It was time to leave. A bitter-sweet time. The CEO felt sadness, but also contentment. The business he had conceived and birthed and nurtured was mature enough to stand on its own feet now, to live out its own life. Ironically, the way he saw it, the company was not the legacy he was leaving at all. The real value was in the way in which the business lived and breathed and kept its people engaged and passionate.
That was the real gift he had given them. And that was why he was leaving behind his scruffy notebooks in the boardroom cabinet - those dog-eared, tea-stained pages on which, over the years, he had jotted down his ideas. Scrawled untidily were the lessons he had learned along the way: about how to make a business 'fit for human beings', about how to survive in commerce and still sleep soundly at night, about how to create a company that served society, instead of the other way around. So many thoughts ...