In the mid-1990s, I was faced with the question: How do you teach a Romanian financial employee about business management and strategy? In 1996, I was an expatriate finance professional working for Colgate-Palmolive and had taken on the management of the finance team for Colgate Romania. While I had traveled in Eastern Europe for several years, this was my first permanent assignment, and I looked forward to teaching the young team about capitalism. Loung Eastern European professionals simply did not have the benefit of context when it came to management concepts.

I thought about assigning them a diet of management books but then remembered that my father had put together an "everyman's" template of readily teachable material that at the time was known as the ABCs of Insearch. I still have one of the original copies he gave me more than thirty years ago. While I had referenced the material from time to time in the early stages of my career, for the first time I looked at the entire body of work and understood its purpose. Simply put, he had taken the most fundamental elements of management theory and practice from dozens of experts and distilled the content into simple and readily teachable images and phrases for the purpose of aligning an entire organization from top to bottom. It was genius.

I have carried this material around with me from Eastern Europe to the early days of the Internet boom when I joined a start-up in NYC named DoubleClick, eventually serving as both Chief Financial Officer and Chief Technology Officer of that NASDAQ-traded public company. I then joined my father at Juris, Inc., taking over the lead of the organization as Dad battled cancer. As he recovered, I had the pleasure of working and learning from him for a few years until we sold the company to LexisNexis. More recently, I was at another NASDAQ company, Bazaarvoice—initially serving as its Chief Financial Officer and then as Chief Executive Officer of the Internet social commerce company. No matter where I have worked—I have worked in dozens of countries around the world—and no matter the business context, I continue to discover and marvel at the incredible utility of what is now titled The Language of Excellence.

I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to my father for the gift of this content. It has guided me and will continue to guide me as I evolve as a business leader and entrepreneur. I have shared the material on many occasions and the concepts are embedded, perhaps unknowingly, into any number of companies spread through the people I have had the privilege to work with throughout my career. My father has had more influence than he even knows in this regard, and it is truly wonderful to see him update the material and translate it to the age of the whiteboard.

After many years in business, I still find The Language of Excellence to be the most useful and powerful management teaching tool I've come across. I hope you, the reader, will too.

Dad, thank you for this incredible legacy. 

Stephen R. Collins