Only four days from now, my son William will marry Christine Zuniga in a lovely 150-year-old church in Cleveland’s Little Italy neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from the amazing collection of institutions in University Circle, including Case Western Reserve University, where William received his law and MBA degrees this past May, Severance Hall, where the Cleveland Orchestra performs, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.  It will be great to be back in University Circle, which holds many happy memories after my twenty-three years in Cleveland.  William, my daughter Jenny, and I spent many pleasant Saturdays and Sundays strolling through the galleries of that wonderful museum and around the Fine Arts Lagoon it overlooks.  Landing at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport this coming Friday will feel like coming home.

This is a momentous summer for William.  Not only are we going to have a wonderful party this coming weekend, as we celebrate William’s and Christine’s beginning their journey together as husband and wife.  This summer has also seen William make tremendous strides on his way to becoming an attorney-at-law.  It doesn’t seem possible that over five years have passed since William, then working for the Chief Administrative Officer of the City of New Orleans, announced to family and friends that he’d decided to make the law his career.  To be very honest, I was a bit skeptical.  That he had the necessary smarts was obvious, but I wondered if my highly artistic son, who’d excelled in theater and dance at Shaker Heights High School in Cleveland, and who was a fine arts major at Tulane University, really wanted to put himself through the grind of law school.  My memory of my one year of law school was anything but positive, so I was a reluctant cheerleader. 

Well, it turns out that William is an object lesson of what passion married with keen intelligence and abundant tenacity and discipline can achieve.  He busted his butt preparing for the LSATs, posting very impressive scores, secured a handsome scholarship at the Case Western Reserve University College of Law, and he was an academic high-achiever, graduating magna cum laude and being inducted into the Order of the Coif, which is reserved for law students in the top ten percent of their class.  He even added a fourth year to his studies, earning his MBA at CWRU’s Weatherhead School of Management as well as becoming a juris doctor.  As I sat in the lower balcony at Severance Hall this past May at William’s Law School graduation, the tremendous pride I felt was combined with a tinge of envy that my son had found his professional passion so early in his journey.  He is one young man who will leave his imprint, of that I’m 100 percent sure.

I am, by the way, a direct beneficiary of William’s graduate studies at Case Western Reserve.  He’s not only provided me with powerful consulting assistance over the past few months, taking an in-depth look at every facet of Doug Eadie & Company and coming up with a number of valuable recommendations to strengthen product development and marketing, he’s also become my partner in an exciting new venture, Governance Edge LLC.  William, as president, directs the day-to-day operations of Governance Edge, which publishes books and DVDs and offers webinars and other web-based instruction.  More on this creative father-son collaboration in my next blog.