[This post is part of a series on Mentors and Heroes]

Harry Max is an independent management consultant and executive coach for a variety of startups and major brands. Previously he was a Principal Consultant at Rubicon Consulting. In 1994, he co-founded Virtual Vineyards (wine.com). Follow him on Twitter @harrymax.

Harry Max’s mentor is…

Brian “Fitz” Fitzgerald, Entrepreneur

How long have you known each other and how did you first meet?
I’ve known Fitz for about 10 years now. I met him through one of my Public Mind investors while he was still SVP of World Wide Operations for Intuit. Brian attended one of my board meetings as an observer. Afterward, he took me to a bar, bought a round of Macallan 25, pulled out his checkbook and invested in our early vision of demand aggregation, now more commonly known as “crowd sourcing.”

How would you describe how you relate to your mentor?
I’d have to characterize the relationship as complex. At times, I’m an apprentice. Other times, I’m a peer. Part of what works is that Brian doesn’t put people into boxes. And, even though some people might perceive him as an “old salt,” his amazing energy, commitment to bringing out the best in people, and supporting what they’re trying to accomplish shines through brightly.

How formal or structured is the mentorship? Does Brian know you consider him a mentor?
Fitz probably doesn’t realize that I consider him a mentor. I can imagine he thinks that we’re just friends who share a common philosophy about how visions get built, and how value gets created and exchanged.

What is one piece of advice your mentor gave you that has stuck with you the most?
Actually, there are two pieces of “advice” that continue to reverberate through my daily interactions. The first is that “Business *is* people.” On some level, I always knew that. But Brian’s words really brought it home to me. The other, as overly simplistic as it might sound is that business boils down to the following things: Making money, saving money, avoiding unnecessary costs, hiring and retaining excellent people, achieving business goals, take care of ALL your stakeholders, and (above all else) provide products and servcies of real and lasting value to customers.

What else do you want the world to know about your mentor?
Brian Fitzgerald is one of two or three people for whom I’d drop everything to follow into battle.

Thank you Harry for sharing your mentor with us!

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Sincere apologies for the last minute change. Unfortunately I will not be able to do Whit Hour tonight. Instead it will be tomorrow, Monday 8/31 from 9-10pm Eastern Time.

Same as always, join me at http://tinychat.com/whitney pw:whithour.

Sorry again! Hope to see you all tomorrow night.

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When I found out yesterday morning that Randy Pausch had passed away the night before, I felt a wave of regret pour over me. For the things I never said. Like: “Thank you for showing me that my purpose in life is to make other people’s lives better.” That would have been a good start.

Instead, we argued. A lot. Publicly, in the middle of a classroom with 100 students. I questioned his strong opinions and he pushed back. Quite honestly I couldn’t stand him. I just thought he was a tough professor that didn’t like being challenged. It was years later when I watched his Last Lecture and heard him say, “When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.” That’s when it finally clicked. I had been wrong. And he cared enough to let me know it.

The quick post that I wrote about Randy Pausch yesterday got a lot more attention than I ever expected — but really, I should have expected it, knowing what a monumental impact Pausch had on so many people’s lives.

The post ended up getting 3,500+ hits yesterday, mostly from people who had simply Googled “Randy Pausch.” (To give you a benchmark, my most-read post to date had 610 views.) The post received a few comments and people reached out through Twitter.

I received a LinkedIn request from a woman in Chicago who said:

I am an extreme admirer of Randy Pausch and am in so much pain today to find out he lost his cancer battle. I found your website via Google and would like very much to connect with you.

Then later in the day an e-mail with the subject “Randy Pausch” came in:

Whitney, I’m just a soul out in western Oklahoma who was deeply moved and touched by the energy and enthusiasm Randy Pausch had toward the life he had been given.

Since you have studied under him, do you know if Mr Pausch was a christian believing soul?

I pray I have not offended you in any way by my question.

What a privilege you were given to have had such a friend.

Thank you for your time

These e-mails show me that everyone out there is so wildly thirsty for human connection. Death somehow brings us closer together, makes us realize our own mortality and forces us to question our priorities. Dave Malouf summed it up: “Reminds me that ‘every interaction counts’ is about LIFE, not about Design.”

Yesterday afternoon, Carnegie Mellon’s President Jared Cohon sent out an e-mail to alumni. I want to share it with you so that you can begin to understand the impact Randy Pausch had on our community.

Dear Alumni:

It is with great sadness that I inform you that our dear friend and colleague Randy Pausch passed away today, July 25, after a brave struggle against pancreatic cancer.

Randy captured the minds and hearts of millions worldwide with his Carnegie Mellon lecture, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” and his book, “The Last Lecture.”

Randy, who earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon in 1988, returned to the university in 1997 as an associate professor of human-computer interaction and computer science. Along with Carnegie Mellon Professor Don Marinelli, Randy was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center, a leading interactive multimedia education and entertainment center.

At Carnegie Mellon, Randy was also the director of the Alice software project, a revolutionary way to teach computer programming. The interactive Alice program teaches computer programming by having kids make animated movies and games. A fitting legacy to Randy’s life and work, Alice may in the future help to reverse the dramatic drop in the number of students majoring in computer science at colleges and universities. Randy was also known as a pioneer in the development of virtual reality, and he created the popular Building Virtual Worlds class.

An award-winning teacher and researcher, Randy was also a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He used sabbatical leaves to work at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and he consulted with Google Inc. on user interface design. He is the author or co-author of five books and more than 70 articles.

Perhaps the greatest lesson, however, Randy taught us all was how to live, even in the face of great challenges, and how to follow our passion. While Randy’s greatest passion was clearly his family, he did not shy from sharing his passion for his work as a professor, for his students, and for Carnegie Mellon. We will miss Randy, but we will carry the memory of him and all that he did to make Carnegie Mellon a better university and each of us who knew him a better person.

A memorial service for Randy will be scheduled at a later date. For more information, visit www.cmu.edu.

Sincerely,

Jared L. Cohon
President, Carnegie Mellon University

Randy would be proud of the passion he has inspired in so many people; people from different walks of life, different ages, backgrounds, professions, political affiliations. His bravery created community and connection. What more could anyone hope for?

• Randy Pausch loses battle with pancreatic cancer at 47
• From the Archive: Interview with The Baltimore Sun
• Thanks is never enough
• Answering Your Questions
• Who is Dave Malouf’s hero?

For those of you who have never heard of Randy Pausch, he was a much admired professor at Carnegie Mellon (my alma mater), and became world-renowned for his “Last Lecture” delivered last September in which he emphatically discussed how to really achieve all of your childhood dreams (he did!).

Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in August, 2006; at the time, he and his wife had a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old and a 3-month-old baby. Pancreatic cancer has a 4% 5-year survival rate, and Randy lasted two years through sheer will and perseverance and willingness to try any treatment possible. He kept a blog detailing his health status. Its last entry was last night written by an anonymous friend saying that Randy had entered hospice. Less than an hour ago, Diane Sawyer announced on Good Morning America that Randy had passed away last night. He was 47 years old.

A few weeks ago, David Armano wrote a blog post titled, Disney’s $100,000 Salt + Pepper Shaker, in which he relates his notion of “micro-interactions” to a story about Disney World that Randy tells in his book, The Last Lecture, published in April of this year. The story is about the small things an individual at an organization can do to create an everlasting impression on the customer, to build trust and loyalty and affection. Read David’s post and then read Randy’s book. It will make you realize what’s really important in this life.

Hearing of Randy Pausch’s death this morning made my heart sink. I feel sick now and wish I had reached out to him to tell him how much of an impression he had made on my life. All I can do now is re-post the comment I left on David’s blog, offering up thanks to the universe for putting Randy Pausch in my path, for making me a stronger person, and for showing me what it means to stop at nothing to achieve your dreams.

Randy Pausch was one of my professors at CMU. He taught the most difficult course I took to receive my degree in Human-Computer Interaction. It was called Programming Usable Interfaces and was essentially about how to express your ideas through functional prototypes. The course materials introduced me to the most prominent thought-leaders in the field (Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, Jesse James Garrett, Steve Krug), and the assignments were unbelievably rigorous.

Randy insisted that any GUI developer or user experience designer (the course contained both types) worth his salt has to have the ability to prototype his ideas and the balls to test them with real people. And ultimately, the inner strength to admit he was wrong and make the design better.

You could say Randy is the opposite of a pushover; he often held a very hard line in class discussions. But despite all the times he and I clashed (in particular on the issue of whether AM/PM is a needed display in hotel alarm clocks: he matter-of-factly said no, I vehemently disagreed; years later I realized he was right), to this day I credit him — his perspective, his tenacity and his endless passion for uplifting the human experience — for making me the designer I am today.

He is going through what no human being ever deserves to experience, but he is owning it, reveling in the chance he’s been given to say goodbye, and making an everlasting impression on this earth. All of us should be so lucky.

Randy, rest in peace. You will be deeply missed.

Read more about Randy Pausch on his CMU webpage or on Wikipedia.

• The outpouring of love for Randy Pausch
• Who is Dave Malouf’s hero?
• Answering Your Questions
• New Year’s Resolutions for 2011
• Reader E-mail: “Follow your dreams while you can”