asking what you can do to help me?' "

Difficult as those months were on Basten's colleagues, they have also been hard on his beloved company. When Basten finally began to step back, the seven firms he had combined reverted to operating less as a cohesive whole than as separate entities. The company was "treading water" and was paralyzed by a "waiting-for-the-new-guy-to-start syndrome," says Bikun, the CFO. "We'd talk about a lot of things but a lot of things would get deferred." The company's financials reflect that. In the summer of 2002, Basten was at the helm of a profitable company that had increased its revenue more than 10% in each of its first two years. Today, in a tough economy, its revenue remains flat, and Centerprise's profit margins have slipped.

This past August, the company got a new leader, Jim McGuire, who left his job as executive vice president at BearingPoint (formerly KPMG Consulting) to take charge. His priority, he says, is to build on Basten's vision by fusing the five accounting firms into a unified whole. "There isn't a common culture, and we need to engender a team atmosphere," McGuire says.

For many colleagues, that common culture begins with shared purpose. "There's definitely a do-it-for-Bob mentality," Elias says. Bikun agrees. "I think about Bob every day. But the last thing he would want is for us to sit here and wallow in sorrow and frustration because of his circumstances."

Bouncing Back

Even though this is a game that Basten knows he will ultimately lose, he talks constantly about winning. His speeches to company leaders mention it. In an afternoon of conversation, Basten regularly calls employees "total winners" and says the same thing about his son, Jack, 13, who responded to news of his father's illness by working to raise money for ALS research. By Basten's definition, winners are people who step up and hold themselves responsible for making things happen. Winners follow through, they play hurt, they hang on.

For Basten, making things happen has meant channeling his prodigious energy into something else, namely, his foundation. In August 2002, he and a Centerprise colleague, Shelley Simmons, cofounded Playing to Win for Life. "It was really my next company," he says, grinning.