Executive Vice President's Message

Reputation --> Placing the hyphen

At a recent meeting, a speaker related a valuable lesson he learned from his father--life is all about where you “place the hyphen.”  I will define this later.

We all want to feel our life has purpose and that, in some small way, we have left the world a better place because we were here.  We do this in many, many ways. Certainly one way is by our choice of careers, how and where we spend our professional time and talents, and the manner in which we treat each other. This, in essence, forms the basis of our professional reputation. 

Collectively, an organization develops its own reputation derived from the sum of its individual stakeholders, its leadership, and the manner in which it conducts its business. Having just attended my fifth forum/conference since joining CLSI in November, I can unabashedly state that our organization enjoys an outstanding reputation.  It is 8 March, and I am sitting in a hotel room at the CLMA/ASCP conference in Chicago writing this column.  At this conference alone, we have at least a half dozen volunteer presenters whose topics are CLSI documents, and the testimonials from attendees visiting our booth on the exhibit floor have been nothing short of inspiring to me.

The speaker said it wasn’t until he was about 13 that he understood what his father meant by the “hyphen.”  The hyphen was the one on everyone’s eventual tombstone between the dates of birth and death.  His message was that the only thing that really matters, in the long run, is what you do after the former and before the latter.

Thanks for being a part of CLSI.  I look forward to meeting many of you at our upcoming leadership conference and workshop in Baltimore next week.

Sincerely,
Glen [ return to top ]