Innovation As Legacy

PBS has amazing programs!  We all really need to watch that channel more often!

In celebration of being on the air 30 years, PBS through its Nightly Business Report (NBR) program,  collaborated (one of my favorite words!) with the Wharton School of business at University of Pennsylvania and its Knowledge@Wharton website on innovation and entrepreneurship.  Their goal: to identify the 30 innovations that have changed life most dramatically during the past 30 years.

The resulting program, the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years, is also featured on both the Wharton and PBS websites.   NBR program viewers in over 250 markets across the U.S. and Knowledge@Wharton readers from around the world submitted some 1200 suggestions for the best innovations they thought had shaped the world in that time.  A panel of eight judges from Wharton selected the top 30.  A fascinating list to check out — true legacies all.

This got me to thinking about my favorite teacher R. Buckminster Fuller, the man who coined the term “Spaceship Earth” and the phrase ”doing more with less.”  He encouraged people to create artifacts - very much a personal legacy concept.

Bucky’s stated intention - as a lifelong experiment with his own life, made as a conscious decision in his early 30’s - was “to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone.”

He answered the question of why there were humans in the universe, with the notion that we are basically local information gatherers and problem solvers.  While we are more complex than that, it is an accurate observation.

Bucky focused his life on solving complex problems through an approach he called “comprehensive anticipatory design science.” The approach emphasized individual initiative and integrity, whole systems thinking, scientific rigor and faithful reliance on nature’s underlying principles.

He thought it was not helpful to try to change people, but rather important to change the context in which they operate, by providing innovative solutions to the problems they face.  That way, ultimately no one would have to work to ‘earn a living’ (we are, after all, already alive), but we would each contribute what we’re good at to positively impact the world around us: gathering information about and solving the problems that presented themselves uniquely to us.

What if we did more of that?  What if you took a look at what you do well and easily and even take joy in doing, and looked around to see who you could assist by creating something that would benefit them in some way?

If your brain is already spinning with ideas, you are developing a legacy consciousness.  Building anything from that thinking would make the planet a bit better place.

If what you build happens to answer Bucky’s urgent call for a design science revolution to make the world work for all.  If it:

• “emphasizes a new design, material, process, service, tool, technology, or any combination”
• “is part of an integrated strategy dealing with key social, economic, environmental, and cultural issues”
• “present[s] a bold, visionary, tangible initiative that is focused on a well-defined need of critical importance [and is]
• regionally specific yet globally applicable, and backed up by a solid plan and the capability to move the solution forward”

Then you might even win the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, as stated on the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s (bfi.org) website.

My ultimate joy at Creating Legacy would be to work side by side with you in helping you do just that, or even some fraction of that, which, in your own unique way “makes a difference now that lasts for generations.”

I’d love to hear your ideas.

Passion for Life is the Stuff of Legacy

My friend and fellow blogger Jeannette recently lost her beloved husband.  Having been married only a few months now myself, but to someone who is the-love-of-my-life-like-I-had-no-idea-could-be, I can empathize with the depth of the void that loss must be. 

A consumate writer, Jeannette wrote in her Write Speak Sell blog, a tribute to her husband describing what he left in the minds and hearts, not to mention lives of others — his legacy.  It reminded me that we all have a legacy, however conscious we are of creating it, and others will be impacted by it.  And they are most profoundly impacted by the things that we do, that we do well and happily because we are most passionate about them.  Read Jeannette’s beautiful tribute here.  It’s a legacy in itself, a legacy of tribute tangibly preserved and offered to the world in a way that will benefit many who read it.

She also included a lovely blog post from Seth Godin about decision making, concluding that recognizing and exercising our power to make decisions allows us to make a bigger difference.  Very nicely stated. 

When you let the notion of legacy develop in your own consciousness, what bubbles up about it?  What does your life mean to others?  What would you like it to mean?  How might you get into action to create something tangible around your passions that will benefit others?  The world needs more of that …

Creating Your Legacy Starts Today!

My new program, 7 Steps to Creating Your Legacy, debuts today! I can’t wait to see what the participants do with the materials - what they consciously choose to create in the world, how they decide what they want their impact to be and in what manner they’ll carry it out.

Watching all that unfold will be magical!

And the program itself is brand new, so it will be a creation unfolding as well - with the added energies of the group members.  Beginning any new process always carries with it excitment “with an edge …”  That’s how it is with the process of creation, and we’ll all be in that together adding the potential for the experience of some great synergy.  This pioneering group of leaders will be taking action that makes changes in the world - we will have our own “butterfly effect” (maybe many of them).  So exciting to see what that will be.

Right foot, left foot, one at a time begins the “journey of a thousand steps” that any significant project includes.  Will keep you posted on how it all unfolds.  If you want more information, please feel free to contact me!  Here we go …

Intentions & Motivations: What’s At the Heart of It?

Many legacies take the form of nonprofit businesses, which like any enterprise must be run in a business-like way. To me, whether the form of an enterprise is for profit or nonprofit - simply two different ways to structure a legal business entity engendering a much longer discussion — the business-like way to run them is with both head and heart.

Just as medicine is often as much an art as a science (unfortunately these days often way too controlled by accounting principles …), it seems there is a tremendous imbalance between head and heart.  And when heart loses out, so do we all.

In a recent article on the Planned Giving Design Center’s blog there was a discussion about the impact President Obama’s Tax Plan would have on the cost of charitable giving for wealthy donors.  Coming from the “head” view, the article made a lot of valid points, calculating the amount of tax benefit that might be lost and suggesting that this would dissuade wealthy donors from supporting charitable causes.  If that is truly the case, it is a cause for great sorrow to me.

One commenter to the article made an extremely valuable observation.  Fred Matthews heads Sound Development Strategies in Seattle, WA, a consulting organization that assists mid-size nonprofits.  His lovely observation in the discussion bears repeating, so I quote it in full here:

This discussion is a classic example of the difference between fundraising and philanthropy. Fundraising is a set of techniques and processes we use to implement philanthropy. Philanthropy is about creating change in our communities, our society and our world on behalf of those who are vulnerable and do not have the advantages many of us do.

When we start to confuse fundraising–and its associated tax benefits–with philanthropy, and do not focus first and foremost on the case for support of our nonprofit organizations (the change for the better in the lives of those less fortunate who share our planet) and donative intent, we have seriously lost our professional way.

Thanks again Fred.

Fundraising and Philanthropy.  Head and Heart.  Both are important.

Where is head and heart out of balance in your work in the world?  Would you like to put more heart into it? Profit is important, let’s be clear - enterprises with no money, whether a family or a company - can’t do much good in the world.  But how can revenue generation be better tied to the heart?

To me, the answer lies in holding the strong intention to do good work in the world with an underlying motivation to add value wherever possible.  What does that look like in what you do day to day?  How would you incorporate it into your legacy project?

Just Start

Creating anything just takes starting. Sometimes it takes starting over, or re-starting or refining an idea. But creation lives in action. So you actually have to start. From there you can build, experiment, have learning experiences (fewer if you learn from the examples of others and get help and support where you need it), and grow the project.

When you start, other things happen. The invisible forces of nature are also called into action. Synchronicity, serendipity, precession, perturbation - my personal favorites - and a host of other natural laws are set into motion, too.

This poem has always said it best for me:

Commitment

Until one is committed
there is hesitancy,
the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)
there is one elementary truth,
the ignorance of which
kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves, too.

All sorts of things occur to help one
that would otherwise never have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from decision,
raising in one’s favor
all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance,
which no man could have dreamt
would have come his way.

I have leaned a deep respect
for one of Goethe’s couplets:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can . . . begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

– W.N. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

To what act of creation will you commit yourself to start? You might be amazed to see where things go from there. How can I and the team here at Creating Legacy help?