“I kept a little notebook of things I would change if I was ever given the chance to run the company.”

– Leon Gorman, in a radio interview

Leon Gorman, who died last week at age 80, is an example of intergenerational business success that Mainers today would be well advised to emulate. Staff file photo

Maine is awash in tributes to Leon Gorman. A truly visionary business leader, Gorman led the transformation of L.L. Bean from a quaint little Freeport business into a global brand and the mental image of Maine for millions of people. I was stunned to read recently that Bean’s annual sales were only $4.7 million when Gorman took the helm in 1967. Even granting that such a total amounts to about $34 million in today’s prices, the growth he stimulated and oversaw is astounding. One needs to return to the paper industry innovator Hugh Chisholm that Monica Wood described in her memoir “When We Were the Kennedys” to find someone who has built so significant an enterprise in Maine.

While Mr. Gorman’s commercial, environmental and philanthropic accomplishments are enormous, his most significant legacy in my mind is the challenge his accomplishments present to all the grandchildren of Maine business founders now facing the question of generational transition.

I’ve often cited the problems that will flow from Maine’s current demographic imbalance, from the fact that we have such a bulge in the baby boomer generation and such a narrowing flow of young people following. Part of that problem arises from the more attractive and higher paying jobs that draw our young to places of apparently greater economic opportunity. But another part of the problem is the difficulty of familial business transition.

Do the children and grandchildren of founders of Maine businesses want to take up the challenge of leading the enterprise that has been their bread and butter into a new economic era? Do the parents and grandparents of such enterprises wish to pass on the torch? Is there even a torch worth passing?

To me, Leon Gorman’s little notebook – wherever it may be today – stands as a model of insight, determination and courage. The specific lessons, applicable to a $4.7 million retailer in 1967, may not be entirely relevant to all Maine businesses facing a generational transition today – though I suspect many are.

But the vision and grit they embody certainly are entirely applicable.

The buzzwords in economic development today are “startup” and “create.” Leon Gorman did not start L.L. Bean, but he certainly created an enduring enterprise that represents the best outcome any entrepreneur could hope to achieve.

In that sense, his little notebook stands as a model for the entrepreneurial solution to our demographic imbalance. It stands as a call to all children and grandchildren of Maine business founders. It cries out, “Don’t look at the tired old enterprise with all its limits, and wrong turns and mistakes and missed opportunities that have driven you crazy for years as problems to escape. Treat them instead as opportunities to bring new commercial and entrepreneurial life into the company and the state that has been your home!”

Like a newly discovered Hemingway manuscript or Picasso print, Leon Gorman’s little notebook should be pored over for years by professors at the Harvard Business School. And it should become the name for (and perhaps the bronze statuette representing) an award given each year to Maine’s best intergenerational business success story.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions Inc. He can be reached at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com

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