Residuals

A Case Study by and for the Humility-impaired

The Engine Under the Hood will profile former Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein early in the New Year, and discuss the principles which forged “the greatest leader I’ve ever met,” according to the legendary leadership guru Peter Drucker.  As 2023 unfolds, I’ll also occasionally profile my father, Thaddeus Lindner.  I’ll start today.

Frances and “Tad” never met, so far as I know, but they shared many traits, including a lifelong commitment to community service and a perennially sunny disposition that lifted the spirits and powered the engines of whoever had the good fortune to enter their optimistic orbit. Though my father was never awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom (like Frances), never wrote a book (Frances wrote or edited dozens), received just one honorary degree (Frances amassed 22), and probably “only” touched the lives of tens of thousands (versus Frances’ tens of millions), Dad’s principled leadership continues to help me in my sometimes sputtering attempt to serve the Greater Good.

Though Dad never gave me his version of Mao’s Little Red Book (which I read in my b-school class on strategy), the former teaching assistant was always teaching. Or trying to. His main formation principle was this: “Life is really all about relationships, and if you build good relationships, good transactions will follow.”

Tad Lindner in his mid-30s, circa 1967.  After returning from Tokyo in 1948 without a penny to his name, he said goodbye again to his parents in Syracuse, moved to Washington, DC, and enrolled in George Washington University on the GI Bill. He went on to law school but dropped out in 1953 to begin working together with his newlywed wife and best friend in the hopes that people would pay to park on a patch of dirt convenient to the State Department. Business was slow and the hours brutal, but the congenial entrepreneur developed a reputation for hard work and absolute integrity. “With Tad,” his partners and landlords said, “I always know I’m getting an honest count, and there’s no second set of books floating around.”    

In 1984, I was full of myself.  Having just been hand-picked by the former dean of the University of Chicago law school to be his research assistant, and then concurrently hand-picked by the 1982 Nobel laureate in Economics to join his independent study group, I felt like I imagined the Gnostics felt: omniscient, one of the illuminati, looking out (too often, condescendingly) at all the poor benighted souls.

Then my law school dropout dad turned successful entrepreneur taught me that in reality I didn’t know diddly.  And he taught me in his typically compassionate way.

“Eric,” he said to me one day in his office on Pennsylvania Avenue, six blocks west of The White House, “you’re the MBA, or soon to be, you’re the lawyer, or soon to be, so I’d really appreciate your opinion regarding a potential investment that’s come our way.  It’s not something we’d ordinarily even consider, but…”  Reaching across his desk he handed me a bound document, a prospectus of sorts: the screenplay for a film. He’d been asked to fork over $250,000, for a 5% stake—a huge sum of money for my frugal, humble-roots father, who loved reminding my three siblings and me how he’d “caddied for the swells at the Lakeshore Yacht & Country Club for two bits and a Coke, if I was lucky, and provided I’d kept them from losing balls and read their putts well.”

“Sure,” I said, “I’ll have a look,” my tone and body language probably conveying that I expected my sophisticated rationale would bedazzle McKinsey & Company, MGM, and the United States Supreme Court.  I was also eager to deliver a return on Dad’s steep investment in me (i.e., my pricey JD-MBA tuition, room, and board).  “Give me a couple days.”

A few days later, I reported back.  “I’d not touch this with a ten-foot pole.”  This time my tone and body language probably conveyed being slightly irritated that Dad had wasted my time.  His, too.  But mostly mine.

Dad smiled genuinely, indulgently; knowingly.  “Why’s that?”

“Terribly written,” I said.  “Crazy surreal storyline.  Huge gaping holes in the narrative. I couldn’t follow it at all.” I handed the scuffed-up screenplay back to him in a manner that probably said: Next time, please give me something that tests my education, will ya?  At least make it challenging?

“Okay,” he said.  “Thanks for the advice.  But I’m not gonna to take it.  I’m gonna invest.”

Dad might as well have said he was going to parachute into Poland, as the CIA had once wanted him to do, at a time when the country was basically a parking lot for Soviet tanks. “Really?  Why?”  I probably sounded like a total jerk.

His Paul Newman blue eyes twinkled like a teacher’s, not a judger’s.  “Because I’m not investing in a movie, but a relationship.  Jim and Ted Pedas own a lot of land, and your Uncle Serge [his 50/50 business partner] and I own slivers in the same parcels.  The Pedas brothers could be friends, or enemies.  We don’t want them as enemies but our relationship needs work.  If I say No to them and this film, I fear they’d take it as an insult.  I’m investing in a relationship. The movie is beside the point. That’s why.”

When Dad plunked down a quarter of a mil for a gonzo screenplay by two crackpots nobody had heard of, I “knew” he was flushing it all down the toilet.  Though I can’t recall what I said to him, I recall “knowing” I’d be able to say in the future: Told You So.

Worse, from high atop my Mt. Everest of Arrogance, I looked forward to that day.

Later, to ensure his lesson really sunk in, Dad asked me to “oversee” his investment.  So my newlywed wife and I flew to Arizona, to Sun Devil Stadium, where Joel Coen and I tossed the football around, and Ellen and I watched him and his brother Ethan fritter away part of my hoped-for inheritance. Bastards!

Raising Arizona was the second Coen brothers film.  Though many of the 20 were iconic, Ethan said it was “the last movie [Joel and I] made that made any significant amount of money.”

When my father died 33 years after it hit the theaters, he was still receiving residuals. 

I am, too.

Even before his beloved Washington Nationals won the 2019 World Series, Dad rarely went out without his Nats cap. After they won, it was pretty much glued to his head. Here he is in June, 2020, celebrating his 94th birthday. It would be his last.

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