A life. A family. A company. An idea. I work with people who have built something consequential to find the story beneath it and set it down as a book, private or published, so those who come after them understand what mattered and why.
A portrait in the office says you were here. An estate plan says what you owned. Neither says what you were like in a room, or what you did when things went badly.
Those are the things children, grandchildren and successors will want to know. They live in stories, memories and hard-earned lessons that surface when someone takes the time to ask.
I do the asking myself, usually for a couple of hours a week over several months, with a recorder going and no fixed agenda.
Then we make sense of it. I help sort out what happened from what mattered, find the shape of the story, and turn it into a book that sounds like the person whose name is on it. Some books are published. Most are printed privately, for the people whose names are inside.
I spent twenty-five years as a magazine editor: executive editor of Inc., senior editor of Money, editor-in-chief of TWA Ambassador and of Enterprise, a special section of the Sunday New York Times. Along the way I interviewed Sam Walton, Dave Thomas, Carl Icahn and Peter Drucker, and a great many founders who never made the cover.
The work was never really about writing. It was about discernment: hearing the difference between what happened and what mattered, and finding the thread running under the version everyone already knew. I bring that discipline to every engagement now, working privately with founders, families and the institutions they build. When a project needs a designer or other specialists, I bring in the right people and stay responsible for the whole.
I come, by my own account, from a long line of Southern storytellers, the kind who could turn a Sunday dinner into an epic requiring at least one disappearing cousin. I have never quite gotten over the habit of asking one question too many.
A short monograph on what estate plans and governance documents can’t hand down.
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