59岁的前美国副总统戈尔,让我想起鲁迅先生的一句话:“跑在最后却坚持跑完的,乃是中国的脊梁。”这位“美国脊梁”,跑了两次。他一直在努力奔跑,平静地接受结果,默默地微笑——虽然很多人看起来他像个陪跑的。这种人总是让我肃然起敬。
　　胜者好像理应可以为王,败者(假如我们以竞选的结果来定义成败)却不一定都要落草为“寇”。比如戈尔,他不落草,却落了“钞”,于一般人在如此状况中都会产生的压抑和委屈中,很负责任地为自己发掘了商业才华。
　　我们可以参加既定游戏规则的游戏,比如戈尔参加总统选举,然后接受游戏规则的评判;我们也可以换种游戏,换种心情,如果这场游戏我们输了,并不表示天下只有这么一种游戏或者只有这么一套规则;或者,我们也可以开辟游戏的蓝海,比如戈尔自己开创了CurrentTV,爱播什么、播给谁看,他可以自己订规则。
　　接受了一重身份,并不代表我们以后一直要照这条路走下去。生活的精彩,需要自己定义给自己。
　　这也是职场,这也是舞台。
　　
　　Funny guy, indeed. In one well-delivered anecdote, Gore manages to make fun of himself, the election, his relationship with his former boss, the Bush administration, and the media--and still come out on top. Gone is the robo-candidate who provided fodder for conservative bile and late-night merrymaking. (For a good time, google "SNL" and "lockbox.") After the 2000 election, Gore might have slunk away to a loser's life: a memoir here, a visiting professorship there, the occasional keynote speech or celebrity golf tournament. Instead, in what may be the greatest brand makeover in history, Gore is being hailed as a visionary who was right about everything from global warming to Iraq. At 59, he's an Academy Award winner, a bestselling author, a front-runner for the Nobel Prize, and a concert promoter who turned out to be a bigger rock star at this year's Grammys than the rock stars themselves.
　　What no one is talking about is that he has also become a stunningly successful businessman--and that has fueled his comeback. Since his nonelection, Gore has become a millionaire many times over, bringing him, in financial terms, shoulder to shoulder with the C-suite denizens he used to hit up for campaign cash. In addition to the steady flow of six-figure speaking gigs, he has become an insider at two of the hottest companies on the planet: at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), where he signed on as an adviser in 2001, pre-IPO (and received stock options now reportedly worth north of $30 mil ion), and at Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), where he joined the board in 2003 (and got stock options now valued at about $6 mil ion). He enjoyed a big payday as vice chairman of an investment firm in L.A., and, more recently, started a cable-television company and an asset-management firm, both of which are becoming quiet forces in their fields.
　　Financial disclosure documents released before the 2000 election put the Gore family's net worth at $1 million to $2 million. After years of public service--and four kids needing high-priced educations--Al and Tipper used to fret occasionally about money. Not anymore. They have a new multimillion-dollar home in a tony section of Nashvil e and a family home in Virginia, and have recently bought a multimilion-dolar condo at the St. Regis condo/hotel in San Francisco. Available data indicate a net worth wel in excess of $100 mil ion.
　　One problem he had in politics, he says, was identifying an issue too early--"'predawn' is the term I use"--to be able to act on it. But "in the business world, particularly at a time when things are moving so swiftly, if you can see it early, you can make a business opportunity out of it." He pauses. "For whatever reason, the business world rewards a long-term perspective more than the political world does."
　　His most public effort was dusting off a slide show on global warming he had put together in 1989. It was full of depressing data about melting ice caps and killer hurricanes--not a likely vehicle to spark a resurrection. As recently as May 2004, he took some serious ribbing for presenting a version of it at an event timed to coincide with the goofy global-warming film The Day After Tomorrow.
　　What has changed since then is, in part, political: John Kerry fared worse than Gore at the polls, and President George W. Bush has seen his approval ratings tumble. Hurricane Katrina played a role, too, stirring fears of climate change.
　　Joel Hyatt is comfortably ensconced in his loft-style San Francisco office at Current TV, Al Gore's now-profitable cable network. Hyatt, the CEO, is a longtime friend of Gore's who made his millions by founding Hyatt Legal Plans, a provider of low-cost legal services that was acquired by MetLife (NYSE:MET) in 1997. He has taught entrepreneurship at Stanford's business school and chaired the Democratic finance committee during the 2000 election. He doesn't talk easily about his front-row view of Gore's disputed loss, and when he does, his voice shakes with emotion. "It's hard to move on from something like that," he says.
　　But he did. After the election, Hyatt began talking with Gore about the sorry state of television and the role that the broadcast media play in the public sphere. "The line between news and entertainment is blurred," as Gore now puts it. "Much of TV is mind deadening. It's a one-way conduit of knowledge." The two men discussed what Hyatt calls "an utter lack of innovation in the media industry"--a barely disguised oligopoly, as they saw it, controlling both content and competition. "We decided that we wanted to build a new kind of media company to democratize--small d--television first and the media industry generally," Hyatt says. They would give viewers from 18 to 34 the means to create and control what went on the air--a user-generated model now familiar thanks to the likes of YouTube and MySpace, but a shot in the dark for TV back in 2002.
　　Undaunted, Gore and Hyatt went looking to buy a cable-TV network. The effort quickly became a disaster. Meetings were taken, favors were called in, but nobody wanted them. "We were told repeatedly, 'You're not going to start a cable-television company,'" Hyatt recalls. "'There's no room in the industry for you. Period.'" The only possibility they could find was a yawner of a Canadian news network, called Newsworld International, or NWI, owned by the French company Vivendi. Yet even here, Gore and Hyatt were initially rebuffed. Gore had to tap then French president Jacques Chirac to arrange a meeting with Vivendi executives. Negotiations dragged on for months. "There were probably at least seven or eight times when [the deal] was dead and all but buried," Gore recalls. Finally, after nearly a year of nail biting and a cameo appearance by Barry Diller, who owned a part of the entities--Gore lobbied him in person--Gore and Hyatt snagged NWI in May 2004 for $70 million.
　　They had the network, renamed Current TV, but they still didn't know precisely what it would air . At a meeting around Hyatt's kitchen table in the summer of 2004, the nascent management team kicked around ideas--and kicked them to the curb. One option was to give 200 talented unknowns all around the world video equipment, train them, and set them loose to tell stories. Hyatt and Gore's response: Not good enough. Gore was looking for something "transformational," recalls Current exec Joanna Drake Earl, a veteran of Paul Allen's Moxi media startup. "Transformational?" Earl remembers with a laugh. "I mean...that's hard to manage to."
　　As Current's August 1, 2005, launch date approached--the old Canadian news programming would end July 31--tensions ran high. "At one point," says president of programming David Neuman, who had produced sitcoms on NBC and Fox, "I got down on my hands and knees and begged for more time." Finally, the team agreed on a formula. They would hire a crew of "vanguard journalists," but work toward the goal of creating a network largely shaped by its viewers, via a Web site that functioned like a production community.
　　Current TV, Gore's cable channel, turned a profit in only two years.
　　Today, less than two years in, at least 30% of the network's content is viewer generated, called VC2. Amateur filmmakers, some in their teens, upload three- to eight-minute documentary-style nonfiction segments, called "pods," to the Current Web site. Online modules help aspiring filmmakers navigate everything from framing a shot to negotiating music rights. The online community comments on the videos and votes to "green-light" pods that they want to see on air. Makers of the pods that are aired get $500; Current gets a library of content to use in perpetuity--with no production costs.
　　The result is surprisingly engaging and unlike anything else on TV. The pods shuffle through everything from cutting-edge bands and dogsled races, to African villagers struggling with HIV/AIDs and dispatches from soldiers serving in Iraq.Gore is clearly happy with Current TV's progress and optimistic about its future. Current TV is now in 38 mil ion U.S. homes via DirecTV, Comcast, Dish Network, AT&T U-Verse, and Time Warner Cable. Its expansion this year to the UK and Ireland on BSkyB and Virgin Media will put it in another 8.2 mil ion homes.
　　While Gore was struggling to launch his cable network in late 2003,he was also moving on another front: starting an investment firm based on a new definition of sustainability. Metropolitan West Financial, an L.A.-based asset-management outfit where he'd been vice chairman for two years, had just been sold to Wachovia (NYSE:WB). (Gore's former Senate chief of staff, Peter Knight, was a Met West managing director and had recruited him.) Gore had his hefty payout from the deal, plus a desire "to incorporate sustainability values into the financial-services work that I was doing." Goldman's Murphy introduced him to David Blood, then CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. "They were both talking to me about similar things," Murphy recalls, "deep conversations about emerging markets, sustainability issues, and new ways of making investments. They were both asking, 'Can this make money? Can this be a business?'"
　　


　　Rather than rely on short-term earnings projections, they thought long-term investment potential--and good management--could be better gauged by looking at factors such as whether a company was preparing for a carbon-neutral future. Environmental stewardship, though, is just part of how Generation defines sustainability. " We think about how businesses attract and retain employees , governance , branding ; how they operate in the community; and how all of that drives their business strategy," Blood explains. "We have a belief that explicit recognition of environmental, social, governance, economic, and ethical factors affect business . " Generation's research team, led by Colin le Duc, has both environmental economists and traditional buy-side equity analysts, who have learned to ask a wider range of questions of the companies they cover. The firm plans to build a long-term portfolio of only 30 to 50 companies. Blood claims that returns so far have exceeded expectations, although he won't divulge specifics. (See "An Inconvenient Portfolio" for some of the firm's holdings.)The firm now has nearly $1 billion under management, from 15 institutions , plus a few individuals. And it has turned down some investors. Says Blood: "Anybody who is expecting a monthly report on how their stocks are doing isn't for us."
　　Back in New York, I ask Gore to explain what he meant when he said he wanted Current TV to be transformational. He answers with a 10-minute history lesson on the computer. "It's a geeky analogy, but you're from Fast Company, so you'll like it," he says good-naturedly. Sketching a diagram on a file folder, he reveals just how geeky he is himself. He certainly needs more than 30 seconds to get his point across.
　　That helps explain why, despite the interest from so many Democrats in his political aspirations, he seems genuinely distanced from the idea of running for President--at least for now. "What politics has become," Gore explains at one point during our discussion, "is something that requires a kind of tolerance for artifice and manipulative communications strategies that I just find I have in very short supply. I just don't have the patience for things that seem to be greatly rewarded in today's political system."
　　Political y, his outsider status makes him a potential kingmaker.
　　If this is sour grapes over 2000, it doesn't sound like it--at least not from the vantage point of 2007. "A politics of ideas, driven by passion, seems to encounter a headwind," he tells me. "I do think that the Internet is bringing revolutionary transformation. I have not ruled out the possibility of getting into politics sometime in the future," he says, "but I don't expect to. Because I don't expect things to change. If they did change, then I would feel differently."
　　As a political figure, Gore may be more palatable as a possible dark horse than an actual candidate--precisely because he seems incapable of turning his passions into sound bites. And in any campaign, he might find himself on the defensive for his business activities. In his slideshow tour, he has been paid by many companies, which could be used to chal enge his integrity. (He routinely cuts or eliminates his fee for schools and other nonprofits.) He also headed the Apple board committee that cleared Steve Jobs of wrongdoing in the stock-options backdating scandal.
　　Gore sees no reason to apologize f or not wanting to jump into the electoral fray. As a businessman, he can speak with a candor few successful politicians can maintain. He has made an enormous amount of money and achieved positions of influence from technology to financial services to media. He and Tipper are even setting themselves up as angel investors for a few early-stage tech companies they believe in. In doing one end run after another around the status quo, he has created a new life: a perfect amalgam of environmental activism and a new type of capitalism in which there is more than one bottom line to consider, more than one master to serve.
　　
　　2007 MANSUETO VENTURES LLC, AS FIRST PUBLISHED IN FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES.
　　
　　LANGUAGE TIPS
　　anecdote 趣闻
　　keynote 主旨
　　hail 致敬
　　denizen 使定居fret 激怒
　　fray 争斗
　　assault 攻击
　　philanthropy 慈善
　　artifice 策略
　　palatable 受欢迎的
　　front-runner 竞赛中领先的
　　comeback 恢复
　　metaphorically 隐喻地
　　
　　戈尔从甚嚣尘上的政治评论中拍拍土站起来过起了别人不清楚的另一面生活,这个有意思的家伙,把自己的品牌做了一番彻头彻尾的修改。他总是从自己身上找乐子,比如竞选,比如他原先的顶头上司布什政府,比如跟媒体的关系。
　　他总是因为准确的政治预见性而被广大公众拥护,无论是全球气候变暖还是对伊战争。现年59岁的他,同时还是学术大奖章的获得者、畅销书作者、诺贝尔奖角逐的热点人物。为音乐会做推广时,居然自己也不小心成了年度格莱美奖上的“摇滚明星”,风头甚至盖过了那些真正的摇滚歌手。
　　戈尔身上还有个天赋不得不提——他是个非常成功的生意人。
　　他颇有预见性地早早成为了两家最热门公司的董事会成员。一家是谷歌,他当年加入时的股票现在已经飙升得厉害,同时还是洛杉矶的一家投资公司的副主席。家中的房产也在急剧扩张。
　　戈尔说自己在政治生涯中有一个习惯或者毛病:把问题揭示得太早但效果并不是非常好。“可是现在在商业领域,尤其在现在这样一个事物发展都非常迅速的时期,如果你可以比对手更早地发现问题,你就可以从中发现机遇!”
　　“也许其中有很多种原因,但结果总是商业世界给予长期投入的回报比政治肯给予的要慷慨得多。”
　　戈尔现在更乐意谈论对全球经济的看法:“我实在是非常享受这个商业世界!我对商业的热爱程度甚至连我一开始都没有预料到!”
　　Joel Hyatt,戈尔Current电视公司的首席执行官,也是他长期以来的老朋友。当时二人认为电视新闻与娱乐越来越接近,所以希望可以给年轻观众一些更加明确的引导。两人想买下一家有线电视网络,可情况没有他们想象得那么容易。他们约见过很多人,投注了大把精力,但这个门槛并不好进。
　　最后,还是通过与希拉克的关系,从一个法国公司拥有的新闻网络公司手中实现了梦想。买下所有权后,起名CurrentTV,意为着眼于当下。
　　2005年8月1日,戈尔的电视频道VC2终于开播了。在短短两年后,就赢利至少30%。
　　Current TV也会选择吸引眼球的节目,与此同时它对环保和公益也十分注重:与艾滋病斗争的非洲小村落和从对伊战争前线回来的士兵都上过他们的电视。
　　今年电视业务已经拓展到英国和爱尔兰,意味着另外又有820万户将看上他们的电视。
　　2003年末戈尔还在盘算着另一个计划:投资公司。在参考了几家银行的经营理念后,他选择了可持续发展这一信条。
　　这时候David Blood被引荐了过来。戈尔说:“我对于为投资和慈善这两项我喜欢的事物创造一个良好的商业环境很感兴趣!”
　　他们相信长期投资和适宜的管理会对一家公司在未来的竞争力有长远的影响。
　　其中不需要付钱的初始资本就是戈尔本人自己的付出。
　　戈尔渐渐发现他的兴趣和特质可能更适合现在的商业领域。
　　作为一个政治人物,戈尔大概要比现在那些真正在摩拳擦掌的竞选候选人更讨人喜欢。
　　旅行中被许多公司邀约演讲和经济上酬谢时(这也是对他自己的一个考验),他只象征性地收一点钱,或者说服那些公司把本打算给他的酬金捐助给学校或者其他非营利性组织。
　　戈尔现在已经在经商中体会到了更大的乐趣,他现在赚的钱多到数不清,也通过商业在其他领域,诸如科技、金融和媒体上取得了一席之地。他和妻子蒂柏甚至还当起天使投资人,为那些创业初期的小公司进行投资。
　　他已经用环保主义和另一种方式的资本主义为自己的生活开创出了新的意义:考虑更多,服务更多。