My Legacy Koan

We’ve arrived. Tomorrow is Bernie’s memorial day, and we’ve been remembering some of his social entrepreneurship teachings. We built an amazing network of schools inspired by Bernie’s Greyston practice, although our school network didn’t outwardly look like Bernie’s Greyston. They had different motive energies – Bernie’s was homelessness; mine was the stigma and discrimination faced by people living with mental illnesses – and they took different organizational forms.

My legacy koan was rooted in our third bottom line, great schools for teachers as well as students. The koan crystallized as soon as our school network became too big for me to rely on informal interactions to stay connected to our growing team.  It was then that I began my regular “coffees with the president.”  During the first round of coffees, I invited participants to talk about their dream jobs, hoping I’d be able to connect their passions to our organizational needs. If I could, everyone would benefit. I was stunned to hear from so many that they’d already found their dream jobs in our schools. They were planning to spend their entire careers in our schools. They’d found a home. We were family.

There was my legacy koan. I was approaching retirement (for the second time), although still happily repeating my semi-humorous refrain that “retirement was always five in the future,” while most of the team were at the beginning of their careers. What can we to make sure their “home” survives my retirement?  As in so many “family” businesses, we concluded that a family member had a better chance of maintaining our “magic” than an outsider. I worked at developing that successor, the individual or group, who could assume the leadership, but things didn’t work out as I’d hoped. When I I announced that I’d be retiring at the end of the school year, our trustees opted to bring in an outsider instead. Rather quickly, our charter network moved in unanticipated directions. It wasn’t “home” anymore. Within two years, most of our leadership team had moved on or been forced out.

There was so much pain, so much sorrow. What could I have done differently? Maybe I hadn’t done enough to prepare our trustees. Maybe I hadn’t done enough to prepare the inside candidates. I was pretty rough on myself. Until recently. Like any good koan, my legacy koan continues to take me deeper, to unimagined and unanticipated places.

It’s occurring to me now that maybe, in looking to make the “magic” moment permanent, I was asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, “How do we keep this going?” I should have been asking, “What’s next?” Maybe that’s the point. Maybe, as the Buddha said, everything changes. Clinging to what was can only lead to suffering. Maybe we take the lessons that we learned and build something new. What we’ve had, all of us will carry with us through the changes in life. Not everyone gets to taste the “triple bottom line.” What do with that gift? What does each one of us do with that gift? How do we carry that experience into the rest of our lives? How do we use that an going forward as ingredient of our life, as we go on to cook the best meal that we can?

Thank you, Bernie.