MIKE WALSH TAKES ON BRAIN CANCER ''Look, I know this is bad,'' says the all-star CEO from Tenneco. But doctors tell him it's ''possible'' to beat the odds, and that's what Walsh intends to do. Talk about inspiring.
By John Huey REPORTER ASSOCIATE John Labate

(FORTUNE Magazine) – FOR 50 unblemished years, Mike Walsh -- Stanford running back, White House Fellow, Yale Law grad, and now transformational CEO of a once teetering industrial giant -- has lived the American dream, choosing to take on increasingly tougher challenges, then surmounting them with determination, organization, intuition, and compassion. For his latest challenge, though, the Tenneco wunderkind wasn't given any choice. On January 19 he learned that inside his head grows a malignant, inoperable brain tumor. Walsh's response has been entirely in character. Doctors tell him it's ''possible'' to beat the thing, so that's what he plans to do, whatever the considerable odds against him. ''What's the statistical probability of somebody who starts out as a public defender, becomes a federal prosecutor, and doesn't even get into corporate management until he's 37 years old, going on to become the chairman of the 25th-largest company in the country? That's what I think of statistical probability,'' Walsh tells his 80,000 employees in an extraordinarily blunt, unscripted 22-minute videotape that he sent out only three days after receiving his diagnosis. ''Is this going to change my life? Is it going to change the way Tenneco approaches things? Hell, no!'' he says, admonishing his colleagues not to let it change theirs either. ''Keep up the good work. Don't look right or left. We're going on because of our common objective and our shared optimism.'' Is something wrong with this picture? Is this what the shrinks call denial? Or is this what Hemingway called grace under pressure? Maybe both. Either way, Mike Walsh isn't crazy. He knows what he's up against, and he knows it has already changed his life. ''Look, I know this is bad,'' he says over deli sandwiches and fruit juice at his temporary encampment -- a hotel suite near Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, not too far from the Tenneco Building. ''In fact, this is tragic. But it's up to me to keep it from being tragic. To a point, you have to concede to medical realism and admit there are elements you cannot control. But there's a personal dimension, too. It includes the will to live, support systems, and hope. These things are under your control, and nothing says you can't be a 9.999 on that scale. Where those two grids meet determines how it all comes out. But I'm not one of these people who believes that just by scoring a 9.999 I necessarily win.'' HE'S BRINGING all he has to the fight, including his sense of humor. Using a cellular phone on a conference call recently, he suddenly pulled it back from his ear and said, ''Hey, you don't think this will give me brain cancer, do you?'' With Joan Walsh -- his wife of 25 years, whom he met when they were children growing up in Binghamton, New York -- at his side, he shuttles off from the hotel to radiation treatments, trying in between to prepare for an upcoming meeting with New York security analysts. Using a regimen common in cancer treatment, he has organized his mental imagery into a ''red team'' (his natural antibodies), which he visualizes building up his immune system, and a ''white team'' (his radiation treatments), which he visualizes as huge snowplows from the Union Pacific Railroad (Walsh was CEO there before coming to Tenneco) clearing the snow (his tumor cells) from the tracks. Except for his partially shaven head and the chemotherapy pump slung over his shoulder, Walsh -- at 6-foot-2 and 200 pounds -- still presents the picture of health. After turning down the boom box in his room -- it's playing Nana Mouskouri singing in French -- he explains that he is ''utterly symptomless'' but for a slight limp in his left leg, the nagging condition that ultimately led to his brain biopsy and the diagnosis of malignancy. ''It's ironic, I guess, because I've always paid such meticulous attention to my health,'' he says. ''I can tell you my cholesterol count. I eat well. + Don't smoke. Don't drink much at all. Work out. Do about 40 minutes every morning on the Air-Dyne bike. Oh yeah, and have lots of sex,'' he says, winking at Joan, the mother of their three children, ages 23, 20, and 18. If Walsh feels any bitterness over this irony, it isn't apparent. ''I know that only 15,000 out of 250 million Americans contract brain tumors every year,'' he says, ''but for some reason I just don't have an ounce of 'why me?' in me. I've already had way more luck in life than I ever deserved.'' Walsh's decision to reveal his condition to the public so soon after getting the news himself has won high praise from Wall Street and corporate ethicists, partly because it stood in such contrast to the disclosure just days before by privately held TLC Beatrice that its chairman, Reginald Lewis, had brain cancer and was in a coma; Lewis died the day after the announcement. But Walsh, who has always preached open communication, or what he calls ''candor, clarity, and credibility,'' says it was ''about a 20-second decision'' to go public. To do otherwise, he says, would have risked destroying the ''open culture'' his team has worked at creating. ''Besides,'' he says, ''what was I going to do, come back from a biopsy with my head shaved and say the barber fell asleep in mid-haircut? Or when I was missing one day a week for radiation, was I going to tell everybody I was having an affair? Because of the terrible impact of a word like 'tumor,' especially 'brain tumor,' trying to hide this would have involved horrible risks to the company.'' Ronald Barone, a Kidder Peabody security analyst, applauds: ''This was handled in the best way possible. Full, immediate disclosure of a material event like this is in everybody's best interest.'' Barone continues to recommend Tenneco stock, noting that in Walsh's 18-month tenure, restructuring has already begun to yield major results. ''There isn't another company in the U.S. that is addressing fundamental change faster and in a more systemic way than this company,'' Walsh told his employees in the videotape. ''Last year, from operations we lost about $3.50 a share. This year we're going to make $1.50. That's a $5 swing on absolutely flat revenues in lousy markets.'' Walsh sees all this as part of a higher mission, one worthy of not letting brain cancer become too much of a distraction. ''It's not just a matter of Tenneco,'' he says. ''The continued success of this company is incredibly important to this nation. What we're ; doing at Tenneco is showing that large industrial companies can reform themselves and become competitive, which, on a global basis, is the ball game.'' If some of this sounds a little arrogant or presumptuous in print, somehow it doesn't seem so when it emanates from Mike Walsh's mouth. What makes such a guy tick? ''I have heard other people describe me as being very rational and organized,'' he says, ''but the truth is that at all the important times in my life, my decisions have been intuitive.'' Says John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause and Walsh's mentor and friend for 30 years: ''This is Mike at his best. He's got that special spark -- some genetic combination of drive and purpose and energy -- that makes him stand out even when you put him up against other leaders.'' Gardner, who at 80 still lectures on leadership and organizational renewal at Stanford, started the White House Fellows program in 1964 and selected Walsh as the youngest member of the first class. He recalls Walsh rejecting terrific opportunities in Washington to attend Yale Law School instead, then, upon graduation, rejecting other more lucrative offers to become a public defender in San Diego. Says Gardner: ''I thought, this guy is smart. He's going to see a side of life he ought to see.'' When he was a U.S. Attorney, Walsh made waves by prosecuting the U.S. Border Patrol for brutalizing aliens, and he began to be mentioned as gubernatorial material in California. But, says Gardner, ''I knew he wasn't going to become a politician. He wasn't about to cut his cloth to anybody else's pattern.'' The ambitious attorney finally seemed to find what he was looking for in 1980 when he took an executive position at Cummins Engine in Columbus, Indiana. From there to Union Pacific to Tenneco, his corporate ascent has been supersonic. And as an early and outspoken supporter of President Clinton, he was again talked about in the political arena, possibly as a future Cabinet member. For now, though, even Mike Walsh has his hands full. ''There's an awful lot we don't know about the mind-body relationship,'' says John Gardner, summoning the wisdom of his age, ''but even given his limited chances, knowing Mike, I guess I have to feel that he might, by God, make it.'' In the world according to Mike, nothing is impossible.