How to Make Your Mark

We all have different approaches to measuring our worth at work. Some of us tally success in dollars or promotions. Others count the problems that they've wrestled to the ground or the high-profile projects that they've led across the finish line. For others still, it's about the best team they can build or the coolest technologies they can invent. But sooner or later, in one way or another, most of us will look back on our work life and wonder, What is my legacy? What bit of workplace graffiti did I leave behind that says, "I was here"?

The good news is that there has never been a better time to think big about the kind of impact you can have. "The nature of business has changed," declares John Hamm, 40, managing director of operations at Internet Capital Group (ICG), a B2B holding company that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in entrepreneurs who are looking to make their mark in e-commerce. "It used to be that making your mark meant climbing a career ladder. It was a lot more political; it wasn't as entrepreneurial. It's not that people today are more ambitious. It's just that they can express their ambitions more openly. People get to take a shot, and that's exciting. Incidentally, that has inspired a lot of incompetent people to take a shot as well."

Ultimately, making your mark means making a contribution -- to your company, to your professional field, to your coworkers, even to the world -- by making the best use of your talents. This story is about three people from very different walks of life, in very different stages of their lives. But they have each figured out how to make their mark. The first, a PR guru turned social evangelist, aims to mass-market a new brand of feminism by creating a multimedia business juggernaut. The second is an ordinary man doing extraordinary things to help find a cure for multiple sclerosis. And the third is an inventor who understood early on the real potential of the Web and influenced the evolution of the dotcom economy. Their triumphs, setbacks, and struggles -- and the lessons that they've learned along the way -- reveal some of what's required to go beyond making a living and to make a difference.

Lynne Franks: Absolutely Determined

The soundstage at Channel 2 is awash in color -- Grecian pillars sponge-painted in peach and salmon, violet-blue backdrops with splashes of green foliage and amber flowers. It has the upscale and fussed-over look of an interior designer's loft -- not your typical TV-talk-show set of beige chairs and matching carpeting. Lynne Franks, 52, the show's host, waits offstage for her cue while the studio audience chats restlessly. She is radiant in an ocher-colored, floor-length silk skirt, tunic, and frilly shawl -- the perfect antisuit, a conscious rejection of any corporate uniform.

Nearly three years of work has led Franks to this moment: a national platform from which to share her ideas about women and business. In the next four hours, she will tape a TV special to be aired on public television throughout the United States this spring. She will talk about her life as a British-born entrepreneur who founded what would become a world-renowned PR agency at her kitchen table when she was in her twenties, as well as about her second career as a world traveler and an ardent spokeswoman for women's issues. And she'll talk about the conclusion that she has drawn from these experiences: Women work differently from men, and to embrace those differences is to embrace an agenda of change for the workplace and for women.

Her goal is to mass-market her own brand of feminism -- and in the process, to make her mark on the world.

Franks laid out her agenda in a recent best-selling book, The Seed Handbook: The Feminine Way to Create Business (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000), a blueprint for women entrepreneurs who want to start businesses that are values-driven, community-minded, and family-friendly. The book was the inspiration for this TV special, as well as for a plethora of multimedia and product ventures now being developed under the SEED (Sustainable Enterprise and Empowerment Dynamics) brand name, including a Web site with regular radio and video broadcasts, merchandise such as stationery and luggage, and live events and workshops.

"SEED is the Coca-Cola of women's empowerment as far as I'm concerned," Franks says."If I can go into supermarkets or department stores and talk to groups of women about how they can take control of their lives, whether that's through eating healthy or starting their own businesses and finding unique ways to run them, then that's very, very exciting and different. I've been to too many conferences where the same crowds of people sit around the same tables talking about the same stuff. But the question is, How do you market a new way of thinking in a way that makes women feel safe without making men feel threatened?"