X.15.2018 - C'est La Vie
We incorporated Whitesell & Company, Inc. in December 2013. We went operational in April 2014. Honestly, it feels like much less than 4.5 years and I am sincerely grateful that organizations find our consulting work valuable as well as challenging to their status quo. My decision to consolidate our 30 years of intellectual property and experience into three service channels (strategy, change, coaching) was inspired by the fact that life — whether an organization or a human being — is time sensitive. Our mandate is to grow or die. C’est la vie.
Maintaining a focus on the future is what helps us get through the failures, mistakes and the unexpected fumbles that are necessary for growth and to get “there.” I coined the phrase that vision is a “…future-based current reality that guides decision making.” When we launched our first website in 1995 for my former company, Kaizen Consulting Group, we experienced the exhilaration that fuels most explorers. We were inspired and motivated by the first web page that was posted by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT computer (look up Steve Jobs for that reference) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, in 1991. The web page looked like this:
Our first website was a breakthrough for us because we were able to translate our award-winning, print graphic design onto a new, dynamic platform that transcended the text laden bulletin board systems (BBS) that dominated the internet in the early to mid-90s. It turned out that Marshall McLuhan was right — the medium IS the message. Many interactions of our website followed our original and I would like to thank our Media Director, Susan Brown, and James Wilson of Overdrive Design for keeping us in the game.
This Whitesell & Company website is more about scaffolding than gratuitous impact. We have been there. We wanted to keep our message clear, without distracting (albeit attractive) clutter. Susan did a great job creating a container that provides us with flexibility to present our message over the next few years.
Tim Berners-Lee unleashed a revolution that built upon McLuhan’s profound insight. The web has changed the way that we think about the world and, for those younger readers, it has created your world. In this time of transformational change, think for yourself and continue exploring. C’est la vie.