It was
all pretty much a disaster, and the only hope left was to
do the hard work necessary to restructure the entire
company. The task was Herculean. WebMD was the
quintessential Internet company, and the Internet
bubble had just burst. WebMD’s stock had once traded
above $100 per share. It was  at $17.50 when we closed
the dea l, on its way to a low of $3 in August 2001. This
called for drastic measures, and that is what it got. Within a month of closing, Marty became chairman of
the board, and he and his elite management team were
running the company. I remained CEO of the Practice
Services Division and sat on t he board of directors of the
combined company, which kept the name WebMD. Marty brought  in a seasoned turnaround specialist, Marv
Rich, to be president during the massive reorganization. The company was losing hundreds of millions of dollars
a ye ar and the  bleeding had to be stopped. Marv’s job
was to work his way through all the divisions and cut
them down to core competency. All that would remain
was that which aligned with WebMD’s core vision and
could quickly begin earning its keep. The task before us was breathtaking, and it provided
tremendous growth for me, personally. I now found
myself part of a team of executives who, instead of
complaining, s imply rolled up their sleeves and tackled
this mo numental project. Eve ryone was working day and
night to do w hatever was needed to right the sinking
ship. For years I had been diligently working to free
myself o f that weak person inside who always insisted on
things b eing the way he wanted. Now, nothing was the
way anybody would have wanted. Yet everyone just took
a collec tive de ep breath and did whatever was asked ofthem. It was an amazing thing to be part of, and it taught
me a lesson of inner strength that permanently changed
me at a very deep level. Marv called me one day and  asked me to accompany
him to California where the WebMD Internet site was
being developed. If the company we had merged with
had a main asset, this was it. Marv wanted me to a ct as a
development s pecialist at meetings with the website’s
development team. Most of the company’s losses were
being generated by its Internet offerings, and this had to
be dealt with. The problem w as that, despite the losses,
the dev elopment team was making enormous demands
for salaries and benefits from the new WebMD
management. They figured they were in the driver’s seat
since th ey con trolled the development of the company’s
entire Internet offering. I couldn’t believe what I saw when we arrived. More
than eight hundred developers were working in a giant
converted warehouse in Silicon Valley. It was tiny cubicle
after tin y cubic le as far as the eye could see. I thought my
development team in Alachua had expanded
tremendously. We were aro und 250 people, but this
development team was over three times that size, and
everyone was packed in like sardines. Unfortunately, the meetings didn’t last very long. Marv
and I sat with their senior management team and
listened to their demands. They had the demands nicely
printed out in great detail on many pages. When they
were done, Marv presented what he was willing to offer,
which f it on one short page. The heads of development
met among themselves and after a very short period of
time came back to Marv with their reply—meet our
demands or we’re leaving. I had so much  to learn from  people like Marty and
Marv, and I was completely open to the process. I would
have thought that the next step was to figure out who we
couldn’t live without and bite the bullet. That is not whathappened. Marv spent a few minutes relaxing quietly, got
up from his chair, and motioned me to walk with him. He left the me eting room and called together the entire
development team right then and there in the open
cubicle area. He explained that the top tier of their
management had just resigned and anyone who wanted
to g o with them  should make that decision at this time. Those w ho wished to stay wo uld not be guaranteed a job,
but ove r the next few weeks we would work together to
see who was needed to keep the core development going. And tha t was that. Marv left a  few of his people in charge
of sorting out the exodus, and we left. The onl y thing Marv ever sa id to me about the whole
affair was that if you let peo ple hold you hostage, they
will for ce you to make terrible decisions, and you will
lose. You might as well take y our bumps up front and at
least be in control of your destiny. Who would have
believed that just a few mo nths later, one of Marty’s
senior executives would move the development of the
website to New York and relaunch it with a team of less
than fo rty developers. That new website became the
foundation for WebMD’s entire future. Again and again I was seeing that each of these
intensely chal lenging business experiences was very
beneficial for my spiritual gro wth. I just kept letting go of
whatever disc omfort got stirred up within me, and
inevitably, a stronger flow of spiritual energy took its
place. This growing strength helped prepare me for life’s
next growth experience: what happened when Marv’s
reorganization team finally got around to taking aim at
my division. Medical Mana ger Practice Services Division, as we
were known at the time, was  one of the largest divisions
in WebMD. We had grown to almost two thousand
employees, and that made us very ripe for cost cutting. With that in mind, Marv brought the reorganization
team do wn to Alachua for two  days of meetings. The firstday was devoted to presenting our business plan and
vision for the future. Fortunately, we were well prepared
to take Marv through our current products with their
highly successful revenue generation, as well as the
products and services we were working on for the future. It certa inly didn’t hurt when Sabrina was able to present
the tremendous growth of Medical Manager Network
Services from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to a
fifty-million-dollar-a-year business in just over three
years. It was during these presentations that it really hit me
what had happened. John Ka ng and I had set out to be
sure that Medical Manager was not left behind by the
enormous potential of Internet companies like
Healtheon and  WebMD. At th e same time, Sabrina and I
had bee n strug gling to find a  way to get Envoy, or some
other cl earinghouse, to evolve  enough to be able to fulfill
our vision for Network Services. Despite all the negative
issues we were facing, the am azing reality was that when
the smo ke had cleared, we en ded up owning all three of
these compani es—WebMD, Healtheon, and Envoy. Just
a short time ag o, no one cou ld have even imagined how
such a thing c ould ever take place. It was like so much
else I had experienced; the unimaginable had actually
happened. The presentations to Marv and his team went very
well. There was palpable excitement in the room
throughout the day. Nonethe less, when I returned later
that evening, I was shocked t o see what had happened to
the meeting room. Stretched around the walls of the
room w ere com puter printou ts with the names of all the
Medical Manager Practice Services Division’s two
thousand employees. Hanging like wallpaper, they
foreshadowed the day plan ned for tomorrow: every
name o n the list would need to be justified. I was aghast,
especially since we had recently requested additional
employees to keep up with our growth.Returning home that evenin g, I was very concerned
about the fate of my employees. Tomorrow could turn
out to be a very ugly day. At the same time, I knew that
Marv h ad to cut costs, and it  was my job as a corporate
executive to help him. This could have created a lot of
inner t ension, but I decided to just surrender to the
reality of the s ituation and be open to balancing these
two areas of co ncern. I came to peace that night knowing
my hea rt was in the right place, and when tomorrow
came, I would do the best I could. The next morning when I e ntered the room, I was
again shocked  by what I saw. The printouts had been
taken down, and the walls were back to normal. Before I
could inquire what was going on, Marv’s second in
command walk ed me out to the hall. He told me that he
and Marv had met last night,  and the decision was made
to s kip the “bloodletting” and allow us to continue the
fine work we were doing. He told me they were very
impressed with  what we had achieved and with our plans
for t he future. As they saw no  need for the second day of
meetings, Mar v had taken an  early flight out. His team
packed up, shook our hands, and went on their way. I
have no  idea to this day if the rest of my management
team ever saw the ominous sight of those wallpapered
walls. I realized just how extraord inary these events were
when a few hours later I rece ived a call from the head of
HR at corporate headquarters in New Jersey. He was
completely beside himself. He playfully asked me what I
had us ed to drug Marv wh ile he was down here in
Alachua. He went on to say th at he doubted that such an
event had ever taken place in the annals of corporate
history. We were all well aware that Marv’s purpose in
life was to cut costs. That he w ould come down here with
that int ention, and simply walk away, is a tribute to both
the quality of our division a nd to Marv as a manager. Medical Manager and I received a number of tributes in2000, but none was more meaningful to me than
receiving such a vote of confidence from someone I
respected so much.4 9 . H a n g i n g  O u t  i n  W a s h i n g t o n
T he year  2000 not only ushere d in a new millennium, it
brought with it a flurry of rec ognition for the pinnacle of
success that The Medical Manager had achieved. To me,
who wa s just on the magic c arpet for the ride, it was all
simply a tribute to the perfection of life’s flow. I had not
sought any recognition; I had just thrown myself into
life’s wind to see where it would take me. I w as invited by one of our previous board members,
Ray Kurzweil, to join him at the White House in March
where he was to receive the National Medal of Honor in
Technology. Ray is credited with many major inventions,
including the first microchip that allowed an electronic
keyboard to sound like a g rand piano and other real
instruments. He is also considered one of the fathers of
speech recogn ition software. Ray had been on Medical
Manager Corporation’s board, and I had sat on Kurzweil
Education System’s board. Through it all we had become
good friends. He even stayed with us at the Temple a few
times and showed a serious interest in Eastern
philosophy. I would have to wear a tuxedo to the While
House, which was far from m y normal attire, but I was
excited about joining Ray for this honor. Like many others, I had been to the White House as a
tourist but certainly not as  a guest of the president. There was a cocktail party a fter the ceremony, and we
were al lowed t o walk freely t hroughout the rooms of the
first flo or residence. I gazed out a window in the Green
Room t hat ove rlooked the Washington Monument and
thought about how many presidents had taken in thatview. Getting used to actually sitting on the antique
furniture in those rooms was difficult enough, but then I
kept realizing that the people I was having conversations
with were all N ational Medal of Honor winners in some
field of science . President Clinton joined the mix, and I
even ran into S tevie Wonder  in the hallway. All in all, it
was one of tho se “what am I doing here” moments. I’m a
yogi w ho mo ved out to t he woods to meditate. I
surrendered to the flow of life, and I end up here—
unbelievable. That was not my only trip to Washington that year. The ve ry next month I came back to represent The
Medical Manager when it was installed into the archives
of t he Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian was
sponsoring an  effort to d ocument the Information
Technology Revolution for future generations. In much
the same way as we now look at the Industrial
Revolution, someday people will be fascinated by the
time pe riod in  which computers revolutionized how we
live. Each year a panel of CE Os of the world’s leading IT
companies did a search for organizations that had done
extraordinary work in the field. Because of our work in
the are a of electronic health -care transactions, Medical
Manager was one of the com panies selected in the year
2000 to  have its story preserved in a time capsule for the
future. There was a grand ban quet the night before and a
ceremony at the museum the  next day. I brought a few of
the old- time employees with me, as well as Donna and
Durga. Reflecting back twenty years to when I was sitting
in that  twelve-by-twelve-foot room in the woods by
myself writing this program, one could never have
imagined that it would lead to the Smithsonian. As i t turned out, I would have to return to DC once
again in August of 2000 on a  very important trip. I had
been asked to represent the company at a meeting with
the Department of Justice (DOJ). Before larger
companies can combine, the U.S. government reservesthe right to determine if the combination could stifle
competition and violate antitrust laws. In the case of the
Healtheon/WebMD–Medical Manager merger, the
government requested very detailed information and a
face-to-face meeting. The reason for this was that
Medical Manager Netw ork Services was sending so many
claims to Envoy that the g overnment was concerned
about allowing  us to become part of the same company. My immediate  reaction to this situation was one of deep
humility. Had  Medical Manager actually reached the
point o f success that the U.S. government had to be
concerned about the very antitrust laws I had studied in
business school? No, not really, but we were going to
have to convince them of that. Sabrina and I flew up to Washington to prepare for the
Justice Department meeting. It was around that time I
began to notice that my life was becoming filled with
more an d more  attorneys. We met for a strategy meeting
at th e o ffice of  one of the largest law firms in D.C. There
were attorneys  everywhere, but one always stood out
from t he rest. Jim Mercer was Marty’s litigation
specialist, and he understood both the law and business
at a  phenomenal level. I had learned to have great
respect and confidence in Jim , and I was glad he would
be present at the DOJ meeting. I, of course, had never previously dealt with the Justice
Department. It was not exactly my everyday experience
to be entering  the DOJ building surrounded by a large
team o f attorneys. Nevertheless, after hours of very
intense questio ning, Sabrina and I managed to address
the governmen t’s concerns satisfactorily. When it was all
said and done, the merger was not going to pose any
anti-trust problems. Though we were very relieved when
the ordeal was over, it had ac tually turned out to be quite
a learning experience. All this exposure to intensely powerful people and
situations was having a profo und effect on the psyche Iwatched so diligently. I had never been exposed to this
powerful lifest yle. Nothing in me got off on it or wanted
anything from it, but it did make me deal with parts of
my being that I would not ha ve faced otherwise. If I saw
any weakness,  fear, or anxiety come up, I just deeply
relaxed back into where I w as watching from. I simply
kept let ting go of whatever c ame up. This is where life
had tak en me, and I used all these situations as a way of
letting go of m yself. It was definitely working. I kept
being pushed into strongly positive and negative
situations, and I increasingly found myself in a very clear
and un disturbed state. It seemed that the more
challenges life put me through, the less my inner energy
flow was affected by outer conditions. What years of
willful meditation had not gotten rid of, life’s situations
and cha llenges were rooting out of me. As long as I made
getting rid of myself my only  goal, every situation was a
fruitful experience. If I’d had any other goal, I think the
constant press ure would have been overwhelming. I
found that I actually got more peaceful inside as I dealt
with the ever-increasing magnitude of challenges. Life
was mo lding me each day to become who I needed to be
in o rder to handle tomorrow’s tasks. All I had to do was
let go and not resist the process. For the next few years, my Medical Manager Practice
Services Division continued to grow to its peak financial
success. We grew to more than twenty-three hundred
employees and were gene rating more than three
hundred millio n dollars a year in revenue. We were the
most widely installed practice management vendor in the
country, and we had begun turning our attention toward
building a fully computerized electronic health record. It
was a period with tremendous challenges that I thought
was putting me through un precedented growth. Little
did I know that life’s portal of dramatic change was
about to open up once again. When it did this time, it
would complet ely redefine for me what it meant to go
through a transformational growth experience.S e c t i o n  I X
Total Surrender5 0 . T h e  R a i d
I t was Wednes day, September 3, 2003. I remember
because on Wednesdays I go into Gainesville in the
morning to see Dr. Chance fo r a health tune-up. After the
appointment, I noticed I had a voice mail from Lisa
Elliot, the resident attorney at the R&D facility in
Alachua. She said it was ver y important, so I returned
her call while still in the parking lot. I got Lisa on her cell
phone, and she was very glad  to hear from me. Her voice
was un characteristically tense, and I realized that
something was  very wrong. She began by telling me that
I n eede d to come to work right away because the FBI was
there, a nd they wanted to se e me. My first thought was
about a federal marshal who  had come to the facility a
few years earlier looking for a prior employee. I asked
Lisa if they w ere looking for someone. She said, “No,
THE FBI is here—twelve to fifteen agents plus the
Sheriff’s Department. They’ve taken over the entire
facility. They’ve shut down all the phone lines and the
entire comput er system. This is a full-blown raid. Helicopters ar e flying overhead, agents are armed, and
there’s a search warrant. You need to come here right
away!”
I clearl y hear d the words she was saying, and I
understood the sense of urgency with which they were
said—but the situation was so absurd that I could not
relate to  it in any manner. It was like—maybe they have
the wrong address. I guess that’s why it didn’t disturb
me. In fact, it  sounded like it was going to be rather
exciting getting to show them they had made a mistake. I
asked Lisa what was going on . Why were they there? Shesaid she  had no idea, but apparently the same thing was
happening at our offices in Tampa and at corporate
headquarters i n New Jersey. She had been trying to call
Charlie Mele, our general counsel, but she couldn’t get
through. The phones wer e down corporatewide. I
assured her that I would be there right away. During the twenty-minute drive back to the office, I
tried ca lling ev eryone I could think of who might have
some informat ion. I still had absolutely no idea what was
going on when I pulled up to  the R&D facility. The front
drive was completely blocked off with Sheriff’s
Department vehicles, and the  employees showing up for
work were being turned awa y. I pulled up to a deputy
and identified myself. He made a call on his radio and
immediately signaled to the others to let me through. As
I drove  up the long and winding drive through the
beautiful hayf ields, law enforcement vehicles were
scattered every where. When I approached Building 1, I
saw th e Sheriff’s Depart ment’s forty-foot Mobile
Command Center stretched across our parking lot. We
had five buildings by then, and FBI and Sheriff’s
Department personnel were positioned around all of
them. There were, indeed, two helicopters buzzing
overhead. I think they ended  up being part of the media
coverage. I parked  in my normal spot a nd made my way into the
building. The place was swarming with law enforcement
officers. I was met by f our or five agents who
immediately w alked me into the back conference room
where I was to  spend the day. I requested that our in-
house attorney, Lisa, be present, and she was brought
into the room. The agents identified themselves as from
the FB I and Treasury Dep artment. They were very
professional and businesslike. I was presented with a
search warrant, which Lisa had already reviewed, and I
was informed that the warra nt gave them full control of
the facility. They had the righ t to take any and all itemsthat fell  within  the itemized c ategories. They asked me to
sign a paper acknowledging that I had been served the
warrant. I glanced at Lisa, an d she nodded that I should
sign. I had a bsolutely no idea what to do; I was
completely out of my element. The only frame of
reference I had for this sort o f thing was the movies, and
I doubted that was going to be of much help. I as ked the ag ents in charge if they could help me
understand what was going on. They didn’t say much,
but they referred me to a list  of about thirty names that
they sa id were persons essential to their investigation. The ent ire executive managem ent team from the original
Medical Manager Corporation was on the list, as were
Marty, the attorney Jim Mercer, and some top people
from WebMD’ s corporate accounting. My mouth must
have been agape as I looked at the list. But there were
also a few oth er names that really floored me, like the
senior auditor from the highly respected public
accounting fir m we had used for Medical Manager
Corporation. I was taking everything in very calmly, but
my mind was spinning trying to find clues about what
was behind all of this. It w as actually the presence  of one name on the list
that first caught my attention. The name was Pat
Sedlacek. Unlike everyone else on the list, this person
was nei ther part of our execu tive team nor part of legal
or accounting . Pat worked on the dealer acquisition
team, which was run by B obby Davids, our VP of
acquisitions. Bobby had come into the company at the
time of the 199 7 initial public offering, along with John
Sessions, our chief operations officer; and David Ward,
our VP of sales. I would hardly have recognized Pat’s
name out of our twenty-three hundred division
employees, except that we were currently in the process
of investigating him for taking kickbacks from some of
the dealers. That investigation had begun in late 2002
and by  early 2003 had included Bobby Davids and acouple of other employe es. WebMD’s corporate
attorneys, with the help of outside counsel, were
handling the matter. We had already fired the people
involved and sued them in a Tampa court in order to
obtain subpoena power and freeze Bobby’s and Pat’s
assets. As our investigation went on, we were finding more
and more incidents of Bobby and/or Pat arranging
kickbacks from  the dealers they were acquiring. The
subpoenas we obtained of their bank accounts had
revealed an intricate network  of shell companies Bobby
had been using to hide the money. The investigators
were ab le to trace the funds coming in and going out of
these accounts to see who w as involved in the money
trail. Pat had already begun  to cooperate, and it was
obvious that Bobby Davids was the ringleader. By the
time of the raid , we had traced millions of dollars, and it
was still an ongoing investigation. With both Pat’s and
Bobby’s names  on the list, and the search warrant listing
more th an a hundred of our dealer acquisitions, it was
likely that these raids were somehow related to what
Bobby had been doing. But his kickback schemes
involved only  four or five employees, and our
investigation of the matter was being dealt with in the
open. Why couldn’t the government just talk to the
investigating a ttorneys? Wh y a sneak-attack raid in
Alachua, Tamp a, and New Jersey when everything was
readily available? I was finally able to get Charlie, WebMD’s general
counsel, on my cell phone. He confirmed that they had
been ra ided by the FBI at WebMD’s headquarters in New
Jersey, and he was as much i n the dark as I was. He also
suspected that this might be associated with the illegal
activity Bobby  Davids had been involved in. We
discussed the possibility that Bobby had tried to strike a
deal by telling the government that all the executives
were involved in his kickback s. If so, it didn’t seem likelythat his  story would hold up given all the hard evidence
we had of his bank accounts and cancelled checks. Charlie said that we would get more clarification over the
next few days; in the meant ime, we were to cooperate
fully with the agents. A sense  of total peace came over me and pretty much
remained there  the entire day . It was so thick it felt like a
protective blan ket. I was no t concerned in the least. I
knew I had not  done anything wrong, and therefore they
were no t going to find anyt hing. If this was a case of
Bobby lying to try to save hi s neck, the evidence would
clearly reveal the truth. I w anted to make sure I was
present enough to fully take in this extraordinary
experience. It’s not every day that the FBI shows up and
raids your place for absolutely no apparent reason. My und erstanding is that nationwide more than fifty
government agents were involved in the raid. They took
the enti re day,  and by the time they were done, they left
with pretty much everything. My desk was cleared of
every single scrap of paper. All my file cabinets were
empty, as were all those of m y executive assistant, Sandy
Plumb. All legal fil es were  removed from Lisa’s office and
from the legal filing rooms. My conference room table
used to have stacks of file folders piled up that were
actively being used to run t he business. They were all
gone with no w ay to re-create them. And it was not just
the paper documents that were being taken; agents were
also making mirror images of all our computer disk
drives, both the desktops and the servers. The day progressed pretty much without my input. I
used m y time to work on remaining completely
comfortable with the radical situation life had stuck me
in. Ther e was really no reaso n to be thinking about why
this was happening or how it  would turn out. Since I had
absolutely no idea what was going on, thinking about it
wasn’t g oing to  help. Instead, I enjoyed spending my day
letting go of wh atever that voice in my head was trying tosay and  deeply relaxing whenever my heart began to feel
anxious. In this situation, sur render was not an option; it
was only sane thing to do. When I left that evening, I sought out the lead agents. I
thanked them for being so c ordial and told them that I
wished we could have met under better circumstances. To m e, they we re just people doing their jobs to the best
of their ability—it certainly wasn’t their fault. When the sun set on September 3, 2003, nationwide,
the gov ernment had taken 1.2 million e-mail messages,
1,500 b oxes of files containin g more than 3 million pages
of documents, and 830,000 computer files. This was,
indeed, a day that would live in infamy.5 1 . A t t o r n e y s ,  A t t o r n e y s ,  a n d  M o r e
A t t o r n e y s
T he next  morning I got a preview of what my life was
going to be like for a while. The headlines of the
Gainesville Sun  r ead, “FBI Raids Alachu a Medical
Manager Offices.” Underneath was my picture next to
the story heading, “Wall Street Halts the Trading of
WebMD Stock Just Before Noon.” I knew it didn’t make
any difference  that I hadn’t done anything and that I
didn’t even know what the raid was all about—I was
headline news . I had never been publicly disgraced
before, and I noticed that it definitely stirred up the
psyche. That voice inside my head kept wanting to
explain that this had nothing  to do with me. There was
certainly no lack of people wa nting to hear what I had to
say. Media outlets from all over the country, including
the Wall Street Journal  and New York Times,  were
trying to reach me for a comment. Fortunately, I knew better. I had spent all these years
quieting down  that mental vo ice, and I had learned that
listening to it only fuels the fire. I knew how powerful it
was to simply relax and release past that urge to defend
oneself. I resolved to only discuss the matter when
absolutely necessary. Otherwise, I would just go about
my bus iness as usual. I hadn’t done anything wrong, so
why should I le t this affect me? Over time it would work
itself ou t. In the meantime, I was not going to let it steal
the great peace and joy I felt deep inside. Right from the
beginning, I resolved to use the whole situation to finally
free my self fro m whatever was left of that scared personinside who had always held me back. This was my entire
journey—liberation at any cost. We had a conference call with the corporate attorneys
first thing in the morning. No one could make sense of
what had happened. Regardless, the first order of
business was to hire an attorney. Well, not exactly an
attorney—separate law firms to represent both the
company and the board of directors, and a criminal
attorney for everyone whose name was on the list. I
could see that the corporate attorneys were taking this
very ser iously. They explaine d that it didn’t matter if you
were as clean as a whistle; a raid of this magnitude
foreshadowed major problems, and everyone needed
legal representation. That meant at least twenty
attorneys. I soon found out e ven that wasn’t going to be
enough. The investigation was coming out of the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Charleston, South Carolina, so it was
suggested that the senior executives also line up
attorneys licensed to practice there. So now we were
talking about hiring thirty to forty attorneys, plus two
firms fo r the company. If I hadn’t been stunned by the
raid, I was certainly going to be stunned by what it meant
to defend yourself against it. I couldn’t relate to suddenly being thrust into this
situation. I knew absolutely nothing about criminal
matters; I had never even thought about the subject. This
made m e very naive about the  inherent danger I could be
facing. If I had been left on my own, I probably would
have figured that since I didn’t do anything, I should just
go i n and talk  to the gover nment. Fortunately, I was
surrounded by  savvy businesspeople who knew that you
don’t do  anyth ing until you c onsult an attorney and find
out what’s going on. I certa inly learned the wisdom of
that advice as events unfolded. Over the next few weeks, WebMD’s board hired
Williams and Connolly to represent the company. This
firm wa s not the largest in Washington, but it had thereputation of being one of the best for this sort of case. I
asked Jim Mercer, since he w as the attorney I respected
the most, to h elp me select m y attorney. I was a novice
and he was an  expert. I really appreciated all the help
and support I got from him. Jim steered me to an
attorney at Williams and Connolly who gave me a list of
highly r espected criminal lawyers whom he had worked
with in the pa st. It seemed like such a big decision. I
wouldn’t have any idea how to interview a top-notch
criminal attorney. I followed Jim’s advice and started to
set up preliminary meetings with some of the attorneys—
but in my heart, I knew I was going to leave this decision
up to the flow of life. As i t turned ou t, events unfolded such that I met with
only one attorney, Randy Turk. Randy was a senior
partner with Baker Botts, one  of the country’s oldest and
most re spected law firms. His résumé read like a Who’s
Who in the white-collar criminal defense world. It ran
from su ccessfully defending Hughes Aircraft Company
against a $400 million claim by the U.S. government
regarding repair of the Hubble space telescope, to being
one of the key  lawyers on th e defense team for Michael
K. D eaver, Reagan White Hou se deputy chief of staff, at a
trial of allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice. The list went on and on. Of all the info rmation I could gather about Randy, it
was something  the attorney at Williams and Connolly
said tha t influenced me the most. He had heard that I
had a ponytail and lived in the woods. He told me that of
all t he top def ense attorney s he knew, Randy was the
most avant-garde. The attorney felt that based on what
he had heard about me, Randy and I would get along
great. I met Randy for the first time in New York. He flew in
for the WebMD shareholder meeting to meet with me
and Jim Mercer, who was hel ping me select my attorney. I was immediately comfortable with Randy. He had beendefending peo ple against government charges for more
than thirty years. He practiced in Washington and was
obviously very successful. Ra ndy seemed to be intrigued
by the case an d my unique background. He had learned
what he could from his contact at Williams and Connolly,
and Jim and I proceeded to tell him what we knew. WebMD had gotten a much b etter idea of the focus of
the government’s investigation by the time Randy and I
met. As we had  suspected, Bobby Davids was behind all
of this. After the company had successfully subpoenaed
his hidden bank accounts in early 2003, Bobby knew he
was caught. It was just a matter of time before we
realized that he had stolen a lmost six million dollars in
kickbacks and embezzlement schemes. He was going to
prison for a ve ry long time. But Bobby was a con man,
and app arently a very good o ne. He had certainly conned
us for years while managing to carry out his fraud
undetected. In March 2003, Bobby Davids embarked on
the con  of his life—how to avoid punishment for what he
had done. He walked into th e U.S. Attorney’s Office in
Charleston, So uth Carolina, near where he lived, and
presented himself as a whistle-blower. He told the
federal authorities that he was an executive who had
been involved in massive accounting fraud at a public
company. He admitted that a s part of this fraud he had
taken kickbacks for himself and a few others, but he was
prepared to turn in the entire upper management team if
the government was prepared to cut him a deal. For the next si x months leading up to the raid, while
WebMD attor neys were openly investigating all that
Davids and his group had done, Bobby Davids was
secretly hand-f eeding the government an intricate web of
lies. Davids was, in fact, a CPA in charge of the entire
dealer acquisition program. As such, he had detailed
knowledge of every acquisition and every supporting
document. Davids was com pletely free to create the
entire frame of reference for the government about thecompany and its executives. With the skill of a Picasso,
he was painting a masterpie ce on the blank canvas of
people’s minds. All he had to do was be sure he told the
story in  a way that would later be supportable by the
documents they would find. He knew there was not
going to be any hard evide nce found to support his
“world accordi ng to Bobby.” But if he says that he was
told to do a dea l in a certain way, and he could later show
that, indeed, the deal was done that way—that would
support his story. The prob lem is that it would not
support the “he was told” part. But if he tells the
government in vestigators what they’re going to find, and
they keep finding it, that wou ld lend credence to the rest
of his story. Eventually, he would earn their confidence. If know ledge is power, then Bobby Davids had all the
power. In that early interaction with  the government, he
was the one with all the knowledge. Randy explained that this was not an unusual
situation. The government fo rms a view and then tries to
find evidence to support that  view. That is what the FBI
was currently doing with the mass of documents taken
during the raid. Randy said t he problem with that many
documents is that you can always find a way to make
them sa y what  you want. On  that ominous note, Randy
agreed to defend me to the best of his ability, and we
shook h ands. I  could never h ave known the odyssey we
were about to embark on t ogether. Nor could I have
known how close our friendship would become. All I
knew at  the time was that the same flow of life’s events
that had led me into this mess had just led me to my lead
attorney. Following this flow was my great experiment,
and there was no turning back now.5 2 . U n i t e d  S t a t e s  o f  A m e r i c a  v . M i c h a e l  A . S i n g e r
F our months had passed since the raid, and we still knew
very litt le about what was go ing on. I continued to feel
confident that as the government investigators worked
their wa y throu gh the documents and interviewed people
in the compan y, they would realize that Bobby and his
group w ere the  only ones who  had done anything wrong. The hea dlines had stopped, and everything was relatively
back to  normal in our daily lives. Randy came down to
Alachua once or twice, as did a few members of his team. Since we didn’t know what case the government was
trying to build, and they ha d taken all the documents
from 1997 through 2003, there was not much legal work
we coul d be doing. The only thing the executives could
do w as start getting our attor neys up to speed regarding
our business and personal histories. Randy selected a South Carolina attorney for me, John
Simmons, and shortly thereafter John came down to see
me. I was very impressed with him. John had been the
U.S. attorney for South Carolina in the past and was now
in priva te practice. As we spe nt the day together, and he
saw what I had  built over the years with the business and
the Tem ple, he grew more and more dismayed at what
was going on. H e told me he knew the prosecutor leading
the investigation, and she was a fine, intelligent woman. Like ev eryone else involved, John wondered how Bobby
had managed to pull her into his world. Randy told me that these large, white-collar
investigations were measured in years, not months. Hesaid there wasn’t much for us to do until the government
investigators h ad worked through what they had seized
and were prepared to discuss their case. He did say that
we could contact the prosecutor to inquire about my
status o n the list. I was shock ed to learn I was one of the
chief targets of the investigation. This did not surprise
Randy. The government was head-hunting, and because
I ha d been the  CEO, that pu t me on the top of the list. Regardless, I continued to believe that since they weren’t
going to  find anything, I had  nothing to worry about. I
believed that in the end, truth would triumph. In the meantime, the company moved forward
aggressively w ith its defense. A firm was hired to finish
off the internal investigation of Bobby’s kickback
schemes. Just because he had somehow managed to get
the government on his side didn’t mean that he hadn’t
stolen from the company. In addition, the company set
out to show th at it was not true that there was rampant
accounting fraud going on in the company. The board
hired a forensic accounting firm to perform a detailed
audit of revenue and earnings of the Medical Manager
Practice Servic es Division for the entire year of 2001. As
a public company, it was very important to protect
WebMD from getting pulled into this mess. Fortunately,
they were successful. As part of isolating the company from the investigation
of the individual Medical Manager executives, in July
2004, I stepped down as CEO of the division. Later that
year, as  the investigation heated up, I also stepped down
from WebMD’ s board of directors. I saw this as another
act of surrender of the perso nal in order to serve what
life was doing. I just relaxe d and let go of whatever
resistance cam e up inside of me. That is how I had been
handling this entire ordeal, and it made that period of
my life  a profound and powerful part of my spiritual
journey.January 2005 brought the next major step in the
process. The government accepted plea agreements from
Bobby Davids and two of his collaborators in the
kickback schemes. These people agreed to pay
restitutions to the company, and Bobby agreed to serve a
year and a day  in prison. Not bad, considering when it
was all said a nd done he admitted to stealing $5.4
million in fifty-three kickbac k schemes over a five-year
period. The only charge Bobby Davids and the others
faced was one count of mail fraud. The rest of us were pretty much beside ourselves. It
didn’t b ode we ll for us that the government was willing
to l et these pe ople off so lightly in exchange for their
testimony against us. We had also found that Bobby had
been ha ving a n affair with a  woman in the accounting
department. She was a CPA and the comptroller for the
dealer acquisitions program. To a large part, it was her
cooperation that allowed Bobby to get his schemes past
accounting, the auditors, and the executives. Yet she was
not charged at all. It was at that point that I started to
realize just how much the cards were stacked against us. The gov ernment was letting admittedly guilty people go
in order to get  their testimony. These people were just
pointing up the ladder to get the spotlight off themselves. Regardless, the story in the papers read that some
Medical Manag er executives had pleaded guilty to being
involved in accounting fraud, and more people were
likely to be charged. The whole thing was a PR nightmare
for WebMD and the Medical Manager Practice Services
Division. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was
hurt the  comp any. After twenty-five years of committed
service, it was time to resign. On February 9, 2005, I sent
my resignation letter to WebMD’s CEO. It may well be
the only resignation letter written under these
circumstances that was ever signed, “With great love and
respect.” I meant every word of it.I w as amazed that after all th ose years my inner state
was not affected by leaving the company. I woke up the
next morning, went to the T emple as I always did, then
walked up to the old Personalized Programming office
building on Temple grounds. That building had been
converted into  a house, but no one was living there. My
old office had been used as a study, and it still had the
same d esk and furniture as fifteen years earlier. I found
that I was just  as comfortable with this office as I was
with th e executive suite down the road. In fact, I was
more c omfortable. I had always liked simplicity; that’s
why I had moved out to the woods in the first place. Sitting quietly in that office, I could see that this terrible
situation was bringing about amazing changes—both
inside and out. Life had alw ays done that to me, and
accepting those changes was my great experiment. I
knew that this attack by the government was no
exception. I just had to be willing to go wherever it took
me. In t he meantime, I had been  given the space to begin
writing the books I always knew I was going to write. There were two of them: The first would impart what I
had learned since first noticing my mental voice talking
while I was sit ting on that c ouch so many years ago. It
would b e a journey back to th e seat of Self that could be
taken b y anyone in the world. It was to be called The
Untethered Soul. The second book would be the stories
of th e m iraculous flow of events that happened over the
years as  I let g o and let life unfold naturally. It would be
called The Surrender Experiment. I couldn’t start that
book yet, because I had no idea how this latest chapter
would play out. So in the midst of all this change and
uncertainty, I began working on The Untethered Soul. Karen E ntner had lived at the Temple for more than
fifteen years. She had grown into a management position
at M edical Manager where  she was a phenomenally
productive em ployee. As head of the documentation andcomputer-based training departments, she had been
writing under my supervision for years. Shortly after I
left the company, she expressed an interest in helping
with my book. So now I ha d a book to write and the
perfect person to assist with the process. The Temple, the
book, and periodic conversa tions with Randy and his
team kept me plenty busy for the rest of the year. By November 2005, a full two years after the raid,
Randy was hearing that an indictment was imminent. He
and some of the other attorneys demanded to see
evidence tying their clients to a crime. The result was
that Randy sent me a one-inch-thick stack of documents
that the government intend ed to use to prove I was
behind Bobby’s activities. I w as very inte rested in getting to study this material,
yet a t the same time I was som ewhat apprehensive. After
only a few ho urs, I was flabbergasted. I did not see
anything in these documents that incriminated me. There were some accounting reports on a few
acquisitions Bobby had done , but most of the rest were
handwritten no tes my assistant, Sandy, had taken during
our twice weekly executive calls. On these notes, the FBI
had circled pretty much every reference to any
discussions we  had about meeting our quarterly revenue
and earnings projections. San dy had scribbled my name
next to some o f the comments or suggestions. That was
about it. I w as both relieved and concerned. I was
relieved because, as I suspected, they didn’t find
anything indicating I had done anything wrong. I felt
concerned because they were obviously considering these
circled documents as evidence against me. I didn’t know
what to think, so I called Randy. Randy told me that everyone who had looked at the
documents had the same reaction—there was nothing in
them that tied me to any wrongdoing. Randy explained
that it didn’t m atter. Bobby had said that the accounting
fraud h e had been involved in was for the purpose ofmeeting Wall Street’s numbers. These documents would
be used to show motive. The government prosecutors
would argue that since I wanted to meet Wall Street’s
expectations, I  allowed Bobby to do things improperly. Motive was one of the pieces the government needed in
order to  try to build a case against me. But this wasn’t
just hap pening to me. Randy told me that every one of
the other executives, and their attorneys, had the same
reaction to the materials they were given. Just one month later, on December 19, 2005, Randy
received notification from the U.S. Marshals Office in
Columbia, South Carolina, th at a federal indictment had
been is sued—I was under arrest. Along with nine other
prior ex ecutives of Medical Manager Corporation, I was
to turn  myse lf in to the federal authorities at an
arraignment o n December 28 in Charleston, South
Carolina. The summons read:
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. MICHAEL
A. SINGER5 3 . P r e p a r i n g  a  D e f e n s e
I  thought I pretty much understood what I was up
against until I saw the indict ment. In all honesty, it was
about the furthest thing from  the truth that I had ever
seen in my life . I knew that Bobby had implicated us by
telling the government that we were aware of everything
he h ad done w rong. In the eyes of the law, that would
have made us co-conspirato rs. But the indictment did
not eve n include Bobby Davids’s name. It listed all the
things he claimed to have done improperly and stated
that the  execu tives did these things—or more precisely,
“caused them to happen.” We were all facing conspiracy
charges that could result in up to fifteen years in prison. I was floored when I first read the indictment. Randy
was not. It was  just about what he had expected based on
his thirty years of experience. The indictment
represented th e governmen t’s story in the strongest
possible language to justify the charges. Truth, on the
other hand, could hopefully e merge from the fires of the
trial. So far there had been absolutely no pushback
against Bobby’s view of the world. We had, in fact, not
yet begun to fight. I met Randy and my South Carolina attorney, John
Simmons, in Charleston for the arraignment. All ten of
the indicted Medical Manager executives were there,
along with more than twenty of our attorneys. Joining
me were John Kang, John Sessions, Rick Karl, David
Ward, two regional vice presidents, the chief financial
officer, an accounting comptroller, and the attorney who
had worked on the dealer acquisition program. It wasquite a circus. Before the cour t proceedings, we a ll h ad to
get boo ked and fingerprinted by the FBI. Needless to say,
that was a first-time experience for all of us. When we were finally brought together outside the
courtroom, it was the first time many of us had seen each
other for years. We had built a successful company
together and there was still real friendship and
camaraderie be tween us. The attorneys preferred that we
not speak to o ne another, but that just wasn’t going to
happen. The scene turned into a reunion with warm
handshakes an d hugs. Each of us knew in our hearts that
we had not done the things we were being accused of. Perhaps the sense of a common enemy brought us even
closer together. All I know is that by the time the
prosecutor showed up, it looked more like a social
gathering than an arraignment. I r eally  wanted  to meet the prosecutor. I didn’t hold
anything against her. In fact, I felt a strange kinship with
her because we both had be en duped by the same con
artist—Bobby Davids. The difference being that I knew it
and she didn’t. Against Ran dy’s better judgment, but
with his permission, I introduced myself to her. She
shook m y hand , but it was very clear that she didn’t like
me very  much. It was the first time we had ever met, but
she had  already built a Mickey Singer inside her head
who I’m sure I’d rather not meet. The pr oceedings progressed smoothly except that
instead of one defendant a nd his attorney standing
before the judge, we had to  squeeze in ten defendants
and twenty attorneys. The c ourtroom was quite small,
and the  public seating area was completely filled with the
remainder of our legal team s. The room was so packed
that the  jury box was being used to hold ten to twelve
inmates in orange jumpsuits who were waiting their turn
to se e th e judge . I was standin g right next to the jury box,
and these inmates reminded me of my group back in
prison. I allowed myself to think that the way things weregoing—that could be me someday. I knew if I was going
to be at peace throughout thi s ordeal, I would have to be
comfortable with that though t. I just let go and relaxed
into the moment. I was standing in a South Carolina
courtroom being arraigned, but I was overcome with love
for those inmates sitting next to me. Randy had to nudge
me to stand up straight and pay attention to the
proceedings. A ll I knew was that I was on the journey of
my life and just look where it had taken me. The judge released us on our own recognizance
without the need to post ba il. Though we were free to
leave, I lingered in that co urtroom for a while and
wondered what it had in sto re for me. These were very
unique moments in one’s life—best not to miss them. I sp ent time with some of the executives afterward. I
hadn’t seen Rick Karl for many years, but that hadn’t
affected our close friendship. He told me he had been
nominated for a federal judgeship in Florida. Indications
were that he would have received the appointment, but
he had to pull his name the  moment he heard he had
been indicted. Likewise, John Kang was preparing to
step do wn as chairman and CEO of the public company
he and his brother had started. Everyone was putting
their best face forward, but this situation was altering
people’s lives. Aside from these executives and their families, the
front-page pub licity from the indictment had affected
some o ther p eople very dear to me. I had already
received a call from the warden at Union Correctional
Institution saying that until this situation was resolved,
he h ad no choi ce but to revoke my authorization to meet
with my Saturday morning group. After thirty years of
committing myself to perhaps the most important thing I
had don e in my life, my priso n work was over. A wave of
darkness was falling over everything that had been the
source of so much light. It was all completely out of my
control. I was determined to sit peacefully deep insideand see  if it could pass by without affecting my inner
state. It was li ke the early da ys when I had first started
my experiment of letting go in the face of perceived
danger. The big difference no w was that this danger was
way bey ond an ything I could have ever imagined. It was
the perfect storm. Meanwhile, it had been over two years since the raid. The government was require d by law to disclose all the
materials investigators had seized. Yet by the time of the
arraignment, we still had no documents with which to
prepare a defense. That evening, the entire joint defense
group g ot toge ther at a hote l. I really enjoyed watching
all the attorneys interact. Randy ha d taken the lead in
putting togeth er a joint defe nse agreement that would
allow us to share materials. But in the end, each attorney
was responsible for their own client’s best interest. Surrounded by a roomful of criminal defense attorneys, I
realized that I was in an amazing situation. I was about
to embark on a very perso nal tour of the American
justice system. I knew I had never even thought of doing
the things I was accused of. But how was this going to
turn out? Would our great system of justice work? A month later we began to receive the first wave of
disclosure materials. We gained access to the 1.2 million
e-mail messag es taken during the raid as well as the
notes fr om some of the FBI interviews. It would be five
more m onths before we had a ny access to the millions of
pages o f paper documents that had been seized, not to
mention the hundreds of thousands of computer files
that had been copied during the raid. The government
had almost three years to rev iew all this material; it was
going to take the defense years to work through it. Once the disclosure materials began arriving, Randy
and the Baker Botts team k ept giving me tasks to do:
review these tens of thous ands of e-mail messages;
review all six years of notes from the executive meetings;
review all my written responses to years of nightly take-home work. I would periodic ally go up to D.C. to work
with th e team on specific items. There were always four
or five attorne ys from Baker Botts working on the case
on m y behalf. All the other executives’ attorneys also had
dedicated teams, though not always as large. The further
we g ot i nto the  material, the m ore obvious it became—no
one except Bobby and his group had done anything
wrong. There were no e-ma il messages or documents
that sho wed an y executive instructing, or even implying,
that accountin g should be done improperly. We had
thirty to forty o f our attorneys buried in these documents
solely to find anything tha t could tie us to Bobby’s
misdeeds. No one found any hard evidence against any
of the defendants. Unfortunately, since we had worked
with Bobby Davids on a regular basis, there would
always be circumstantial evidence that could be exploited
to mean whatever you wanted it to mean. This was the backdrop under which I wrote The
Untethered Soul. T o the core of my being, I wanted to
communicate to others tha t they were deep inside
listening to that voice’s incessant chatter, and there was a
way the y could  be free. That was the work of my life—not
this abs urd leg al mess. I didn ’t care how threatening this
nontruth had become—I wanted to share a deep truth
that would brighten the lives of others. I committed
myself to the b ook. Karen and I had finished writing by
late 200 6, but we were still doing editing passes. I sent
an early draft to Randy because I wanted to get his
feedback. I also needed my attorney’s permission to do
just abo ut anything that might affect the case. Randy was
very concerned that the government prosecutors would
find a way to use the book against me, as they had been
doing with everything else. I told him that I was willing
to ta ke that ris k. Especially since we had no idea where
the cas e would end up, I  needed to get the book
published as soon as possible. Having discussed the
risks, Randy left the decision to me.Getting The Untethered Soul  pub lished came together
very qu ickly. I had given an e arly draft to James O’Dea, a
dear friend of mine who wa s on the Temple’s board of
trustees. As the perfection o f life would have it, James
was the director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences
(IONS) at the time, and th ey had just signed a co-
publishing arrangement with New Harbinger
Publications, the country’s foremost psychology book
publisher. They all read the b ook and loved it. Given how
everything else  in my life was being pulled toward the
abyss, it amazed me to se e these energies flow so
smoothly. The Untethered Soul  was launched in September
2007. I bypassed the cus tomary promotional book
signing tour and declined all interviews. I knew it was an
author’s respon sibility to promote their book, especially
during the launch, so I infor med New Harbinger that I
would h andle the publicity by way of the Internet. Karen
and I devised a marketing strategy, and without leaving
the woo ds of Alachua, we poured time and money into
promoting the book. The resu lts were phenomenal. New
Harbinger’s first press run of The Untethered Soul  was
supposed to last a year—we ran out of books in just three
months. The book has continued to s ell very well on its
own after the launch, including internationally. In the
midst of that intensely dark p eriod, the book managed to
manifest, sprout wings, and soar off around the globe. The feedback from everywhere was overwhelming. The
Untethered Soul  was fulfillin g its purpose—it was
helping people. In the midst of phenomenal darkness, it
was spreading light.3
3  Publisher’s note: In November 2012, The Untethered Soul  became a
number one New York Times  bestseller.5 4 . T h e  C o n s t i t u t i o n  a n d  t h e  B i l l  o f  R i g h t s
T he legal battle was definitely  getting more interesting. Once w e had access to the dis closure materials, we could
prepare a defense. The first t hing Randy and the defense
team did was ask the judge to force the government to
cut the scope o f the materials down to size. They couldn’t
just hand us millions and millions of e-mail messages,
documents, and computer files, as well as years of
accounting entries, and then say somewhere in there is
what yo u did wrong. If we we re going to have a chance of
defending ourselves, the claim s of wrongdoing needed to
be m ore specific. In legal terms, this is called requesting
a “b ill of particulars.” The go vernment fought it, but the
judge issued an order forc ing prosecutors to specify
exactly which dealer acquisitions and which accounting
entries they were going to present at trial. In all these yea rs of seeing the truth manipulated until
it became unrecognizable, th is was the first time I saw
that w e had some say i n the matter. The U.S.
Department of  Justice is one of the most powerful forces
in the world. But it is not all-powerful. The judge had the
right to  overru le the DOJ. I  reminded myself that this
was not the c ase in lots of other countries. If those
governments were convinced that you did something
wrong, it was pretty much over. As long as I had to go
through this ordeal, I wanted to learn all that I could
about o ur lega l system. I ask ed Randy what exactly gave
us t he right to  make this demand of the government. I
really l oved his answer—th e Constitution. The Sixth
Amendment sa ys, “The accused shall enjoy the right…to
be informed of the nature an d cause of the accusations.”Supreme Cou rt rulings through the years have
interpreted this right to mean that if the disclosure
materials presented to you are too broad in scope, you
have the right to demand a bill of particulars. I didn’t  tell Randy at the time, but that moved me to
the core of my  being. For three years I had been sitting
quietly deep inside myself watching the powers that be
take Bobby’s lies and turn them into a seemingly
unstoppable force of destruction. Suddenly, I was
reminded that people I’d never met had possessed the
caring and foresight to make sure I had rights. If it was
going to be the United States  of America versus Michael
A. S inger, I ha d some very great people in my corner—
Thomas Jeffer son, George Mason, and James Madison,
to n ame just a  few. Over the next few years, it would
become painfu lly obvious to me that only a single piece
of paper stood between me  and the dark abyss. That
piece of paper was the U.S. Constitution. I went back and read the Constitution, beginning to
end. From the perspective of my predicament, it was so
evident that the Founding Fathers were not only creating
a go vernment,  they were pro tecting the people from it. I
had always known this intellectually, but now it was
personal, very personal. This was not a civics course—it
was my life. Un der these circumstances the Constitution
really came alive for me. Throughout 2007, the joint defense group worked on
finding all relevant documen ts regarding the items the
government ha d listed on th e bill of particulars. I went
up to Washington a few da ys each month for review
meetings and also had regular conference calls with the
legal team at Baker Botts. Ra ndy was present for almost
all t he meetings, and his par tner, Casey Cooper, and the
associate attor neys handled  much of the day-to-day
work. Each associate  had been assigned a share of the dealer
acquisitions to thoroughly reconstruct, and we wouldreview each of these transactions in painstaking detail. It
was like having a jackhamm er taken to my ego. I had
built an d run a beautiful company. We had a great
product, great employees, and great clients, and we had
been very successful. But underneath the dealer
acquisition program, there was filth. It was like looking
into a cessp ool. Bobby had been stealing, lying,
manipulating, and controlling everything in his world—
including me and the rest of  the executives. It took my
breath away to see what he h ad done. Behind it all was
the realization that these meetings were not about what
Bobby had done; they were about the fact that he had
managed to find a way to make us criminally responsible
for what he had done. It was like being in the Twilight
Zone. All I could do was keep letting go at the deepest
possible level. My mantra was: This Is Reality—Deal with
It. I just took the attitude that on my journey through
life, I was now  part of this excellent legal team that had
been pulled together to defen d this poor sap, Singer, who
had bee n framed by the evil  villain. I took a breath, let
go, and contributed positively to the topic being
discussed. We we re definitely maki ng headway. We had
discovered that the disk drive the government gave us
that held data from people’s personal computer files had
been indexed improperly by the FBI. For some reason
the agents had only index ed the files by the short
description header they had assigned to each file. The
contents of the files had not been indexed for search
purposes. This severely limited the search results of this
important sou rce of data. The defense team had a full
indexing done, and we were finding lots of interesting
historical documents. We found early drafts of
documents and letters that directly contradicted some of
the lie s Bobby had told. Little by little we were
unraveling the convoluted mess he had created.Judge Blatt was our judge, an d Randy was doing really
well with him. We were having regular pretrial hearings,
and Judge Blatt was approving many, but not all, of our
motions. Rand y found him to be very fair in his rulings
and felt that t he judge was beginning to get a sense of
how far  the government had stretched its case. It had
been m ore than four years since the raid, and things
were finally beginning to look up. I couldn’t have felt
more confiden t in Randy as my lead attorney and as the
leading figure in the joint defense group. Things began to unravel in 2008. Randy informed me
on February 7 that he had gon e in for a checkup, and
they had found a tumor. I t was cancerous and they
wanted to operate immediately. They ripped open his
chest and cut out the tumor. In the midst of the battle,
the general was down. It only took three or four weeks for Randy to be back
on his feet lead ing the charge. But there was a lingering
issue. T he doctors said there was a good chance that the
tumor could return, and he should consider
chemotherapy. He decided to wait and see, hoping for
the best . In the meantime, it was back to work. That was
a good thing because the government had been
petitioning the  judge to finally set a trial date. We had
been te lling the  judge that du e to the sheer volume of the
disclosure materials, we were nowhere near ready. But in
June 2008 the judge gave us  our trial date—February 2,
2009, just seven months away. We had so much work
left to do; it really was g oing to take an army of
attorneys. Halfway to the trial date, Randy’s cancer returned. This time he was going to need eight weeks of very
intense chemo therapy and an indeterminate recovery
period. I remembered back to when Jim Mercer was
advising me about choosing an attorney.
The-Surrender-Experiment-by-Michael-a-Singer.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        It was
all pretty much a disaster, and the only hope left was to
do the hard work necessary to restructure the entire
company. The task was Herculean. WebMD was the
quintessential Internet company, and the Internet
bubble had just burst. WebMD’s stock had once traded
above $100 per share. It was  at $17. 50 when we closed
the dea l, on its way to a low of $3 in August 2001. This
called for drastic measures, and that is what it got. Within a month of closing, Marty became chairman of
the board, and he and his elite management team were
running the company. I remained CEO of the Practice
Services Division and sat on t he board of directors of the
combined company, which kept the name WebMD. Marty brought  in a seasoned turnaround specialist, Marv
Rich, to be president during the massive reorganization. The company was losing hundreds of millions of dollars
a ye ar and the  bleeding had to be stopped. Marv’s job
was to work his way through all the divisions and cut
them down to core competency. All that would remain
was that which aligned with WebMD’s core vision and
could quickly begin earning its keep. The task before us was breathtaking, and it provided
tremendous growth for me, personally. I now found
myself part of a team of executives who, instead of
complaining, s imply rolled up their sleeves and tackled
this mo numental project. Eve ryone was working day and
night to do w hatever was needed to right the sinking
ship. For years I had been diligently working to free
myself o f that weak person inside who always insisted on
things b eing the way he wanted. Now, nothing was the
way anybody would have wanted. Yet everyone just took
a collec tive de ep breath and did whatever was asked ofthem. It was an amazing thing to be part of, and it taught
me a lesson of inner strength that permanently changed
me at a very deep level. Marv called me one day and  asked me to accompany
him to California where the WebMD Internet site was
being developed. If the company we had merged with
had a main asset, this was it. Marv wanted me to a ct as a
development s pecialist at meetings with the website’s
development team. Most of the company’s losses were
being generated by its Internet offerings, and this had to
be dealt with. The problem w as that, despite the losses,
the dev elopment team was making enormous demands
for salaries and benefits from the new WebMD
management. They figured they were in the driver’s seat
since th ey con trolled the development of the company’s
entire Internet offering. I couldn’t believe what I saw when we arrived. More
than eight hundred developers were working in a giant
converted warehouse in Silicon Valley. It was tiny cubicle
after tin y cubic le as far as the eye could see. I thought my
development team in Alachua had expanded
tremendously. We were aro und 250 people, but this
development team was over three times that size, and
everyone was packed in like sardines. Unfortunately, the meetings didn’t last very long. Marv
and I sat with their senior management team and
listened to their demands. They had the demands nicely
printed out in great detail on many pages. When they
were done, Marv presented what he was willing to offer,
which f it on one short page. The heads of development
met among themselves and after a very short period of
time came back to Marv with their reply—meet our
demands or we’re leaving. I had so much  to learn from  people like Marty and
Marv, and I was completely open to the process. I would
have thought that the next step was to figure out who we
couldn’t live without and bite the bullet. That is not whathappened. Marv spent a few minutes relaxing quietly, got
up from his chair, and motioned me to walk with him. He left the me eting room and called together the entire
development team right then and there in the open
cubicle area. He explained that the top tier of their
management had just resigned and anyone who wanted
to g o with them  should make that decision at this time. Those w ho wished to stay wo uld not be guaranteed a job,
but ove r the next few weeks we would work together to
see who was needed to keep the core development going. And tha t was that. Marv left a  few of his people in charge
of sorting out the exodus, and we left. The onl y thing Marv ever sa id to me about the whole
affair was that if you let peo ple hold you hostage, they
will for ce you to make terrible decisions, and you will
lose. You might as well take y our bumps up front and at
least be in control of your destiny. Who would have
believed that just a few mo nths later, one of Marty’s
senior executives would move the development of the
website to New York and relaunch it with a team of less
than fo rty developers. That new website became the
foundation for WebMD’s entire future. Again and again I was seeing that each of these
intensely chal lenging business experiences was very
beneficial for my spiritual gro wth. I just kept letting go of
whatever disc omfort got stirred up within me, and
inevitably, a stronger flow of spiritual energy took its
place. This growing strength helped prepare me for life’s
next growth experience: what happened when Marv’s
reorganization team finally got around to taking aim at
my division. Medical Mana ger Practice Services Division, as we
were known at the time, was  one of the largest divisions
in WebMD. We had grown to almost two thousand
employees, and that made us very ripe for cost cutting. With that in mind, Marv brought the reorganization
team do wn to Alachua for two  days of meetings. The firstday was devoted to presenting our business plan and
vision for the future. Fortunately, we were well prepared
to take Marv through our current products with their
highly successful revenue generation, as well as the
products and services we were working on for the future. It certa inly didn’t hurt when Sabrina was able to present
the tremendous growth of Medical Manager Network
Services from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to a
fifty-million-dollar-a-year business in just over three
years. It was during these presentations that it really hit me
what had happened. John Ka ng and I had set out to be
sure that Medical Manager was not left behind by the
enormous potential of Internet companies like
Healtheon and  WebMD. At th e same time, Sabrina and I
had bee n strug gling to find a  way to get Envoy, or some
other cl earinghouse, to evolve  enough to be able to fulfill
our vision for Network Services. Despite all the negative
issues we were facing, the am azing reality was that when
the smo ke had cleared, we en ded up owning all three of
these compani es—WebMD, Healtheon, and Envoy. Just
a short time ag o, no one cou ld have even imagined how
such a thing c ould ever take place. It was like so much
else I had experienced; the unimaginable had actually
happened. The presentations to Marv and his team went very
well. There was palpable excitement in the room
throughout the day. Nonethe less, when I returned later
that evening, I was shocked t o see what had happened to
the meeting room. Stretched around the walls of the
room w ere com puter printou ts with the names of all the
Medical Manager Practice Services Division’s two
thousand employees. Hanging like wallpaper, they
foreshadowed the day plan ned for tomorrow: every
name o n the list would need to be justified. I was aghast,
especially since we had recently requested additional
employees to keep up with our growth. Returning home that evenin g, I was very concerned
about the fate of my employees. Tomorrow could turn
out to be a very ugly day. At the same time, I knew that
Marv h ad to cut costs, and it  was my job as a corporate
executive to help him. This could have created a lot of
inner t ension, but I decided to just surrender to the
reality of the s ituation and be open to balancing these
two areas of co ncern. I came to peace that night knowing
my hea rt was in the right place, and when tomorrow
came, I would do the best I could. The next morning when I e ntered the room, I was
again shocked  by what I saw. The printouts had been
taken down, and the walls were back to normal. Before I
could inquire what was going on, Marv’s second in
command walk ed me out to the hall. He told me that he
and Marv had met last night,  and the decision was made
to s kip the “bloodletting” and allow us to continue the
fine work we were doing. He told me they were very
impressed with  what we had achieved and with our plans
for t he future. As they saw no  need for the second day of
meetings, Mar v had taken an  early flight out. His team
packed up, shook our hands, and went on their way. I
have no  idea to this day if the rest of my management
team ever saw the ominous sight of those wallpapered
walls. I realized just how extraord inary these events were
when a few hours later I rece ived a call from the head of
HR at corporate headquarters in New Jersey. He was
completely beside himself. He playfully asked me what I
had us ed to drug Marv wh ile he was down here in
Alachua. He went on to say th at he doubted that such an
event had ever taken place in the annals of corporate
history. We were all well aware that Marv’s purpose in
life was to cut costs. That he w ould come down here with
that int ention, and simply walk away, is a tribute to both
the quality of our division a nd to Marv as a manager. Medical Manager and I received a number of tributes in2000, but none was more meaningful to me than
receiving such a vote of confidence from someone I
respected so much. 4 9. H a n g i n g  O u t  i n  W a s h i n g t o n
T he year  2000 not only ushere d in a new millennium, it
brought with it a flurry of rec ognition for the pinnacle of
success that The Medical Manager had achieved. To me,
who wa s just on the magic c arpet for the ride, it was all
simply a tribute to the perfection of life’s flow. I had not
sought any recognition; I had just thrown myself into
life’s wind to see where it would take me. I w as invited by one of our previous board members,
Ray Kurzweil, to join him at the White House in March
where he was to receive the National Medal of Honor in
Technology. Ray is credited with many major inventions,
including the first microchip that allowed an electronic
keyboard to sound like a g rand piano and other real
instruments. He is also considered one of the fathers of
speech recogn ition software. Ray had been on Medical
Manager Corporation’s board, and I had sat on Kurzweil
Education System’s board. Through it all we had become
good friends. He even stayed with us at the Temple a few
times and showed a serious interest in Eastern
philosophy. I would have to wear a tuxedo to the While
House, which was far from m y normal attire, but I was
excited about joining Ray for this honor. Like many others, I had been to the White House as a
tourist but certainly not as  a guest of the president. There was a cocktail party a fter the ceremony, and we
were al lowed t o walk freely t hroughout the rooms of the
first flo or residence. I gazed out a window in the Green
Room t hat ove rlooked the Washington Monument and
thought about how many presidents had taken in thatview. Getting used to actually sitting on the antique
furniture in those rooms was difficult enough, but then I
kept realizing that the people I was having conversations
with were all N ational Medal of Honor winners in some
field of science. President Clinton joined the mix, and I
even ran into S tevie Wonder  in the hallway. All in all, it
was one of tho se “what am I doing here” moments. I’m a
yogi w ho mo ved out to t he woods to meditate. I
surrendered to the flow of life, and I end up here—
unbelievable. That was not my only trip to Washington that year. The ve ry next month I came back to represent The
Medical Manager when it was installed into the archives
of t he Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian was
sponsoring an  effort to d ocument the Information
Technology Revolution for future generations. In much
the same way as we now look at the Industrial
Revolution, someday people will be fascinated by the
time pe riod in  which computers revolutionized how we
live. Each year a panel of CE Os of the world’s leading IT
companies did a search for organizations that had done
extraordinary work in the field. Because of our work in
the are a of electronic health -care transactions, Medical
Manager was one of the com panies selected in the year
2000 to  have its story preserved in a time capsule for the
future. There was a grand ban quet the night before and a
ceremony at the museum the  next day. I brought a few of
the old- time employees with me, as well as Donna and
Durga. Reflecting back twenty years to when I was sitting
in that  twelve-by-twelve-foot room in the woods by
myself writing this program, one could never have
imagined that it would lead to the Smithsonian. As i t turned out, I would have to return to DC once
again in August of 2000 on a  very important trip. I had
been asked to represent the company at a meeting with
the Department of Justice (DOJ). Before larger
companies can combine, the U. S. government reservesthe right to determine if the combination could stifle
competition and violate antitrust laws. In the case of the
Healtheon/WebMD–Medical Manager merger, the
government requested very detailed information and a
face-to-face meeting. The reason for this was that
Medical Manager Netw ork Services was sending so many
claims to Envoy that the g overnment was concerned
about allowing  us to become part of the same company. My immediate  reaction to this situation was one of deep
humility. Had  Medical Manager actually reached the
point o f success that the U.
Marty
Who was the chairman of the board at the time of the company's financial difficulties?
To cut costs and align the company with its core vision
What was the main goal of the reorganization process?
Randy Turk
Who was the attorney that the author was referred to by Jim Mercer?
The government seized 1.2 million e-mail messages, 1,500 boxes of files, and 830,000 computer files
What was the result of the FBI's raid on the company?
He chose to let go of any discomfort and anxiety, and instead focused on maintaining a peaceful state
What was the author's attitude towards the situation and his inner voice?