It’s the summer in 1971 and a young woman is driving her Mini through the sunny alpine passes to Geneva airport to collect a dignitary for one of the first ever meetings of the European Management Forum. The woman was my mum, and the EMF later became the World Economic Forum. She was on her way to collect Edward Heath, the UK Prime Minister, who was not too pleased to be crammed into a Mini rather than a limo, but at the time the EMF was like any startup, everyone had to lend a hand. I hear stories like this whenever I speak to startup founders who are bootstrapping the business to get things off the ground.
My dad, John Nicholls, was then the partner of Klaus Schwab and co-founder of the EMF, laying the foundations for the hugely influential organization it is today. Mum was there too, shoulder to shoulder with princes and dignitaries who came to exchange ideas.
For decades, Klaus Schwab has been the face of global cooperation and enlightened leadership. But the reality seems quite different. The man who built his reputation on bringing the world together was threatening his own board members and fighting to maintain personal control at all costs. Reading the recent WSJ article (link in comments) about the implosion of Schwab, you won't read about my dad, he left the EMF in the late 70s and exactly why was between them and is lost in time.
Thinking about this, it really struck me how dangerous it is to judge our own lives and performance against those people who make it to the top. We can feel like we should be doing more to be successful, to have attained certain goals, to look and act a certain way. Open Linked In and you'll find a stream of success stories, and thanks to survivorship bias we downplay the role of luck in success. We all have a personal brand, a carefully crafted narrative but these stories are always incomplete. They're the highlight reel, not the full movie.
To me the lesson is that there is more to life than outward signs of status and success. The ends don't justify all means. Although the WEF has had undeniable impact, sometimes what matters more is if you able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you've done the right thing when no one else was looking.
Dad isn't here to see the recent news, and he certainly wasn't perfect, but I’d like to talk to him and hear more of his side of the story. Instead, I’m trying to get more stories out of mum ;-)
(Picture above is of a very cool 1970's Mum and Dad!)