EdgeOne Medical - Blog
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published on September 18, 2015 by
Someone years ago shared with me the principle of "a happy wife leads to a happy life". I chuckled, acknowledged the sage advice, and stored the catch-phrase somewhere in my brain. It wasn't until I started working with my wife Lilli as co-founder of EdgeOne Medical that I realized how true this saying was. But it wasn't just about "happiness"--it was about something more. It was about significance. Her life's significance and what I could do to support and enable her pursuit of significance.
I need to credit Harry Kraemer, former Baxter Healthcare CEO and a mentor to Lilli, on helping me make the mental leap on this idea of significance. His philosophy on values-based leadership really provides clarity on how to pursue and achieve a significant life and not just a successful one. If you want to learn more I highly recommend reading one of Harry's great books on the subject.
A Happy Wife = A Happy Life (is good)
A Significant Wife = A Significant Life (is even better)
So if I am doing the math/logic right --- I help my wife achieve a life of significance leads to me achieving a life of significance. (Though I bet Harry would argue that it is better to flip the equation and focus on creating your own life of significance and then positively affecting others to have lives of significance.)
Now the (very) hard part. How do you support and enable the pursuit and achievement of significance by your wife?
That is a question I will be trying to answer the rest of my life. However, the good news is that it all starts with values, gifts of significance, intent and having self-awareness of what they are. I greatly value helping other people achieve significance in their lives -- so does my wife. This is one of the reasons we find it so fulfilling to support other individuals and teams in developing innovative, life-improving therapeutic and diagnostic technologies through our work at our medical device and combination product development company EdgeOne Medical. The core "professional gift of significance" my wife Lilli has is the following: She is one of maybe 20 people in the world who has founded a device engineering organization for a biologics or pharma Fortune 500 firm and led it over 5-10 years to support multiple commercially successful combination products. By sharing this gift of experience and know-how with our clients she is on a daily basis making deposits into her "significant (professional) life" bank account.
Thus, It is my intent to support and enable my wife to pursue and achieve a significant life (as well as to pursue and achieve one myself). And to prove the following hypothesis:
A Significant & Happy Wife = A Significant & Happy Life
How about you? Are you explicit in your intent to support and enable the pursuit and achievement of significance by the most important parnter in your life?
I will share any learnings I have on the "How" to do this as I become aware of them. As always I am open to listening to sage advice...
EdgeOne Medical and the leaders of their Combination Product Development Services Team have been supporting the device development component of Drug/Biologic and Device Combination Product Program for the past fifteen years. Services include Strategic Product Development, Project Management, Regulatory Strategy & Submission, Quality Systems, Remediation, Risk Management, and Device Product Testing in an ISO 13485 and ISO 11608 certified lab.