From Purpose to Legacy – Built to Really Last #26 #cong24 #legacy

Synopsis:

In this follow-up to previous Congregations on Leadership (#Cong2021) and Purpose (#Cong2022), our focus shifts to Legacy—what remains after we’re no longer in the room.

This submission focuses on our work with Creme Global and emphasizes the importance of thinking about our legacy as we build the company together. It explores how knowledge, values, and technology can be developed and passed down to future generations, shaping the organization’s lasting impact.

Total Words

903

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. Legacy is about the lasting impact of our actions, culture, and values, long after we’ve moved on.
  2. Every team member plays a role in shaping the legacy of Creme Global.
  3. Sharing knowledge and fostering a shared vision, mission, and culture is crucial.
  4. Financial success in Creme Global is a measure of the value we create, but it is just as important to know that what we build today will continue to impact the future.

About Cronan McNamara:

Cronan McNamara is the founder and CEO of Creme Global, a science and tech company born out of research at Trinity College Dublin. Creme Global is at the forefront of computing for health and risk analysis. The team has built a powerful cloud-based data science platform and published over 85 peer-reviewed papers in international scientific journals.

Contacting Cronan McNamara:

You can connect with Cronan on X, LinkedIn or see his work in Creme Global.

 

By Cronan McNamara

One of my favourite business books is Built to Last by Collins and Porras. In #Cong2021, we talked about Leadership, and I wrote about the lessons from the front lines of business in Creme Global.

In #Cong2022, we took that a step further by exploring the concept of Purpose—why we do what we do and how that drives us forward. Now, Eoin encourages us to continue our journey into Legacy for #Cong24; it’s clear that Leadership and Purpose are essential chapters in the story. Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is Legacy.

Legacy is what remains when we’re no longer in the room. It’s the mark we leave on organizations, people, and the world. And importantly, it’s something that each of us at Creme Global is working to create every day.

What Story Will We Write Together?

When we speak as a team at Creme Global, I talk about the Vision, Mission, and Culture — recently, I asked the team to think about their story and the company’s Legacy. What story do we want to write for Creme Global? The idea went down well. I want everyone to feel part of that story, to feel proud of the work they’re doing and the impact it’s having. This isn’t just my story; it’s our story. Each one of us is shaping the legacy of the organisation.

In #Cong2021, I wrote about vision, mission, and values—it was really all about culture. At Creme Global, we understand the importance of culture and how it’s demonstrated in everything we do. Now, we think beyond culture to Legacy, which makes a difference in our thinking. It’s not just about the work we do today; it’s about how that work will endure, evolve, and impact others in the future.

Pride in Our Work

We want our work at Creme Global to be about more than just hitting targets or solving problems—it’s about making a lasting impact, whether we’re helping clients make better decisions through data or developing new ways to apply science in a complex world.

We need to understand that what we’re doing today is creating the foundation for something bigger. We are leaving behind a legacy, one that will continue to shape the industry, the people around us, and the future of this organization. It’s not just the leaders who create this legacy—it’s every team member, every decision, every contribution.

Why Legacy Matters

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day challenges, but we must remember that our work can have a lasting effect. Knowledge and skills can be at risk of disappearing when someone moves on. When we share knowledge, mentor others, and create systems that can grow without us, we are building something that lasts beyond any one of our tenures.

Epigenetics and the Ripple Effect

The field of epigenetics is fascinating—the idea that traits and behaviors can be passed down through generations at a biological level. It is hard to validate this concept, but I believe it certainly applies to organizations. The knowledge, values, and culture we’re fostering at Creme Global will be passed on through our actions, decisions, and culture. Our legacy will live on through more than what we do; it will also live on through how we do it.

A Legacy We Can All Be Proud Of

Financial success is an important way of keeping score—it measures the value we create and secures the company’s future. But the real win comes when we see that we’ve built something lasting—something we can be proud of.

When we encounter challenges and roadblocks in our day-to-day work, we understand these are worthy challenges. Knowing that the work we’re doing today will continue to have an impact long into the future motivates us to overcome these. That’s the legacy we’re creating together. We know that our work matters. The company is shaping the future of and influencing the next generation of scientists and innovators. It is Built to Really Last.

Discovering and Sharing your Purpose #10 #cong22

Synopsis:

This is a story about finding my purpose.

Total Words

986

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. You can discover your purpose
  2. If you don’t know yet, make decisions that keep your options open
  3. Take some time out – travel, study, read books – find out what you value
  4. When you find your purpose, share it with others

About Cronan McNamara

Cronan is the founder and CEO of Creme Global. Creme Global is a data science technology company delivering data management, scientific models and predictive analytics. Cronan enjoys technology and innovation and is driven to deliver world-class products and services, from Ireland, that make an impact globally. Cronan is also an Adjunct Professor at UCD and in his spare time, he enjoys playing competitive tennis and spending time with his family.

Contacting Cronan McNamara

You can follow Cronan on Twitter, LinkedIn or check out Creme Global

By Cronan McNamara

Discovering your Purpose

You get one go at life, so my thinking is that you may as well try to achieve something great and work on something you enjoy as you do it.

What your ‘something great’ or the ‘something you enjoy’ is up to you. And while you’re thinking about what yours is going to be, I’ll tell you about how I stumbled across mine.

You could describe it as discovering your purpose. It is not something that happens all at once, and perhaps you can only really join the dots looking backwards (as Steve Jobs once famously said), but I would argue that you probably know it deep down, somewhere in your intuition, from a fairly young age.

It is not something we think about a huge amount every day. But, of course, there are some crucial life junctures like – should I go to college? Should I take a year out or start a full-time job? Should I start my own company? What should I study? What industry would be good to work in?

These can be daunting questions and the options may seem overwhelming. As a young person, you are unlikely to be sure of the answers. So, if you are unsure, I would suggest you make decisions that keep your options as open as possible. The lean/agile philosophy – just plan your next step based on what you know now.

To help get some perspective, take some time out, do something different like travel, read books, take up a new study course or a new hobby or sport. Use the downtime and new experiences to daydream about the vision for your life. This may help you to uncover the things that are important to you and that you are really interested in.

During school, I had an aptitude for maths and science, so I chose to study science at UCD and picked Physics, Maths, Mathematical Physics and Chemistry in first year. In second year, I dropped Chemistry and then in third year, I had to make a choice (from those remaining three subjects) of which field I wanted to specialise in for my degree.

I was struggling to make a choice and I bumped into one of my friends, he said to me … “yeah, you’ve limited yourself, if only you had studied some biology in 2nd year, you would have more options”. Instead of this statement depressing me, I immediately feel better, as I realised I didn’t want to study biology, I love physics!

It immediately reframed my situation and I felt confident that I knew what I wanted to do. I chose Physics as the subject to specialise in for 3rd and 4th year and haven’t looked back. I had followed my gut in the past in choosing my path in an agile way and even when I doubted myself, I realised that the decisions I made in the past were sound and were working out OK.

I always loved to build things and during college, I found building computing models to simulate real-world situations to be very interesting. I also loved the challenge of competing in various sports, especially tennis, which is still something I do to this day.

So, from a creativity, challenge and competition point of view – the idea of starting my own business appealed to me. And naturally, the business that I wanted to create related to science, maths and computing. This was the ideal outlet for me. I found it to be a calling worthy of my efforts. You could say I found my purpose.

Sharing your purpose

I wanted the company to succeed and to be built to last. This meant two things: 1) the company must be highly aligned with my interests, so that I would be interested in it for the long term and 2) I would need a team to help me.

To build a team of like-minded individuals, it is important to articulate a purpose (vision and mission) so that others: customers, team members, stakeholders, etc. can understand and buy into it.

So, I articulate the purpose of Creme Global as clearly and as often as possible – in both my words and what I spend my time focusing on at work. A mentor of mine says ‘you have to be relentless and boring about this stuff’ so that it fully percolates through to the culture of your organisation.

Being the founder and CEO of the company, I was able to build a company whose purpose is highly aligned with my own. It provides me with fulfilling work and allows me to set a clear vision, mission and strategy for me, but more importantly for the team I work with.

To describe the purpose of our company, we articulated the vision, mission and values of the company. These are all built on the foundation of the company’s purpose.

That’s how I discovered my purpose and how my purpose became our purpose.

Leadership Skills – Lessons from the Front Lines #40 #cong21

Synopsis:

Good leadership ensures that an organisation’s Vision, Mission, Values and Strategy are articulated, connected and ultimately realised. Of the above, values are arguably the most critical. In simple terms: values (culture) = behaviours. Feedback is an important leadership skill to ensure the right culture and values develop in an organisation. A resilient leader focuses on doing the basics well every day. This should enable the organisation to grow and achieve its mission and potential.

Total Words

1,075

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. Leadership is learned on the job, but there are key skills that can be learned.
  2. The leader should connect the Vision, Mission, Values and Strategy to the daily work of every team member.
  3. The leader should look after the culture of an organisation – feedback is a key skill for this.
  4. To be resilient, focus on doing the basics well every day.

About Cronan McNamara

Cronan is Founder and CEO of Creme Global and Founder and organiser of the Predict Conference. Creme Global is a data science technology company delivering the Expert Models data science platform.

Cronan is fascinated by in creativity and innovation and is driven to deliver world class products and services, from Ireland, that make an impact globally.

In his spare time Cronan enjoys playing competitive tennis and spending time with his family

Contacting Cronan McNamara

You can follow Cronan on Twitter, LinkedIn or check out Creme Global and the Predict Conference.

By Cronan McNamara

In this article, I write about some of the key things I’ve learned about leadership from 16 years as founder and CEO of Creme Global and in particular from an executive leadership programme called Leadership for Growth that I completed in IESE, Barcelona a few years ago.

I’ve come to realise that good leadership encompasses the following elements:

  • Vision (direction)
  • Mission (purpose)
  • Values (behaviours)
  • Strategy (decisions)
  • Growth
  • Resilience

Vision

You should think of your organisation’s Vision as its North Star – what do you want the organization to be when it grows up? It is where you are always heading towards. You may need to adjust course now and again to get around obstacles, but you always tack back towards your North Star as soon as you can. Often, organisations will keep their vision statement internal and confidential.

Mission

Mission is an expression of why your organisation exists – its purpose. What impact do you want to make on the world? This is often a public statement. For example, Creme Global’s mission is to enable better decision-making in a complex world using scientific methods, computing and data.

The leader should define the vision and mission of their organisation. Input should be taken from the team and stakeholders, but ultimately the leader should take full ownership and responsibility for these. Once these are defined, the leader should quickly move on to focus on values.

Values

The maxim that culture eats strategy for breakfast is true in my experience. Culture is an expression of your organisation’s values. Values are observable by the behaviours you see in your organisation. Culture & values are the soul of your organisation – you must feel them in your heart, as well as intellectually in your mind.

Organisational values can be selected to design for the behaviours and culture that the leader wants and that will help the organisation to succeed. The values should align with the vision, mission and strategy, of course.

We have broken down our values into strategic values (that are aligned to our specific company mission and vision) and core values (the kind of values that all organisations would want to have). It is important to write both of these sets of values down. Once written down, communicated and understood, you can start to develop your organisation’s culture.

Values (or Culture) = Behaviours.

The best thing to do is to hire for the right values. Do this by using a trusted interview panel that is tuned in to understanding how the applicant’s values align with the organisations.

The leadership team needs to coach and encourage the right behaviours (and discourage the wrong behaviours) on a daily basis in the organisation. They do this by using the skill of feedback.

Feedback  

Feedback is a key leadership skill. It is a simple and effective way to set (and reset) expectations about behaviours (and hence values) in an organisation. Here are the three simple steps to effective feedback:

Positive feedback (for behaviours you want to encourage):

  1. Describe the behaviour that you observed
  2. Explain the impact of the behaviour on the organisation
  3. Congratulations!

Constructive feedback (for behaviours that need to change):

  1. Describe the behaviour that you observed
  2. Explain the impact of the behaviour on the organisation
  3. Coaching

Feedback should only be used for important (non-trivial) issues and it should be timely. Timely doesn’t have to mean straight away, but certainly as close to the time as is practically possible. The observed behaviour should be clearly observable by any independent observer.

Constructive feedback should be delivered one-on-one. Positive feedback can be given in a broader team setting or one-on-one. Finally, the 1, 2, 3 of constructive feedback should be delivered in a neutral (non-emotional) and non-judgemental manner.

Strategy

There are many things to say about strategy, but what I will say about strategy in a leadership context is as follows: strategy ultimately will boil down to tasks/jobs to be done (strategic objectives) by your team on a daily basis.

The leader’s job is to make sure that the team members (who are carrying out those jobs) understand how those tasks align with the values, mission and vision of the organisation. It’s as simple and as difficult as that!

Growth

The more you can grow, the bigger the impact you can make on your mission, so that’s a good thing. Growth is good and it brings more resources, new and interesting opportunities which should keep the team motivated, challenged and engaged.

Resilience

Resilience is demonstrated by people who have the ability and confidence to do the basics well and consistently. If you want to find a resilient person in your organisation, look for the ones that perform the basics well every day, even under pressure.

Leadership skills can be learned and developed. To be a resilient leader, focus on the basics of vision, mission, strategy, values and feedback every day. Growth will take care of itself.

I hope this article was useful to you. Good luck on your leadership journey!

 

What Value do Ideas Have as Intangible Assets? #44 #cong18

Synopsis:

Some ideas you believe in your heart, and you can’t let go of. They just make sense to you. There is a certain unassailable logic to them. No matter how or by whom they are challenged, you know you can overcome the objections. Challenges do not deter your belief in how your idea can succeed. But how valuable are they really, in the context of a business organisation? How can you really tell? And what should you do about it?

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. Intangible assets account for a significant portion of total company value in the modern economy (84% in S&P 500 in 2015).
  2. Ideas are valuable intangible assets of companies and organisations. Once they are written down, they can be protected as intellectual property
  3. How can you have great ideas? Master your subject area and if your instincts say that you have a good idea, trust it
  4. Develop a culture in your organisation to nurture ideas and put systems in place to capture and review team – these are both the CEO’s job.

About Cronan McNamara:

Cronan is Founder and CEO of Creme Global and Founder and organiser of the Predict Conference. Creme Global is a data science technology company delivering the Expert Models data science platform.

Cronan is fascinated by in creativity and innovation and is driven to deliver world class products and services, from Ireland, that make an impact globally.

In his spare time Cronan enjoys playing competitive tennis and spending time with his family

Contacting Cronan McNamara:

You can follow Cronan on Twitter, LinkedIn or check out Creme Global and the Predict Conference.

By Cronan McNamara

The mention of intangible assets in the question places this issue firmly in the context of a business or organisation.

I am interested in exploring the value of ideas in organisations, what they’re worth (if anything), how to capture them, nurture them, execute on them and ultimately exploit them.

Intangible assets continue to be the greatest asset to today’s companies. In 2015 the intangible assets of the S&P 500 companies were valued at 84% of total value.

An intangible asset is defined as an asset that is not physical in nature. Examples of intangible assets include goodwill, brand recognition, copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade names, and customer lists. You can divide intangible assets into two categories: intellectual property and goodwill.

Well, what about ideas? Are they intellectual property or goodwill? Well both, actually.

Ideas can come from the goodwill of your team, your suppliers, your customers, partners, stakeholders and others. Without goodwill, it is unlikely ideas will be forthcoming let alone acted upon.

According to Wikipedia: Intellectual property (I.P.) is defined as a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect, and primarily encompasses copyrights, patents, and trademarks. It also includes other types of rights, such as trade secrets, publicity rights, moral rights, and rights against unfair competition. Artistic works like music and literature, as well as some discoveries, inventions, words, phrases, symbols, and designs, can all be protected as intellectual property.

I.P. can be protected in law, for example, patents, copyright, trademarks and confidentiality clauses in contracts.

An idea becomes more tangible once it is written down in a white paper, a discussion document, an algorithm or software code. Before it is written down, it is essentially the goodwill of your team and once It is written down, it becomes the confidential information of the company – protected by contracts, copyright and sometimes patents.

The act of writing it down is important from both legal and value-creation points of view. But the value was essentially there all along, however, before the idea is written down, the risk is that the value can walk out the door.

Writing things down also forces people to think about the idea, elaborate on it and gives others the opportunity to extend them and provide feedback.

“Ideas are cheap, execution is everything.”

Investors often spout the phrase “ideas are cheap, execution is everything”. These are the very people who will refuse to sign an NDA for a startup pitch while at the same time insisting that they love to be in the investment game because of the opportunity, learning and new ideas (those very new ideas the startup was pitching that they could happily pass on to their existing investee companies).

But of course, execution is critical. On the flip side, execution without (good) ideas is also counterproductive! Some ideas essentially have no commercial value for any number of reasons.

According to Peter Theil in his book Zero to One, it is important to realise that we live in a power law world, where 80% of your rewards are likely to come from 20% of your efforts. How do you choose which ideas to pursue and put your efforts into when the decision could be so critical and the opportunity for success of various competing ideas is so unclear?

If you are planning to invest the next 10 years of your life in an idea, or if you are an investor planning to invest 10’s of millions of Euro in an idea. How do you know which are the ones to go for?

How to have great ideas

  • Master your subject. Spend 10,000 hours studying your area of interest and your instincts for ideas should improve.
  • Stay curious.
  • Combine two distinct things that you are passionate about.
  • Copy others, but do it better or with a different slant or philosophy.
  • Be lazy – anything that you get frustrated by because it is non-value-add and you find yourself doing repeatedly could be a candidate for automation or a new company.
  • Take advice from Jeff Bezos: focus on things that won’t change in the long term (i.e. 10+ years)
  • You can protect an idea with a patent. Ideas can be patented. Do not disclose it or it will be novelty destroying.

Do the opposite of a Lean Business Startup, i.e.

  • Risk boldness rather than triviality and incremental improvements
  • Have a vision and a plan – even a bad plan is better than no plan (rather than just stay lean and flexible and incessantly respond to the market)
  • Try to make the competition obsolete rather than iterate and compete
  • Sales matter just as much as the product. Don’t just focus on the product and underestimate sales.
  • Listen to feedback, but market research can be over-rated. If you feel strongly enough about it, stay true to your idea and vision.

Get great ideas from your team:

  • Articulate a clear vision and strategy so that your whole team can understand it. This will allow them to put ideas in the context of the company’s mission.
  • Develop a culture of open dialogue and that you value ideas with the staff in your business (especially customer-facing staff). Provide coaching and mentoring in coming up with and capturing ideas.
  • Put a system in place to capture good ideas in a backlog of ideas. We use JIRA for this and capture everything in a separate backlog for review.
  • The CEO should take responsibility for reviewing and prioritising this list on a regular basis.
  • Use Service Design workshops to unlock hidden value and ideas in your organisation. Write down the outputs of all meetings.

Don’t use Google’s 20% time

  • Google used to let any staff member work 20% of their time on any idea they like. This has essentially been cut because (I think) there was not enough structure, strategy and vision behind it.

Concluding Thoughts

In our modern knowledge-economy, where intangible assets dominate companies’ balance sheets, ideas do have significant value as intangible assets. These ideas, however, need to be captured, curated and exploited in order to realise that value. This is the job of the leadership of organisations.

You will find some that you believe in your heart, and you can’t let go of. They just make sense to you. There is a certain unassailable logic to them. No matter how or by whom they are challenged, it does not deter your belief. If the leadership in your organisation do not share your belief in those ideas, then perhaps it’s time to leave and start your own thing.

Some big ideas you know in your gut will form the basis of your life’s work. They are valuable and they are the ones you pursue.