At 39, I was the CEO of a company with a few hundred employees. Depending on the day and the employee you asked, I’d rate anywhere from a zero to a seven on the unkindness scale (10 being a tyrant). I’d guess that I normally hovered around 4.5. I doubt anyone would have rated me a 10—that takes a particular kind of malevolence. I wasn’t taken to raging, other than on one occasion when the lives of the participants in our Montana AIDS Vaccine Ride (a 1,500-person, seven-day bike ride across the Rockies to fight the disease) were in jeopardy during a horrific mountain wind storm that literally blew our temporary city apart. But day to day, I was fairly consistently stern and serious.
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