During my career I had the opportunity to work with people of capacity in all types of organizations: academic institutions, business enterprises, professional societies and private foundations, government agencies, religious groups, etc. The reality is I had no certifiable credentials that qualified me for membership in any of these entities. Still, I possessed sufficient perceived value in the eyes of their leadership that they granted me access and gave me platforms to influence the design of processes and behavior of people within their purviews. The perceived benefits people within these organizations gained through my interactions with them led to long term working relationships that extended across several years and in the case of some, decades.

I’m at the stage of life where I need to sort through an over 30-year accumulation of “stuff” from my consulting practice while I’m still able. Then, I can digitize and make public what may be useful more generally and dispose of the rest so that family members won’t have to do it.

Aside from the physical aspects of cleaning up, I intend use this exercise as a prompt to take a deeper dive into the source of authority I carried that enabled me to do what I did during my career. My core assumption is that it came from my grounding in the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith. To explore this notion further, I plan to arrange my career output along a timeline that parallels the availability of publications and messages from the Universal House of Justice—“the international governing council of the Bahá’í Faith.” This post together with “The Universal House of Justice—April 30, 1963” marks the beginning of this effort.