WHEN I FIRST MET LANCE ARMSTRONG...(FOREST GUMPING PT. 1)

I just watched ESPN’s “30 for 30 Lance” and it reminded me of how he and I first met…

My oddest claim to fame is that I am the only person in the world to have raced on the same cycling team as Lance Armstrong and also worked for Jeff Skilling of Enron - arguably the two greatest frauds perpetrated in modern mankind. (To be clear, I never doped, and I never made any whitewash trades.) As it turns out - these two men are basically the same person. But first, how did this happen?

LANCE: It was the summer of 1990 and I was at the Olympic Training Center (OTC) in Colorado Springs for a training camp with the US national speedskating team. I was 21 years old. At the same time, the US junior national cycling team was there also, training for the junior world championships, most of them 16 to 18 years old. I knew a few of the young riders including my old friends Jessica Grieco and George Hincapie. There were also whispers of a new young rider with significant potential. His name was Lance Armstrong. We had not yet met.

It was not my first time living at the OTC - a few years prior, I had lived there for a summer while training with the US cycling team for the junior world cycling championships to be held in Casablanca, Morocco. My roommate that summer was my friend Rich Hincapie - brother of George Hincapie - a key player in Lance Armstrong’s 7 Tour victories years later. Just prior to moving into the OTC I had traveled around the East coast to bike races with Rich Hincapie (17), George Hincapie (age 13), and Jessica Grieco (14) - all up-and-coming junior racers. I managed, that summer, to win 14 races in a row while racing on the 7-11 Junior Team under manager Jim Ochowicz. This was the same team that Lance later joined that morphed from 7-11 to Motorola to U.S. Postal Service to the Discovery Team.

Back to 1990: as our speedskating training camp was ending and just prior to the junior national team heading off to the world championships in England, I attended a house party near the OTC hosted by one of the young cyclists. George Hincapie was there along with Jessica Grieco and some of the other skaters and many of the other junior cyclists. I mostly hung out with Jessica. However, midway through the party, there was an odd occurrence. A minion of Lance’s - a young cyclist perhaps 17 years old - approached me and said somewhat formally, “Lance Armstrong is outside, and would like to speak with you.” Lance was only 18 but had already had assumed command of the junior ranks. At 21 years old I was a little annoyed, but also curious - his VO2 Max test days prior had already become legendary. I decided to accept this strange invitation and walked out the front door of the house.

Lance was waiting for me on the front porch, pacing back and forth. As I drew close he asked me if I would walk and talk with him. He was very serious despite being just 18. It felt like something straight out of the movies. I was intrigued and said simply, “sure.”

We walked to the end of the driveway to the curb, and then he gestured at me to sit down. I decided to comply even though he remained standing. He paused looked up and then finally turned to look at me. He then became very intense and proceeded to ask a series of targeted questions about Jessica Grieco. Jessica was a 16-year-old cycling phenom who also happened to be a very attractive blond - if very young. He had that same now-famous, hawk-like stare. He started with an odd question, “Jessica Grieco - how did you ‘get’ her’?” Confused, I explained that we were just friends and that we were not romantically involved at all (I had to remind him that I was 21 and she was just 16).

He immediately followed up with a variation of that same strangely worded question, “Well, how can I ‘get’ her?” I was a bit confused and asked him to clarify. He responded almost bemused, “well, I want her, so I need to know how to ‘get’ her.” He then asked me a series of very specific questions. “What kind of music does she like? What does she read? Does she wear perfume? What are her hobbies outside cycling? Is she smart? What’s her favorite subject in school?” and then again, “How can I get her?”

I tried to be helpful but found it all a little bit like a science project. I can remember, as we wrapped up, he said formally, “thank you for taking the time to come out and speak to me,” and I was thinking, “you’re just a kid - why are you talking to me like you are the adult?” I laughed to myself as I returned to the party. Later I saw him talking to Jessica with some of the same intensity – though at least he did bother to smile and laugh.

Lance eventually went on to win the world championships at age 21, then almost lose his life to cancer only to return to win 7 Tours de France and become a worldwide icon and hero. He was then subsequently stripped of all his titles for doping. Perhaps worse, was how he won - by cheating, bullying, doubling down on his lies, aggressively going after those that began to question him, berating and even threatening those that stood in his path even while being the biggest most professional doper of them all. He struck out at my teammate Frankie Andreu, called his wife Betsy a “fat bitch” and attempted to physically and psychologically intimidate his former teammates including Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton until he finally capitulated, with very little remorse, to Oprah, bemoaning the $150 million dollars he had lost. The best documentation of this fraud was by Tyler Hamilton and my friend and author Daniel Coyle in “The Secret Race”. (Dan was a contributor to my last book “Design for Strengths” and also wrote “The Talent Code” and “The Culture Code.”)

ENRON AND JEFF SKILLING: A decade later I was to meet another Texan, Jeff Skilling of Enron, who was a doppelganger of Lance. As it turns out Lance Armstrong and Jeff Skilling are basically the same person - the same arrogance, the same hawk-like stare, the same intelligence, the same dominant drive to win, the same capacity to innovate… and the same psychopathic incapacity to include ethics in their decisions.

During the same timeline of Lance’s triumphs, I had retired from Olympic sport and had joined a management consulting firm, Diamond Technology Partners, that placed me with a key client, Enron, in Houston Texas to help them develop new trading businesses and systems. I knew nothing of trading, or technology for that matter, but it turned out I had a keen capacity to understand business processes and experience design. Quickly I became the lead experience designer for the strategy and IT group that coded the trading systems for gas, power, bandwidth, and freight at Enron.

A year into my tenure at Enron came a career highlight for me: in May of 1999, we had finished our first trading system for bandwidth. Enron was preparing for its annual investor conference and Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay came to see us and our new bandwidth trading system and the associated physical “pooling points” on the 52nd floor of the Enron tower for their emergent practice of trading units of online capacity. After giving them a short tour, they thanked us and slapped us high fives while a photographer took photos. I was disappointed at first that I didn’t make it to CNN like my friend Jake Chou - but later grateful. That afternoon the share price of ENE rose sharply and added 9 billion dollars to the company’s value. A year later, in 2000, Schroder’s estimated the ultimate worth of Enron’s bandwidth trading effort at $36 billion, more than the combined value of Enron’s electricity and natural gas businesses combined. We were heroes in the company and already tasked with our next assignment - creating online platforms for gas and electricity trading.

During this period, Enron managed to win the title of the "Most Innovative" company by Fortune magazine 7 years in a row while making many fortunes for its executives. In a similar timeframe, Lance Armstrong won 7 Tour de France titles making fortunes for him and his sponsors. Both enterprises had a similar edge, and a similar flaw: intelligent innovation combined with arrogance and lack of ethics. Enron began to thwart the rules, developing a “smartest guys in the room” approach with their continued winning that led, at one point, to Jeff Skilling calling an analyst an “asshole” during an investor conference when someone asked a question he didn’t like. Lance Armstrong, during an interview at the roughly a similar time period, also replied with the exact same quote when questioned about doping during his tour run.

INNOVATORS: Lance won 7 tours through a single-minded focus and the power of innovation - thinking “outside the jar” to identify whitespace opportunities to compete and win. The innovations he helped usher into the world of cycling came on many fronts and not just the obvious like lighter bike frames, lighter wheels, ribbed skinsuits. It also included organization and governance of a team with a very, very specific training regimen designed for one thing only – to win the biggest event in cycling – the Tour de France. Wind tunnels and the perfect tuck to reduce drag, a higher cadence to reduce muscle fatigue, more time in the saddle on the climbs, a specialized diet where each meal was weighed to replace exactly the lost body mass, consultations with experts from around the world to identify opportunities to win – all these were innovative builds to the previous approach.

It was only natural that the science Lance was analyzing would show that increasing the ability to process oxygen (more red blood cells through EPO and blood transfusions) and recovering faster (steroids and cortisone) were adjacent innovations to the core of training harder and suffering the most. He had, as he has shared, little to no guilt at all about it and integrated systematic doping into his regimen with the compliance of team leadership.

Lanced tilted the field in his favor in every single possible aspect. Was he the best ever? Yes, he was: no one has climbed so many mountains so fast – recent times up the famous mountains on the Tour are more the 15% slower than during the “Lance Era”. But therein lies the rub: innovation is necessarily “absent of values”. It is part of the process – to “diverge” and suspend judgment and restrictions to determine opportunities to find new ways to compete. One of the primary predictors of a creative or innovative approach is the willingness to step outside the status quo, to break rules. This is the heart of Design Thinking. But, at some point an ethical and moral filter needs to be a part of the “converge” process.

Enron was much the same - with their unique “mark to market” trading valuations and new trading products including “weather derivatives” they were innovating into areas that were little understood by regulating bodies. In the early days, this all led to increases in market valuation… but in the process of inventing these new processes and commodities, they also “doping” their accounting finding ways to pad their revenue and bottom line through things like “whitewash trades” where they would make artificial trades with partners like Global Crossing that looked real but in which no actual commodity changed hands. I had actually invented this process of net zero trades and was appalled, later, when I learned from the FBI how they were using it.

Like all forms of cheating, this too eventually led to their end. I was always mystified at how, each time we delivered a new trading system to Enron, we would be ushered off the floor, locked out, and then settled somewhere else. This was very contrary to the typical consulting experience where they want to keep you around for a while. Later in a 3-day deposition to the FBI - we learned why.

Months after Enron folded I was asked to come out to Pennsylvania to spend a few days with a couple of FBI investigators at the house of my consulting partner to talk through what we had created for Enron. I think the investigators were a bit disappointed - they were originally attempting to promote the idea that Enron’s trading systems “didn’t work” at all, but through our testimony and others, learned that they were functional but used in an illegal fashion to create fake revenues.

Like Lance, Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay were convicted - both in court and by the court of public opinion. Unlike Jeff and Ken, Lance did not have to go jail, but both of their legacies have contributed to the seeds of distrust that permeate the press and public opinion even now. I spent more than 3 years at Enron. They were incredibly innovative and hired the best and brightest… but because of the actions of a few at the top, the accolades and awards and money all disappeared. By October of 2001, Enron’s stock price had dropped below $1 from a high of over $90. I was still there the day they closed their doors.

ENRON’S DEATH RATTLE: October of 2001 - I think it was a Wednesday, and at 9 am the morning we had launched our 4th trading system for Enron - freight trading - the capacity to trade full truckload freight (FTL), less-than-truckload (LTL) freight, and intermodal freight (truck-train-truck). I had designed the entire front end after meeting with dozens of experts from around the globe. About an hour later after the first successful trades, I was walking across the trading floor of the new Enron building with a $2 million contract extension for our client bosses to sign. That morning Enron’s stock price had continued to plummet due to the scandals and was under $0.20 / share. The trading floor had nearly 600 traders in long rows of desks with no walls. Like always it was noisy with the traders and their phones. Suddenly there was an announcement over the loudspeaker: “Please stop trading… Please stop trading. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded our debt. We no longer have collateral to trade. Please stop trading… Please stop trading…”

I stopped mid-stride and looked around. It had gotten quiet. Slowly the realization hit the room - “This is it… It is all over… We are ALL unemployed as of this moment.” The silence seemed like forever but was probably only 30 seconds. Then, several things happened at once. Somewhere in the cavernous trading floor someone produced a giant jambox and began to play “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC. Simultaneously papers began flying up into the air as everyone realized they were no longer useful, traders leaning back into their seats in disbelief. Then monitors began to be kicked off tables and a short mild riot took place.

Amazingly, less than 10 minutes later, as everyone congregated in the center of the trading floor, 6 men marched in with blue jumpsuits with white embroidered patches that said “Budweiser” and rolled in 12 kegs of beer. The party began and everyone that stayed proceeded to get rip-roaring drunk. No one was particularly angry and there was a lot of singing. A couple of hours later and we (a few traders and I) decided that we would exit the scene with a worthy souvenir. Outside 1400 Smith Street in Houston was a giant chrome emblem of Enron rotating on axis day and night - but inside, on a pedestal in the lobby was a 4 inch version of the same in pure gold. It was always guarded by an armed security guard but we wanted it. We hatched a plan. The two brothers, Phil and Steve, would pretend to have a fight right by the pedestal. Jeff and Eric would rush in to break it up. As the fastest of the group I would grab the golden cube and run for the door and Stan would have it open and ready. We actually practiced this in the aisle of the trading floor and then headed down to the lobby.

Upon our arrival the lobby we were dismayed to find it filled with literally 100’s of policeman. We huddled briefly recognizing the futility of the stunt and then went our separate ways. It was the last day of business for Enron and we never saw each other again (except for a party we threw that night: we had cheap beer and ordered 300 hamburgers from McDonalds.) The next day I would fly home to Phoenix and begin a new client adventure. I did manage to take a poster off the wall as I left, featured a smug-looking man in a suit with the caption “Enron - where values matter.” I still have this poster but someone had defaced it as you’ll see when I find it (picture to follow)

CONCLUSION: In the history of the world… has there been a more visible public figure with the support of EVERYONE that so actively said one thing while doing the exact opposite without shame? Lance didn’t dodge the question of doping, he didn’t hide his head when approached, he didn’t focus attention elsewhere. Instead, he actively attacked others fallen from the omertà, sued former friends and supporters, and enlisted the public, moral and political support of millions using the shroud of cancer to aid in his cover-up through sheer pressure. Skilling did much the same, accusing the accusers, labeling their concerns as a lack of intelligence while actively committing fraud. Skilling eventually served 12 years in prison. Lance lost some contracts. Despite my own misgivings and despite knowing some of those around him, I was in the camp of “just leave well enough alone” regarding Lance for years, and silently criticized Greg LeMond and the wife of my friend and teammate Frankie Andreu (Betsy) while openly criticizing Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton. I was wrong. I eventually apologized directly to Betsy and would now like to do so to Greg and Floyd and Tyler and others.

Innovation is almost certainly the answer to many of the world’s most pressing business challenges. That said the Lance and Enron sagas also show that one of the success criteria for all innovations has to be an ethical filter. It sounds obvious, but “implicit” expectations of the most obvious sort have repeatedly failed – let’s not make that mistake again. Societies and businesses have a cycle of creative destruction, with “the ruling elite” and “innovators” trading power. That said, when innovation is launched without a filter of ethics, it runs the risk of being destructive and criminal. Sadly I think the Armstrong and Enron scandals also contributed significantly to the loss of trust most people feel toward the media and institutions of all kinds.

PS: Not that he would ever read this or hear my advice, but I do have some for Lance. Right now, no matter where he goes, there are backstabbers in the room, and a constant feeling of judgment, and gloom. No day probably goes by where someone isn’t casting him a sidelong glance or directly confronting him as a liar, a thief, a cheater. Consider this - for what amount of money would you trade your honor and integrity to have to live like that? For me there is no amount of money that would make that kind of life worth it. Here is what you should do Lance. Give every single penny you have to the American Cancer Society (roughly $75 million). Apologize profusely. Commit your life to good. Live in a trailer down by the river. Be poor for 6 months. Be an example for truth. America LOVES the underdog and those who fully acknowledge their failures. Use that innovative mind to find new cures, new ways to solve cancer. I’ll bet you’d be worth 6 figures on the speaking circuit and could regain your name, and at least a part of your fortune. And you would finally be free. Just one person’s opinion.