LESSONS AND LEADERSHIP
When I started at Inc., just a few weeks before the pandemic, I admitted on this page that I came from a clan of failed entrepreneurs. The patriarch of that family, my grandfather and namesake, was a child of the Depression and an entirely self-made man. Sadly, he entirely unmade himself, too. Like many entrepreneurs, he saw opportunity and was creative and most definitely hard working. He went from time in a DuPont factory during World War II to owning what was then called a filling station, and from there to a school-bus company for a growing post-war town and ultimately to a construction company started when that same town discovered the joys of municipal sewer systems. Then he used what we’d call those “core competencies” to branch out into running…