Making a Living, or Making a Mark?

"I never thought I'd live to be a million." The Moody Blues*

Business owners, whether of grand corporations or Mom-and-Pop stopovers, take pride in their legacy.  They will look upon the balance sheet, or the web page, or gaze across the parking lot toward the bricks and mortar.  In the beginning those places were constructed on pillars of disciplined savings, the stress of mortgages, bank notes and promises, cornerstones of a dream.  “When the notes are paid,” they wondered, “would we seek new notes for expansion?”  Would the customers be ten-fold what they are today?  Will the town know our name?  Will the region?  Will cyberspace?  Will our legacy be another warehouse, or fleet, or factory?”

Those questions crisscross the minds of many entrepreneurs, small or large, to-do lists that disturbed precious hours of sleep.  But for the multitude of professionals who signed up to earn a week’s pay, do they see their time and focus and concentration as supporting the dream as well?  Are they sensing the legacy as part of their own?  Or are their eyes seeing only a means to the paycheck?

Many executives are rightly criticized for their perception of employees, living laborer widgets that help build output widgets. If the employee isn’t delivering, then replace “it”, they might believe.  Besides, the employee’s dream is nothing but a check that will pay a bill.  But is that bill a house mortgage, a college education, a retirement fund or a trip to a resort.  Maybe just the week’s groceries.  Do some executives see those dreams as less worthy than the CEO’s or the investors, who see the company as their own brainchild, or their design, or empire in the making?  

If they do, then they fail to see that legacies are not built by one.  Successful executives, the great ones, do not uncomfortably, or arrogantly, spit out the populist concept like a stringy, bad piece of beef marring the plate. Instead they welcome the reality of legacies – they are built on the backs of many.  It is an axiom that is understood but not embraced, shoved aside by cynicsm.  But everyone is entitled to embrace the legacy as part of their own if they contributed with goodwill, serving the firm’s customers.

It’s why I abandoned the sense that “I worked for…”  For whom?  The “man”?  AT&T?  Joe’s Tire Depot maybe?  Even with startups’ offers of options, profit promises as likely as the roulette ball slotting on my number, I didn’t feel I worked for anyone.   But I was happy to work with them.

Looking to our older age, when our days become slower but in retrospect faster, life’s memories can be a merciless canvas of regret.  The mind and body are no longer accelerating, but are sadly reversing.  In those moments of hazy reflection, was the multi-decade, weekly ritual nothing more than “making a living”?  If we “lived for the weekend,” were we not living the other 5/7 of the week?  I wish I could reel in that time again, and remind myself that the days at the desk, in the meeting room, in the cafeteria, were building a legacy.  That legacy was one of learning, of sharing successes, perhaps a modest means to sustain living during a future retirement’s final bus layover.  That will be when I can no longer run with the herd.  When the time to catch my breath arrives, there will be ample time to serenely graze in private, while a vibrant, younger generation extends the firm’s legacy, as well as their own. The company’s legacy was not a singular dream of some pretentious puppet master.

Be mindful that an executive with integrity, self-awareness, and keen perceptiveness, gratefully sees the legacy as a splendid stew whose perfection was borne of many cooks in the kitchen. Those souls didn’t work for the woman or the man or for a name.  They worked with them, whether in the boardroom or in the lab, on the factory floor or driving the truck.  

Because we see the factory floor as demanding fewer sophisticated skills, we misunderstand the value. “If the factory worker is gone, we’ll just get another.”  That thought process imagines that we can grab labor as easily as yanking weeds from the ground, swappable hands that are not as critical to the organization’s success.  Why then is that same disrespect not uttered when an executive departs?  I’ve heard it often stated that the executive is a rare commodity. But when an executive job requisition opens, there always seems to be a replacement, and it happens pretty quickly too.  This isn’t some Marxian cry. Certainly, I don’t reject the market dynamics that pay executives the salaries that other professionals envy.. The demand for some positions is many times the salary of others, and is rational; those executives will mobilize the operation or the strategy in a more impactful way.   

The value of the executive is in the machinations of the teams and the individuals who sustain the culture. However, the wise executive will recognize that the blood and sweat that built the enterprise are neither greater among the rank and file nor smaller!  Shame on them if they don’t.

The decisions of the leadership are made not in isolation; they are borne of understanding the capabilities of the teams, the potential of the teams, the capacity of the teams – either those who are already on the payroll or out in the marketplace waiting for an offer. The craftsman on the assembly line, the consultant at the whiteboard, the analyst poring over spreadsheets laden with financial options, the muscled lifters on the loading dock, are all human ingredients for success in the organization. Whether all these players witness it or not, they are part of the firm’s legacy.

So if the firm fails, was the legacy one of shame? Hardly, the minds and muscles collaborated toward a dream, and a failed dream is still valuable.  The spillovers of trying still motivate and steer others.  They are worthwhile knowledge for those who come after, perhaps that spark that turns to flame.

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My father's father owned Café 200 in Newport, Rhode Island, probably 80 or 90 years ago, maybe more.  Like my other grandfather who owned a New York lounge as well as a Prohibition Speakeasy, he created many memories for families, great ancient (to me) stories, and gathering moments for paying customers.  

A restaurant or two does not make for high finance or high-rises, and small business owners often follow a day of analysis with a day of cleaning or sweeping.  But they’re business people nevertheless. They made livings nevertheless. And they created legacies.  Sometimes their buildings lived on, for a few years or even decades. Sometimes they didn’t. But every hand in my grandfather’s restaurant, from the bookkeeper’s to the baker’s was a noble part in an operation that added to the market’s mosaic.  Every one in the operation was building a legacy.  No, the picture of the restaurant might not be at the forefront of their memories, but it is one they carved, influencing others that sat there.  

A couple decades ago, I was driving through Rhode Island and I was searching for that building once owned and operated by my grandfather.  As I drove, I talked of its history, which I only knew through family conversations. But what I recalled, or at least imagined, was a place that filled bellies with comfort food, and lined smiles for customers who had a respite from cooking and plating and cleaning at home.  Were other legacies being fed in that dining room?

In that venue, how many happy moments were celebrated for families who ate there? How many great ideas were exchanged by business folks who innovated over a meal?  Laborers at lunch, solving world problems, with ideas that may, or maybe not, wafted in the air and influenced someone at the next table.  What other legacies were being created?

The restaurant was but one small thread in the building’s history, one of many tales and toils, a place to sit and drink and talk.  And the same model would continue after my grandfather sold it, thanks to other owners, and cooks, and waiters.

My eyes and those of my passenger scoured the landscape. “I think it’s on this street,” I said, as I slowed the car to a crawl. “There!” shouted my passenger. “It’s there!” and he pointed to the side with the faded lettering still visible. With laughter and hugs, as though we found the Holy Grail, we snapped a few photographs of the place, and us in front of it, the street, the landscape, and we started to head out again.  

I turned and said, “You know, I can’t believe it’s still here. But the way I think of it, even if it weren’t, I suppose my grandfather left his mark.”  His small innovations there, his ideas, modest as they were, might have been copied or tested or discarded for someone else in humanity’s journey.  Or maybe nothing would be left except a memory.

Whether my passenger -- my son, three generations removed from my grandfather -- knew it or not, he heard me say the words, “Legacies are much greater than just old buildings,” and reaching over to stroke his head, I added, “And they come in many forms.”

He was still looking back at that street as we drove out of the town.

*Album cover art by Phil Travers for The Moody Blues'  “To our Children's Children’s Children (1969)"