Previous articles explored how great legacies are inspired, thoughtful, heart-filled, beneficial, touching and meaningful. We’ve discussed how being generous, wise and creative – powerful human attributes we can each nurture and develop – endows a legacy with those same characteristics. Creating from that place, you can bring a once intangible legacy idea to fruition – something that produces positive and tangible results. Those results have recognizable and reproducible characteristics as well:
GREAT LEGACIES ARE WORKABLE. A great legacy accomplishes something – generally a socially beneficial purpose. A great legacy incorporates important values into its vision and mission, and it delivers great value to someone or something. Consequently, it works to bring about its intended results.
And the effort that goes into making that happen is good work or even great work, not just hard work. Yes, there often perspiration involved in the expenditure of energy, for the “doing” of it. But, it is the sort of work often experienced as being in a flow state where the passage of time may not be noticed, rather than toiling in a way that the hands of the clock seem to move backwards. And the results are measureable – quantitatively and qualitatively, not just measured in net profit.
Doing the work of creating a living legacy involves the efforts of others – including the need to properly coordinate professional advisors. The work of making the legacy operational may also involve volunteers and sometimes the beneficiaries of the effort themselves. Developing a workable legacy is a great training ground for children and grandchildren to come to understand the broader purposes of wealth, to learn to create meaning as well as money, to give back in exchange for what they’ve gotten, and to learn to be grateful and appreciative for what they have that others may lack. All of that adds to making a legacy truly workable.
GREAT LEGACIES ARE SYSTEMATIC. Building a legacy has definite steps. They are steps others have taken. Their path and successes have left clues, and give you a roadmap to follow. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, even with a new or novel idea. There are both structures already developed – derived from estate, financial and business planning – and methods to develop recurring steps or processes for smooth operations that are known and time tested. Basic business and marketing development principles are likely applicable whatever form your legacy takes to be sure lasts for generations.
The key is to develop whatever you create, what is done and how it is done, into something that others can easily repeat – so you can pass the activities on to others, short-term, and ultimately long-term. As the applicable steps to making your legacy operational are discovered, designed and taken, they can be documented so others can replicate them in ongoing fashion. That not only allows others to get involved, but also the scale of the project to be replicated and even expand. As it expands, you will likely want to give others the opportunity to revise methods of operation or service/product delivery. That is inherent in any system, that it be self-correcting so it improves over time.
For example, this principle caused a revolution in the auto industry most everyone will recognize. Edwards Deming worked with Japan after World War II to improve design, product quality, service and testing – particularly with car makers there. He helped turn a statement of ridicule (“made in Japan”) into the preferred brands of car worldwide coming from their factories.
In his 1982 book Out Of The Crisis, Deming aptly noted: “The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management.” Hence the importance of both leadership and systems development: when they are well designed with self-correcting mechanisms built in, people can produce good work at a level of quality that is designed into the process and methods.
This is what supports the principle that:
GREAT LEGACIES ARE ENDURING. They start with an idea and as it takes on mass, it grows. You build a network around you, and others who are moved by it want to be involved, too. It develops exponentially. The money needed to build it appears, either because you can contribute it or because funding is available from others – or both. Professional services needed to expand the project are identified (and may even be contributed).
The project takes shape, and each aspect of it is developed with an identifiable and replicable method – a system that others can learn, teach to yet others, and correct along the way as may be needed. Your legacy begins to take on a life of its own. Other people show up to help operate it and carry it on, allowing you to let go. You can step away, knowing it will continue as designed, to accomplish its defined mission and create a benefit for the intended recipients that can last for generations to come.
Templates, and tons of existing resources, exist to help you create your legacy. Starting with only your passion, your good and beneficial idea can be developed using time-tested structures and methods that allow you to get it started, involve others in a systematic way, stay involved as long as you like and then step aside to allow it to continue to make a positive enduring difference in the world.
Is there a great idea and some good work you want to drop into this template? The journey begins with a single step …