THE STORY OF Patagonia, as shared in the Foreword, is an inspiring example of the power of long-term personal ambition in a short-term world. But for every Patagonia, there are many more cautionary tales, such as Blockbuster, Borders, and Kodak. Once synonymous with the videos, books, and film they sold, these three iconic brands all filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the space of just 16 months between 2010 and 2012.¹ Their falls from grace sent chills through global markets and popular culture. At its height, each commanded an industry and appeared to control its own destiny, employing tens of thousands of people around the world and generating billions in annual revenue. Consumers loved them. Competitors feared them. It once seemed impossible to imagine the world without them. Today, however, less than a decade letter, one of these brands no longer exists, another is near defunct, and the third is still hoping for, but has not yet realized, its second life.²

There are brands that rest on their laurels, and there are brands that add a page to their story every day. Once Blockbuster, Borders, and Kodak stopped doing the latter, they became the former—and they began to die. Since each brand filed for bankruptcy protection, countless articles and books have autopsied their decline in exhausting detail, but the synopsis for all three is the same: each is the story of a once-famous brand that stayed stuck in the past instead of continually bringing the world forward.

As a strategist and a journalist, respectively, authors Mark Miller and Lucas Conley—hereafter we—have spent our entire careers telling other people’s stories. Some leaders and brands come to us fully aware of the message they want to share. Others ask us to translate their messages for them. Few expect their stories to end, but too many, such as Blockbuster, Borders, and Kodak, lose their way.

In today’s short-term economy, long-term success stories are increasingly hard to find. Twenty percent of all U.S. businesses fail within the first year. Nearly half are gone by the five-year mark. Only one out of three survives to celebrate its 10-year anniversary.³ Even among the biggest, most recognized brands, long-term survival is increasingly rare. In the 1920s, the average life span of a company listed on the Standard & Poor’s 500—a list of the top 500 publicly traded companies in the world—was 67 years.⁴ Today, it’s just 15 years.⁵ That means that the playground equipment at your local park now outlasts many of the world’s biggest companies.⁶

Short-termism isn’t limited to brands; it also affects the people who work for and lead them. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, average employee tenure numbers are declining, depleting corporate ranks of consistency and culture. Between 2014 and 2016 (the most recent period for which data was published), median job tenure in the United States dropped 11.5 percent to 4.2 years.⁷ The decline was even steeper for chief marketing officers at major U.S. brands: Their tenure shrank by six months—to just 3.5 years—during that same period.⁸ With corporate and career life spans locked in a downward spiral, it’s no wonder only a third of people consider themselves engaged at work.⁹

Caught in this short-term spin cycle, careers and brands that last are becoming a scarce resource. The antidote to this outbreak—as Yvon Chouinard demonstrates at Patagonia—is to build your brand through the lens of legacy. Not the old-world legacy that’s bequeathed from the past. We’re talking about a new kind of legacy that simultaneously encompasses what was and what will be. Whether yours is a young brand aiming to endure or an established one seeking to remain vital for generations to come, this book marks a turning point in the way brands are built.

This is the end of legacy as we know it.

The Call for a New Kind of Legacy

We’re all familiar with the traditional meaning of legacy, as evidenced by the steady churn of autobiographies, bequests, commemorations, and dedications we are forever leaving in our collective cultural wake. We see it in every leader who seeks to “cement” his or her legacy as if it were something set in stone and left behind on a museum pedestal to gather dust. This is the problem with traditional legacy. It’s backward-looking. Stuck in the past. An anchor. Static.

In contrast, our lives are anything but static; they evolve fluidly on a continuum. Just as we reflect on our past milestones for inspiration and guidance, we draw motivation from everything we still hope to accomplish. Inspired by long-term personal ambition, each of us is capable of continually crafting his or her legacy in the here and now by adding to it every day. Traditional legacy is no longer suited for today’s short-term economy. Traditional legacy is about telling the same old story. Today’s circumstances call for a dynamic way of looking at brand building that fosters nimble and resilient brands that are perpetually in the making—neither forgetting the past nor getting stuck in it—as the world constantly changes around them.

Seeking to better understand how companies inherit, create, and pass along their living stories, Miller established The Legacy Lab at Team One in 2012.¹⁰ Working with a group of leading strategists and experts from disciplines such as cultural anthropology, data analytics, and semiotics, we started by researching pioneering brands. We looked at established brands and upstarts alike. No company was too small, too big, too young, or too old. Our focus was on the story behind those companies: What kind of legacy were they building? How were they enduring and thriving?

Through this research, we began conducting global surveys of brand builders everywhere, gradually formalizing the way we collected, processed, and analyzed the feedback. Then we reached out to leaders at some of the world’s best-known and most innovative companies to request in-depth interviews. We suspected that they would have a lot to teach us about building brands to last, and they did, but what these leaders observed in the world around them was equally intriguing—and troubling.

First, the Trouble: The Short-Term Thinker’s Blind Spot

Soon after we began conducting in-person interviews, we discovered an unnervingly pervasive flaw in the way many people think about building brands. Although the leaders we approached tended to describe their legacies as forward-looking ambitions—such as the desire to solve a problem, improve an industry, or protect and grow something meaningful—they consistently lamented that many of their peers fell into one of two nearsighted traps: The first is repeating the past. The second is reviling it.

Those who repeat the past are essentially playing it safe. They prefer to stick with what they know rather than change things and risk screwing up. After all, they reason, even if they fail, who could fault them for doing what always worked in the past? In the words of one Legacy Lab respondent, “No one wants to go down in history as the person who changed the formula for Coca-Cola.”

Those who revile the past see it as an obstacle to making their mark now. Eager to validate themselves and highly conscious of how little time they have to demonstrate results in light of receding corporate life spans and employee tenures, they see themselves as change agents racing to capture attention before time is up.

As different as these methods appear, both approaches exhibit the same myopia. Both are shortsighted because they mismanage the past, either clinging to it too closely or rejecting it outright. In concert, these nearsighted flaws amount to a false dilemma, a black-and-white way of viewing the world that results in something we refer to as the short-term thinker’s blind spot. The brands that play it safe do themselves a disservice. They may temporarily protect the status quo by anchoring themselves to the past, but they risk diminishing their relevance as the world continues to change around them. Meanwhile, the brands that look to make their mark quickly as change agents risk jettisoning their heritage and identity, leaving them rudderless and adrift in mercurial markets.

Propelled by myopic thinking, short-termism is taking a heavy toll on our culture and economy, sapping the souls of modern brands and the employees who fill their ranks, and even redefining our understanding of and appreciation for things that last and flourish—things with enduring legacy. We wondered: How are leaders at today’s most ambitious brands avoiding this blind spot?

Now, the Intrigue: Five Transformations, One Mindset

Six years, 20 countries, and thousands of surveys and interviews later (and counting), The Legacy Lab has amassed an insightful body of knowledge on the dynamics of long-term brand building in a short-term world. More often than not, what we are finding is that the commercial success enjoyed by enduring brands is matched by an equally inspiring story of personal leadership and ambition. In this book, we have collected a number of these lasting success stories. All point to a new approach to brand building: a long-term, ambition-driven way of creating something of enduring worth and significance.

Legacy in the Making celebrates a dynamic form of brand building seen through the eyes of a select group of extraordinary men and women who are living out their ambitions in the age of now. Some are founders or cofounders of their own companies. Some—those we call refounders—lead businesses established by others. All are actively building enduring brands that are informed by the past, drawn by the future, and forged continually in the present. We define this active method of brand building as the making of modern legacy. Whereas traditional legacy is static, modern legacy can no more be cemented than time itself.

Embracing this active interpretation of legacy building—one in which your story never ends—involves continually reconciling past achievements and future goals while building your brand in the present. Traditional legacy brands, for example, are strictly caretakers of the past. In contrast, modern legacy builders are also the authors of a vital today and tomorrow. Rather than simply repeating history, they add to their stories every day, harnessing their long-term personal ambitions and inspiring others to carry their brands forward. Modern legacy brands are not museums. They’re not left behind. The brand legacies you will find here are all in the making.

Guided by personal ambitions, the modern legacy builders in these pages respond quickly to new competitive challenges, unexpected crises, and evolving market conditions. Informed by long-term ambitions, these leaders are actually faster, better short-term decision makers than their nearsighted competitors. This insight led us to the counterintuitive thesis at the heart of this book: the best short-term strategy is a long-term one.

This isn’t just a book of business tactics. It’s a book about the profound transformations in business and brand building that we observed again and again throughout our research. Most important, it’s a book about how you can take advantage of these brand-building transformations as you set out to achieve your own legacy in the making.

Modern legacy builders—leaders who envision their legacies in the making as opposed to something static or in the past tense—not only think and talk about their work differently, they are transforming the entire business landscape in distinct and powerful ways. The closer we looked during the course of our research, the more it became clear that these transformative perspectives were all part of one cohesive mindset—a dynamic, visionary worldview better suited to our rapidly evolving economy than the outdated strategies of nearsighted brands looking only to survive for the short term.

Whereas short-term thinkers focus solely on conventional measures of success such as profits, growth, capturing consumers, dominating categories, and achieving their 15 minutes of fame, modern legacy builders ask more of themselves and their brands, leading to five far-reaching transformations in the way enduring brands are built in the modern age:

1.  From following institutional practices to leading with personal ambitions

2.  From attitudinal posturing to behaving your beliefs

3.  From commanding and controlling customers to influencing social movements

4.  From obeying orthodox boundaries to pioneering unconventional solutions

5.  From episodic innovation to perpetual adaptation

Together, these five transformative perspectives on brand building constitute what we call the modern legacy mindset. Each chapter of this book is devoted to exploring one of these transformations and illustrating how modern legacy builders differ from their nearsighted peers.

Additionally, to bring the five transformations of the modern legacy mindset to life, each chapter in Legacy in the Making includes the following elements:

•   Inspirations

Three stories, each with its own inspiring lesson, drawn from in-depth interviews with successful modern legacy leaders.

•   Applications

Provocative thoughts and questions about how to apply the lessons at hand to crafting your own modern legacy.

•   Summation

A summary of how the inspirations and applications covered in the chapter are transforming the world of work.

•   The Legacy Builder’s Balance Sheet

Modern methods for qualitatively gauging the impact of difficult-to-measure concepts such as ambition, behavior, influence, originality, and perseverance.

Our Personal Ambition as Authors

Although there is no shortage of business books featuring fast-twitch solutions, books based on enduring personal ambitions are few and far between. After all, shilling one short-term answer is much easier than stoking countless lasting ambitions. But we’re not here to give you all the answers; that isn’t our goal. This book is intended to help you discover your own answer. Rather than a recipe, a formula, or a step-by-step solution, we offer you a mindset for achieving your own version of the remarkable. Rather than instructions, we offer you inspiration.

Over the next couple hundred pages, we will share stories of legacies in the making across brands of all ages and in all categories. By the time you have finished this book, our hope is that you not only will be able to tell the difference between nearsighted brands mired in short-term thinking and modern brand legacies guided by long-term ambition—but you will be inspired to begin building your own legacy in the making.

Rest assured, it will be difficult. If there were shortcuts to achieving professional success and personal fulfillment while creating lasting change, many more would be doing it. There would be no need for a book like this. Therefore, bring an appetite for risk, a willingness to fail, and the resolve to keep trying. Although this book offers guiding principles and useful tools, none of the leaders highlighted in these pages got where they are by checking off boxes. Instead, they are using the modern legacy mindset to build significant brands that will endure and thrive.

The time has never been better. The scarcity of people pursuing their long-term personal ambitions—as well as the ever-increasing short-term distractions and incentives not to do this—presents a unique competitive opportunity for leaders with the modern legacy mindset.

When the economy crashes, nearsighted companies cut from all corners. But modern legacy builders do not compromise their ambitions. In fact, they rely on the principles of the modern legacy mindset to sustain them through recessions, competitive pressures, fickle sales trends, tight job markets, and any number of other unpredictable challenges. When the direction ahead is unclear, this mindset illuminates the way. As a result, the modern legacy builders profiled in the pages of this book are outperforming rivals, attracting and keeping the best talent, and changing the way others engage with their work and think about their own legacies in the making. Equipped with their insights, you too can harness your personal ambition to build a brand that lasts.

This is the end of legacy as we know it. This is the start of something new.