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 come from a long line of Southern storytellers, the kind who could turn a Sunday dinner into a tale of a cousin who left town under suspicious circumstances.
That appetite for a good story led me to a twenty-five-year career in magazine journalism: 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.
I’ve never quite gotten over the habit of asking one question too many. Over the years, I’ve learned to distinguish what happened from what mattered, and to find the story beneath the version everyone already knew. That’s what I do today, working closely with founders and families to tell the stories of their lives, businesses, and institutions.