mourning the loss of the truly great Mike Yasick, the head of Shire Specialty Pharma, and a friend

March 6, 2013, 8:25 AM, the email zings in: "Are you superb?"

It was from Mike Yasick, of course, head of Specialty Pharma at Shire—one of the only people on this planet who regularly addressed me with that kind of jazz. He was like that, Mike Yasick. He was light. He was a serious guy, sure, a well-read guy, a guy who loved his family and a guy who loved his job. But he was also a guy who made us laugh.

"Hey," he said, last time we were talking on the phone. "You want to see how dumb I look in bright red pants?"

"Sure, Yasick," I said.

"Check your in-box," he said.

And that, above, was the picture he sent.

Mike Yasick knew what it was to live a life. He knew that the clock was ticking on his own—that he had inherited a difficult disease, that it could flare at any time, that his own father and brothers had been taken too soon. He wanted to live fully—and he so absolutely did. Taking his wife around the world to celebrate her birthday in style. Sending colorful notes to friends during his Vietnam travels. Watching one daughter dance, another daughter take her first huge job, a son prepare a favorite meal with chef-like precision. Not just watching. Watching is the wrong word. Mike Yasick appreciated every single second of those he loved. He appreciated his life, and when you were with him, when you thought of him, when he showed up at your birthday party and said, "I love your Dad, he reminds me of my own," you appreciated your own life even more.

I talked to Mike because I wrote stories for Mike—that's what I do for Shire. He'd joke that I never gave him enough ink. "Don't you want to use my picture?" he'd say, stopping me in the halls. "Don't you want to quote me on something? Aren't I important? Don't you think I am?" I'd indulge him when I could. But mostly I'd just stop to talk, or he'd email me, or he, on occasion, would call. "You in?" he'd write, and I'd say, "Sure, Yasick, I'm in." And then the phone would ring and he'd make me laugh, but he'd make me think as well.

Not long ago—maybe nine months ago—the conversation grew serious. He was worrying about work things. He was pondering this condition of his. He was saying how much he loved his wife and family, how much he wanted to beat the odds of his genetic inheritance and stick around for a long time. "Don't you go anywhere on us, Yasick," I said. And he said, "I think you're going have to deal with me for at least a while more."

I wanted a lot more while. We all wanted a lot more. I mourn the loss of Mike deeply. I mourn for his wife and children and family and fishing friends and thousands of colleagues at Shire. He left an impression. He made a difference. I'll hear his laugh in my head a long time on, will miss him asking what books I'm reading, will miss him saying, "You've become someone, haven't you?"

Am I superb? Not today, Mike. Not with this news. But I know the sun is shining right now because you're up there in the skies.

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Zenobia, the Dutch version.

When your heart has been pounding, like my heart has been pounding, when you're averaging five corporate stories a day and still behind, when the Zumba ladies ask you if you are a size bigger than you thought you were (could this be from sitting on your bum all day?), you see the mail truck drive up and you run.  First, to get that dress size down.  Second, for some relief.

Today, my running relief revealed a package that contained the Dutch edition (Sdu Uitgevers) of ZENOBIA, the corporate fable I penned with Matt Emmens, a good friend through all these years and now the chairman of the board of Shire, the international bio-pharma company.  The illustrations (my husband's work) look exactly the same as they do in the English-language version.

The words?  Not so much.

Matt, did you ever think we'd be so multiply translated?  I hope this makes you happy today.

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Dine In/Help Out

Last year, I had the privilege of hosting two of my long-time clients—Mike Cola, until recently the president of Shire Pharmaceuticals, and Jerry Sweeney, the CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust, along with the beautiful women in their lives, for an initiative called Dine In/Help Out.  Dine In/Help Out is designed to promote healthy eating through its Farm to Families program.  I chronicled my efforts here, on the blog.  Confessed to being a less-than-perfect cook who is blessed with near-perfect friends.

This summer St. Christopher's Foundation for Children is sponsoring its second DIHO event, and because I adore Jan Shaeffer, the Foundation's executive director, and because the St. Christopher's Foundation crowd is my all-time most favorite philanthropic Philly crowd, I was there, at the launch party.  Read about the whole story here, in this Joan A. Bang Mainline Media News.  Or go to the Dine In/Help Out site and see what you can do to have fun and help this worthy cause.

Thank you, Kimberly Hallman of Devine + Powers, for sending this to me just now.

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We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication/Judith Warner: Reflections

I wrote last evening of spending time in the company of people I admire—of clients who become and remain friends.  That post was prompted, in part, by the all-employee meeting conducted by Shire Pharmaceuticals—an event that took place beneath a wide, white tent on a morning that recalled summer far more than it augured fall.

Judith Warner—bestselling author of Perfect Madness, former New York Times blogger, once a special foreign correspondent for Newsweek—was among those who, as an invited guest, made that all-employee meeting so special.  Her newest book, We've Got Issues, released earlier this year, tells the story of Warner's journey as a journalist who had once assumed, like so many others have, that we are a nation dangerously prone to over-diagnosing and -medicating our children.  This was the state of things, a fact, a reality so transparent that she'd agreed to write an entire book about it.  She'd signed a contract called "UNTITLED on Affluent Parents and Neurotic Kids." She was set to collect her arsenal of facts in support of her theory that "the kids we saw making the rounds of doctors and therapies were no more than canaries in the coal mine, showing the first-line symptoms of the toxicology of our pathological age."  Her book would be on the shelves in but a few years' time.

Except.  Except sometimes writing is the only path toward knowing, and the harder Warner worked to prove her point, to sway her audience, the more quicksandish her proposal became.  In her quest to meet parents who proved her point about the desire for quick diagnoses and easy fixes, for drugs that could turn report-card Cs into stellar As or, perhaps, ease the overscheduled child into one more resume-building activity, she encountered instead the heartbreak of those who were watching their children struggle and who did not know where to turn. She found herself jolted by questions that didn't have easy, or obvious, answers.  She discovered a fact that began to haunt her:  "Five percent of kids in America take psychotropic drugs.  Five to 20 percent have psychiatric issues.  That, according to my math, just doesn't add up to a pattern of gross overmedication."

What do you do when the argument you seek to make (you promised to make) is porous?  What do you do when your own world view can't be supported by the facts?  If you are a writer with the integrity of Judith Warner, you stand back, reassess, look harder.  You write a book with a brand new title, and you chart new journalistic territory by writing passages such as these:

If we live in a time when the brains of non-ADHD kids are shutting down from mental overload, if we live in an era when even our young winners are "a bit less human," the it's fair to say that normal life is now "sick."  But that's using the word "sick" as a value judgment, not a medical category, and it's urgently important not to confound the two.  For to do so does a real injustice to children with mental health issues and their parents, and also makes improving empathy and getting better help for those children all but impossible.

The issues are tangled, and complex.  Psychotropic drugs can be abused; sometimes they are.  But by and large, Warner writes, it's time for all of us to bring more compassion to this issue, and less headline-borrowing judgment.  There is no love like a parent's for a child.  We are all, in our way, working toward rightness—hoping to be heard, hoping to be helped, hoping that education, therapy, and science (for it takes all three) can keep our children safe.

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Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business

I sometimes talk about Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business, the corporate fable I co-authored with Matt Emmens, who is now the CEO of Vertex and chairman of the board of Shire. I explain the book to those who ask as an Alice in Wonderland-esque fable about the power of the imagination in corporate America. The story features a character named Moira, who wears read shoes and fine, striped socks as she winds her way through a sclerotic bureaucracy in search of a way to make a difference. In the process, she inspires those she meets—a character named Hedger, for example, characters named Nod and Bolt and Snort—to help revitalize a corporate giant called Zenobia.

Published by Berrett-Koehler in 2008, the book has gone to live and breathe in many countries, sometimes adapting the original illustrations (which were created by my husband) and sometimes unveiling entirely new graphic universes. I thought of this book last week, during the readergirlz chat, when Hipwritermama and Maya Ganesan and others asked if I'd ever consider writing fantasy.

Zenobia is the closest I've yet come.

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Returning to Work

From the train platform at 30th Street Station, I always had this view of Cira Centre—of the offices, in particular, of Brandywine Realty Trust, a once and sometimes client. Waiting for the train on Monday evenings, I'd watch my friends across the way, huddled in meetings or hurrying back and forth, sitting alone with a pen in hand. I'd wonder what they were up to now, how their next buildings would shape the cityscape, what they would think of me if they turned and saw me—a teacher for a spell, not a consultant.

Yesterday I left academia and returned to the world of corporate work. I sat with my good friend (and co-author) Matt Emmens in the offices of Shire. Turned my thoughts toward an annual report and a news magazine. Buckled myself in for the ride. The thing about the life I live is that there are friends at every turn—people I am genuinely eager to see, stories I can thread my way into. Everywhere in this world, people are dreaming. They are putting up buildings and launching new drugs. Sometimes I stand by their side.

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ZENOBIA: The Curious Book of Business

Today ZENOBIA, that very curious book of business, rolls off its Michigan presses. The making of ZENOBIA has been a two-year odyssey that took me back to such classic books as Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland, not to mention Calvino's Invisible Cities. My husband designed the book and produced its 15 illustrations. My co-author, Matt Emmens, Shire Pharmaceuticals CEO (and long-time friend), was just last night named Life Sciences CEO of the Year by the Eastern Technology Council.

So this is a risk, this book—a literary fable about the role of the imagination in corporate America. It's full of characters named Vert and Hedger and Nod (have you met them out there already?), and it stars an intrepid young soul named Moira, whom, I might add, is modeled after a wonderful young woman I mentored a few years ago when she was a senior at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.

We had fun with this. It's a new genre, something that taught me so much more about writing.

Thanks to the team at Berrett-Kohler for having faith in it, to my agent, Amy Rennert, for making it happen, and to the always inspired Nettie Hartsock.

And, Mr. Emmens: Congratulations on this, your first book.

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Ringing the NASDAQ Bell

Today my co-author for ZENOBIA: THE CURIOUS BOOK OF BUSINESS (an Alice in Wonderlandish tour of corporate America, due out in January) is in New York, ringing the NASDAQ bell, opening a day of what we all hope will be better-than-yesterday trading (much better).

I'm not there, but I can imagine what it looks like: Matt Emmens (who is not just my friend and co-author but the CEO of Shire Pharmaceuticals) and a crowd of Shire-ites—a fist of energy on the trading floor. Dreams fulfilled (the big ones, anyway). Dreams still spinning forward.

Photos of the event here: http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/200711/market_Open_110207.stm

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