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The struggles are real but so are the Strothers, Part Two
[This is PART TWO in a two-part mini-series. CLICK HERE for PART ONE.]
This series results from two people whose lives I learned about this week. One is Matthew Strother, who passed at age 36 last year. Besides wondering whether we are kin, I found his life and approach to life intriguing. You can read what I wrote about him here.
I most liked this quote from Matthew: “Consider who you are going to be in the world, not what.”
Who not what. Powerful concept.
Meet John Struggles
Seriously. That is his name: John Struggles.
I imagined meeting him.
Me: “Hello, how are you? What’s your name?”
Him: “John Struggles.”
Me, thinking he just told me of his troubles in the third person: “Ok. Gene struggles, too. Nice to meet you.”
John Struggles was born November 29, 1913, in Wilmette ILL. He died in 2005 at age 91. Struggles served as Vice President for Personnel at Montgomery Ward in the retail chain’s heyday. In 1953, Struggles left Montgomery Ward to team up with Gardner Heidrich and form one of the first executive search firms in the world, Heidrich & Struggles. They are headquartered in Chicago. They and their wives were the only four employees.
In a 2005 obituary, The New York Times shared this:
“¦an international concern, the firm today employs 1,300 people, with offices in 57 cities throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Recent clients have included the Walt Disney Company, Volvo, Office Depot, Nike, Coca-Cola, J.C. Penney, Starbucks, Honeywell and TIAA-CREF.
On the surface, Struggles’ life hardly seems to fit the name. He appears to have hatched one golden egg after another and lived a long, influential life. One is hard-pressed to feel the struggle in it all, especially one whose struggles are real”¦whose struggles are life, death, and taxes”¦whose obituary will never be a feature article in The New York Times.
I searched for more intimate information on John E. Struggles with little success. I did not find a single quote from the man, only a couple of quotes about him from his son, shared in an obituary in The Chicago Tribune“¦
“He was a brilliant businessman, and he and his partner had a lot of vision,” his son said. “One thing he did talk about is finding the right person for the right job.”
“They did some major searches for some big-time companies,” his son said. “There was a market for their vision, and it took off.”
The Unexamined Life Was Worth Living
It appears that John Struggles accomplished a great deal quietly. When he died, people did not line up to eulogize him online or in major media outlets.
On the Our Heritage page, the Heidrich & Struggles website spends two sentences on the firm’s founding partners. Two sentences!
1953
Two Men, One VisionGardner Heidrick and John Struggles meet and launch the firm in Chicago. It is among the first in the executive search industry.
I am speechless. A life with what we would term significant accomplishment dismissed in two sentences on his company’s website and remembered in bare facts on two of America’s top newspapers.
That’s all.
Matthew Strother lived 36 years and a school is named for him. He leaves us with thought-provoking quotes and a vision of an alternative approach to education and life. Struggles never seems to struggle and no one seems to care.
Most of Struggles’ life was before the proliferation of information and access via the Internet, but still”¦crickets.
Benjamin Franklin, who also missed the information superhighway ( by a couple of centuries), said, “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
I do not doubt that Struggles struggled somewhere along his 91-year journey. I can’t learn anything from them because he didn’t share anything about them that I can find and no one else shared anything substantial about him.
Conclusion
Here lies John Struggles, who lived 91 years, accumulated wealth, and left a two-sentence legacy on the company he built.
Here lies Matthew Strother, dead at 36, in whose name The Center for the Examined Life was founded by those on whose lives he had an impact.
Both men mattered, whether examined or unexamined, to those who loved, followed, and leaned on them.
So do you.