Your Legacy as a Leader

BOOK REVIEWS
By Cynthia G. Wagner
Your Legacy as a Leader
PIERRE.COM
By looking backward to
look ahead at their potential
legacies, leaders may
be able to create better
futures for their organizations—and
themselves.
If you don’t want the only mark
you make on an organization to be
the one on your own rear end as you
go out the door, then the time to
think about your “leadership
legacy” is before you enter a new position,
not as you’re about to leave.
“It’s never too early to think about
the kind of influence your leadership
will have after you’ve retired or
taken a position with another company,”
argue management consultant
Robert M. Galford and business
journalist Regina Fazio Maruca. “In
fact, we believe that the earlier leaders
begin to consider their leadership
legacy, the better leaders they will
be.”
A leadership legacy is basically a
values statement and, as such,
reflects personal beliefs and goals.
Because it is an attempt to look backward
at one’s life and work from a
point in the future, a legacy is likely
to define success differently than
would a strategic plan or mission
statement.
“Put simply,” Galford and Maruca
write, “we found that looking forward,
people want to achieve success
in organizational or performance
terms. But looking back, they
wanted to know that their efforts
were seen—and felt—in a positive
way by the individuals they worked
with directly and indirectly.”
Legacy thinking allows leaders to
put their personal values to work in
ways that have long-term impacts on
their colleagues and employees—
and hence the organization—as well
as to assess how their own decisions
Your Leadership Legacy:
Why Looking Toward the
Future Will Make You a
Better Leader Today
by Robert M. Galford and Regina
Fazio Maruca. Harvard Business
School Press. 2006. 194 pages.
$26.95. Order from the Futurist
Bookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf
.htm.
and actions measure up to their
values. The goal is to leave behind
you a set of positive and empowering
values embedded in the organization.
Galford and Maruca cite the experience
of the restaurant chain
Wendy’s in 2005 defending itself
against a fraud case as an example of
how a leader’s legacy influences the
organization’s future. When a customer
claimed to find a severed
human finger in her food and sued,
the company could have settled the
matter quickly and quietly by paying
her off. But instead, CEO Jack
Schuessler worked with investigators,
stood by his employees, and
protected the brand. Schuessler credited
the legacy of Wendy’s founder
Dave Thomas “that a reputation is
earned by the actions you take every
day, and that’s still our credo.”
The authors emphasize the need
for obtaining feedback during the
process of legacy thinking, since
Your Leadership Legacy authors Regina
Fazio Maruca and Robert Galford.
people who know you or have
worked with you may be able to give
you examples of how your decisions
or actions affected them. As you
progress in your leadership role, this
feedback will be useful in conducting
periodic “legacy audits.”
Legacies are not built in a day, and
because legacy building is ongoing,
success can be redefined. The
authors quote legendary television
producer Norman Lear (All in the
Family):
You have to look at success incrementally.
It takes too long to get to any
major success. . . . If one can look at
life as being successful on a momentby-moment
basis, one might find that
most of it is successful. And take the
bow inside for it. When we wait for
the big bow, it’s a lousy bargain. They
don’t come but once in too long a
time.
The legacy-thinking process is a
useful personal discovery tool even
for nonleaders. In one of many illuminating
case studies in the book,
Galford and Maruca quote a young
businesswoman of bright prospects
who found herself in the uncomfortable
position of leading an important
project:
Right at the end of the meeting I said
something like, “I know we can do a
great job on this.” And then I said,
“Just don’t f*** it up.” . . . I can look
back on that now . . . and see clearly
that I was trying to do a job that I
really wasn’t suited to do and did not,
in fact, enjoy much.
She chose a different role for herself
than leadership, and a more ap-
60 THE FUTURIST July-August 2007 www.wfs.org

The Leadership Legacy
Statement
Save the list of your proudest
achievements for the obituaries;
your legacy statement should
focus on your values and the
traits for which you hope to be
remembered, according to
authors Robert M. Galford and
Regina Fazio Maruca.
The legacy-thinking process
goes like this:
1. Reflect.
2. Find the themes in your
reflections.
3. Write the statement.
4. Elicit reaction.
5. Revise.
6. Occasionally review and
update (conduct legacy audits).
Among the questions to ask
yourself during the legacythinking
process are, What personal
traits or behaviors or
values would you most like to
be remembered for? How are
these manifested in your work?
What have you learned that
you would most like to pass
on? And what remains to be accomplished?
Source: Your Leadership Legacy by
Robert M. Galford and Regina Fazio
Maruca (Harvard Business School
Press, 2006).
propriate one for her organization:
I came to realize that I was happiest
when I was helping the people
around me do “their stuff” better. Not
when I was telling them what to do,
but when they already knew what
they wanted to do and I could help
them achieve their goals. To use the
language of legacy thinking, I learned
that there was too much of a conflict,
for me, between the positions I had
held and sought, and the roles that fit
me best and brought me the most satisfaction.
Your Leadership Legacy offers this
valuable lesson: that our actions and
attitudes have an influence on other
people, though subtly or in ways
that may not be immediately felt. We
are all role models, whether we are
leaders or not, and whether we
know or accept it or not. Even thinking
occasionally about how our
neighbors may one day remember us
could help us become better citizens
today.
As expressed by Barnes Boffey of
the nonprofit educational organization
Aloha Foundation, “Our lives
become the stars that others steer by,
and if we live them well, the world
will change.”
About the Reviewer
Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of
THE FUTURIST. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.
Profits and Prophecy
Turning the Future into Revenue:
What Businesses and Individuals
Need to Know to Shape Their
Futures by Glen Hiemstra. Wiley.
2006. 226 pages. $24.95.
Glen Hiemstra’s unambiguously
titled Turning the Future
into Revenue (a sell-out at the
World Future Society’s 2006
annual meeting) seems to acknowledge
that business
leaders are not necessarily
future-averse
just because they focus
on meeting quarterly
profit estimates or increasing
share value.
They may just need
some practical guidance
on understanding the
impacts of the conflicting,
converging, and confusing
trends we face.
Business futurist Hiemstra,
founder of Futurist.com, here provides
a clearly written overview of
business-relevant trends in the major
sectors of futures analysis (society/
demography, technology, economy,
environment, and government/politics)
and guides the reader through
the potential impacts and—more
Glen Hiemstra
valuably—inspirations for new ways
to turn a profit.
For example, shrinking populations
in Europe and Japan would
represent a crisis to businesses that
only see a dwindling customer base.
But Hiemstra finds the silver lining
in fewer people demanding the same
amount of resources. “The same resources
available to fewer people
ought to, if managed well, lead to
greater per capita wealth creation,”
he notes. “This is particularly true
when combined with prospects for
ever doing more with less and less,
as Buckminster Fuller used to say.”
Another opportunity is environmental
improvement. If shrinking
populations lower the cost of living
in downtowns, it could help curb
suburban sprawl, Hiemstra points
out, recommending the development
of policies to enhance urban living
and return oncesprawled-upon
lands to a more natural
state.
A workforce that’s
shrinking due to an
aging population
also presents opportunities,
such as to
develop technologies
and policies
that enhance worker
productivity. Hiemstra
suggests “mid-life retirement”
or universal sabbaticals
in which workers nearing the
traditional retirement age take
time off to reeducate themselves
for new careers—keeping
themselves and the economy
productive.
Hiemstra’s book is both
practical and visionary, business
oriented and personal. He concludes
with a mission statement for
humanity—a “twenty-first century
do-over”—that encompasses a rapid
conversion to the next (post-petroleum)
energy era, universal affordable
connectivity through broadband
communications, an integrated
global labor system, and a reawakened
“hunger for peace rather than
war.”
—Cynthia G. Wagner
THE FUTURIST July-August 2007 www.wfs.org 61

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.