What is Your Legacy to the World?
The Meaning of Legacy
The impact of your achievement is reflected in your sense of fulfillment and significance. As you lead, how is the world better because you achieve? Do others grow as your objectives and results grow? Do you often hear the word “meaningful” in relation to your work? Who else besides those around you benefits from your most critical decisions? How is your achievement a message to the world? How do you want to be remembered? Are you purposely leaving a path for others so they can also become a contribution? Your answers to these questions represent the cornerstone of your Legacy.
The Importance of Designing Your Legacy
A powerful Legacy is not built on a whim or overnight. It’s a design: the deep impact of your leadership and your life’s work can be envisioned and intentionally crafted as the most artistic of endeavors. I can assist you in designing your meaningful Legacy by analyzing your accomplishments, the values that guide your decisions, your relationships, your most cherished ambitions and the totality of your worldview. Designing your Legacy is a rewarding exercise in introspection and Deep Thinking, for your fundamental ideas deserve to be shared with those focused on positively transforming the world.
The Legacy Design Process
Your Legacy design process can be structured in four distinct phases and developed over an intensive workshop or several weekly sessions (in person or online). The four phases are:
Analyzing Past and Present Situations
Envisioning Possibilities, Going Beyond What’s Known
Exploring Options and Alternatives
Planning, Piloting, Evaluating and Reporting
The Rewards of a well-crafted Legacy
As humans, we feed three hungers: to create, to express our talents and to leave a Legacy. We are fulfilled when we satisfy them and we deeply understand how our lives matter. Wealth, power, fame and knowledge are not enough. Nothing compares with Wisdom.
By designing your Legacy in a profound and systematic way, you continue to lead by example, inspiring others as you move forward with your plans, generating new ideas and transforming your environment so it can be significantly better than when you arrived.
Planning Your Family Legacy
As a family with a track record of success or a desire to contribute to the world at large, you might consider the Family Legacy planning process. I partner with worldwide experts to adjust to cultural and regional requirements, as well as exploring the financial aspects of the enterprise. As a start, here are some of the key questions to consider as a framework:
What's the motivation to engage in a Family Legacy development process?
What's the Family's message to the world? How do you envision "making meaning" through your Legacy - as in: Increase the Quality of Life, Right a Wrong or Prevent the End of Something Good?
What specific contributions do you envision making through your Legacy? What does "achievement" look like?
What's the ideal expression of your Vision? (As you succeed, how is the world better because you achieve your plan’s objectives?)
What is the path you are building for others to follow? Is there a Leadership development and continuity plan for your Vision?
Case One: A break with past success, a New Horizon
The client retired from a 30-year successful career in international wealth management with an excellent track record and portfolio of contacts. Having enrolled in a renowned university’s program for senior leaders, he wanted to discover how to design a project for social change that could have global impact. The four-month process yielded a plan to gather experts and social investors who could fund solutions for problems related to climate change for impoverished regions of the world. The process involves forming leaders to provide continuity to the programs.
Case Two: Same as before, but with greater Social Impact
The client had created a successful app development company to teach literacy and numeracy to children. As her business started to run on auto-pilot, she discovered that she could teach many more children in Africa, as mobile phone companies are flooding the continent. After a two-month exploration of possibilities and opportunities, she created an series of alliances with foundations and international education organizations to run pilot programs in several African countries. She currently travels with a team of facilitators and education consultants to test her new technologies and expand the creation of schools.