Legacy

If you enter my hometown's cathedral, the Freiburger Münster, and walk to the sides of its hushed medieval interior then you will come to a series of tombs. These are the stone monuments to nobles and knights who lived long ago.

It is sobering to read the inscriptions upon such structures. They talk of lives, often brief by modern standards, and of pedigree, of lands, sometimes of battles. They speak to us even now of the ever-present battle of life. One upon which, for better or for worse, we are all engaged currently. These tombs also bear testament to families.

My business start was with my father. It worked out for me; I got the start I needed, and from there headed to Switzerland before on to the City of London. It may have worked out for me in terms of career advancement. But my relationship with my father was fraught. In life we were well suited; in business we were ill matched; I realize that now. He had his ideas of what I should do in the family business; I had my own hopes and dreams to say nothing of a different aptitude.

It is the hardest lesson for a parent to learn, namely, one’s children are not an extension of who you are. After childhood, they are independent in thought, word and deed. Still, there is a natural desire to have one’s children work in the family business – no matter what that business is and no matter how ill-suited one’s children are to it. I recognize this. I fight against it. For, like any parent, I wish for my children to be as happy and fulfilled as their unique identity and gifts allows for, which may well be very different from what I imagine. 

It is harder still to keep this in mind when one considers the whole notion of legacy. I meet many successful people who wish to leave a legacy. On the whole this desire is a good thing. They want all that they have built and created to outlast them. They want their heirs to benefit and take care of that with which they have been entrusted. Often times we know it does not work out that way. How many times do we hear of the children of the wealthy squandering that which was fought and hard won by previous generations?

Given that we cannot control our children should this prospect surprise us? And, perhaps, in light of that fact we are being too reductive in thinking about what the word legacy really means.

Those cathedral tombs are not just reminders of the departed, however. They are reminders of a bloodline. This was a continuation of a family on lands that had been with that family often for centuries. In the half-light of stained glass they tell of historical continuum. That continuity is today a legacy. It remains part of a process as well. For these men and women legacy was never simply a destination. 

Entrepreneurs are people of the ‘now’. I understand that. So am I, to some extent at least. Entrepreneurs make business decisions on what is happening today in markets and elsewhere. But our actions are built upon the work of others now long since gone, people like my father. And what we create and build today will form the basis for others to achieve yet more again. The interconnectedness of life and history is as present in our work today as it will be in the work of others tomorrow.

Freiburg stands on the western edge of the Black Forest in the Upper Rhine Plain of southwest Germany. The ancient beauty of the city’s cathedral is a telling symbol of the transitory nature of all things. Surviving the last war, these stones remain a shout of affirmation and celebration sounding to us right down till today. Despite, during the Second World War, Freiburg, like so many other German cities being reduced to dust, this cathedral almost miraculously stood and stands intact. The Swiss 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt once said that the cathedral’s 116-meter tower will forever remain the most beautiful spire on earth. For it marks where we have been; it testifies to what we had in us. But this work of mankind is without signature. More mysterious again, the many intricate carvings, upon the cathedral’s roof and within its many crevices, are known only to God and the men who worked them.

It is true; we think too little of legacy, or rather we are too limited by our own immediate visions of it dictated by the present. We need to lift our eyes and our thoughts to a wider idea of legacy. A wider vista that encompasses many people today and many more in tomorrows still to come; people who will benefit from what we created, even though we may never have known them.

As my hand rests upon these venerable stones I realise that my legacy is today, now, as much as it will ever be anything else long after I have gone. For all must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. We also, but no matter, for it is as if here in the Freiburger Münster I hear the ancient voices out of the living past whisper to me, "Be of good heart. Our songs will all be silenced, indeed so but what of it? Go on singing."