For this post, I'd like to talk about how our personal journeys shape our professional legacies. To know where you are going, I think, it helps to have perspective about where you came from.
Most of us don't have to look too far. But for me, having lost my Dad when I was young (he died when I was 14, and Mom a few short years later), knowing how my immediate ancestors shaped my journey was always a little more challenging. I became a genealogy buff. I discovered some amazing connections.
But it wasn't until last week that I had a clue about how my Dad's work nevertheless threaded its way into my own. Sure, I knew I inherited his entrepreneurial streak. But I think, now, that there's more.
My Dad was a film producer in the 1960s. His specialty was educational and promotional films. I have a framed picture of him in my office, gesturing at a 3-D model of what would become the 1964 New York World's Fair. In the photo, he's standing between Robert Moses and Walt Disney. Heady stuff.
That picture was all I had from his professional world. But that changed last week. After numerous attempts, over many decades, to find his films, all of a sudden I found two of them on the web. Two of them! Both are black-and-white, long, and oh-so-dated. (In this one, my Dad makes a cameo at 24:30.) These films are 50 years old, and I had never seen them. It was like having my own personal "Field of Dreams" moment.
(Even more spine-tingling: my daughter now works for the New York City Parks Department in the very same Administration building (The Olmstead Center) whose groundbreaking my Dad chronicled in one of these films.)
But beyond the incredible thrill of finding two of my Dad's films, both offer a look at how marketing worked in those days. The clients (Robert Moses and the World's Fair Corporation) wanted to portray the "players" (governments, corporations, religions, individuals) as optimistic, energetic and globally oriented. These were exactly my Dad's personal brand qualities! No wonder they chose him, repeatedly, to help promote their ambitious projects. Sure enough, by the end of the films, you believe people are inherently good, and that the World's Fair is going to be enormously fun.
My work is to help professional and business service firms develop strategies to compete and grow more effectively. As I guide them to address their challenging organizational structures and cultures, broken processes, under-resourced teams, copycat competitors -- and more -- I always want to portray optimism, positive energy and a global orientation.
This is where I came from. This is where I want to go.
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