Innovation As Legacy

March 11, 2010 By 2 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Blog, Designing Your Legacy, Enlightened Leadership, Legacy Stories, Personal Legacy Tagged With: Buckminster Fuller Challenge, Collaboration, consciousness, Enlightened Leadership, entrepreneurship, Impact, innovation, PBS, problem solving, Significance, visionary, Wharton School of Business

Who And Why, Before What And How

August 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Do you know who you are – really? Do you know what you value? Are you involved in what interests you most in life? Can you say what you believe, articulate what’s important to you? Can you list your talents and abilities with confidence? Do you know what environments best support you? Can you state what truly motivates you, really stresses you (and describe the coping mechanisms you have in place), and describe the natural style that makes you, well, you?

Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
Tell me, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
‘Cause I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
– Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend, 1978

The term legacy most often generates thoughts of “what.” Some thing that’s left behind. Something tangible – an asset, impact on someone else, artifact, ongoing organization – may well be a part of your legacy. But preceding that is the “who” – that’s you – and the “why” – that’s what’s important to you and works best to support your day to day brilliance – behind the “what.” This foundation that makes the “what” what it is!

Developing any sort of legacy project is about equal parts of “beingness” and “doingness.” We are first human beings, though many people live their lives as human doings: ‘if I do the right things, I’ll get the things I want (or think will make me happy) and then I’ll be who I’m meant to be.’ My coach training teaches that while that is typical, it is not as effective as ‘if I appreciate and become fully who I am, I can do the things that develop my personal sense of significance and fulfillment, and from that I’ll produce or have what I truly want.’ So before taking action, go inside and discover yourself to truly know and appreciate all that you uniquely are – so you can more fully impact the world in the way that only you can. It’s not about being right, it’s about being real, true, authentically you. The world needs that.

“A bird sings not because it has an answer, but because it has a song.”
– Chinese proverb

Knowing yourself and the song you have to sing allows you to fully appreciate your individuality and the gifts only you can contribute, based on the unique design of your DNA and life circumstances. It makes you a true power to reckon with – not in the “win, kill and conquer” sense, but from the magnificent ability to “do” that only you possess. From that perspective, there is no competition – only you and what you came here capable of doing. Will you fully discover yourself in order to do it?

As for the doingness part, you already have a developing legacy. It is how others currently perceive you and your talents, and the contributions you have already made – both tangible and intangible, large and small. You may discover that your family, friends, colleagues and others in your communities already think a lot of you – for reasons you may not be fully aware of. You may want to ask a few of them how they perceive you – and may be surprised to hear about your attributes, not just your self-perceived flaws. These are the parts of your beingness to build on.

Creating legacy begins with a mindset and a conscious decision about how you want to be known and remembered. That can color all your interactions and outcomes. Begin to take stock of who you are, which may give you a clue about why you’re really here on the planet – what you’re drawn to and meant to touch and influence. Your attitude and how you choose to touch our world, are among the few things you truly have much control over anyway. That is your true power.

We’re here to help with that discovery and your development of great projects that make a positive and sustainable difference … So who are you and what will that be?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Authenticity, Legacy, Significance

A Client Motivated Evolution In My Coaching Work

August 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I had an interesting discussion today with someone about my coaching work.  She was a friend and business owner I know, but we hadn’t talked in year – and caught up through Facebook.  That’s great fun – amid the folks friending me I sometimes can’t fully remember, every now and then you stumble on someone you really DO want to connect with. 

Anyway, prior to our actual chat, after FB and then email exchanges, we had both had the opportunity to visit each others’ websites and catch up on each other’s work.  She started at my old, original site, www.AllThrive.com, which was built to describe the focus of my practice back in the late 1990’s and crossing the ‘threshold into the new millenium’ — remember Y2K?  (I was studying strategic marketing design then with a company that at the time was called Y2Marketing – Y2M, for short – so I remember it vividly because people kept referring to the company as Y2K … they’ve since changed focus and names, but I did get great training from them in how to do direct marketing).

I really do need to get that old site updated, but it gave me the chance to explain a bit more about Creating Legacy – and how developing it has been a journey that my clients started me on. 

Creating Legacy and this blog/network site  were built as a result of so many of my clients saying they wanted to transition out of what they had been doing, to do something that really makes a difference and feels significant to them in terms of making a positive contribution.  Many of them came to me initially to help them build or develop a business.  The evolution came when, business operating smoothly with them at the helm (rather than the business running them …), they discovered they wanted to exit from it and had 20, 30 even 40 more years of life to do something with.

That something might involve different work or starting a new business – but the difference this go around is that they want it to be on their terms, meaningful, fulfilling, fun-even, and have some significance.  If they’re going to work diligently (some even more so than in prior careers) they want it to be good work, even great work – not just hard work.  Yes, productive; yes, profitable – they’d been around the block enough times to know that anything not run in a business-like fashion doesn’t run for too long.  And maybe even pay them a salary if need be – but whether a for profit structure or a nonprofit structure, it needed to be a social enterprise.  Something that made sense and not just money.

Somehow they find even more life energy to bring to the project that way. From a coaching perspective, it always seemed to me that’s how one’s work in the world really should be.  So my clients sort of led me toward the concepts behind Creating Legacy.  In a way, with and because of them I’ve been developing it all from there.  It’s not about what you leave at the end of life, it’s what you consciously build during it …

As I told her, I still do the business development/succession planning/exit planning and career transition work, too – depending on where the person is when they come to me.  But so often that has led into an “and what I really want to do is …” conversation.  That can go in so many different directions about what they decide to do or build next, or they choose to add on to an existing business from a social responsibility perspective, before they step away. 

It’s been really fun and fulfilling work for me, I think that with our generation, there is so much more of that coming.  Not to mention from Gen X and Gen Y – who already have the concepts of working with the world’s ecosystems and making thing sustainable well ingrained in their thinking.

Which is good – the world needs more of it!  And I’m just happy as can be working with people to help them build it.

Filed Under: Blog, Coaching Tagged With: Authenticity, Career Transition, Coaching, Generation X, Generation Y, Significance