A Banker Goes Portable in the Nonprofit Sector
"The notion of becoming a banker was always preeminent in my mind," says forty five year old former banker Keith Darcy, looking back at the early part of his career. A third generation banker whose own career path had followed a straight uphill trajectory that took him from a position as head of the West Chester /Rockland Division of Marine Midland Bank to a position in which he acted as CEO for a joint venture between Frank B. Hall & Company and the General Reinsurance Corporation, then back to Marine Midland, where he worked on a major strategic assignment and reported to the vice chairman. Eventually, a combination of personal growth and restlessness led Darcy to leave banking and major organizations altogether.
There, on the beach, Darcy recalled a quote of the Presbyterian minister Frederick Buchner's that continues to be meaningful to him to this day: "We are called to the place where our deep joy meets the world's deep hunger." The day he read it, says Darcy, "I began to figure out where my deep joy was and where my talents and my skills and my experience could best be applied elsewhere." No stranger to major life changes, Keith Darcy decided on his fortieth birthday to go back to school to earn a master of divinity degree, and managed to be "a banker by day and a seminarian by night."
In January 1990, Darcy realized that what he really wanted to do was to start an institute for ethics and leadership. When he re turned to the bank, he basically sought to eliminate his own job and negotiate an exit package so that he could start his own foundation. The bank agreed to pay him two year's salary if he agreed to stay for one more year, thus giving Darcy a two year head start.
On his first morning at home Darcy recalls his twelve year old son Timothy asking, "Dad, if you're not in charge of the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors anymore, who are you?" As prepared as Keith Darcy thought he was for his transition, both he and his family members went through a collective identity crisis once he left the bank, in part because they all had to come to terms with the loss of status that accompanied Darcy's decision to quit his position as a prominent banker.
Darcy planned to model his ethics and leadership institute after the Aspen Institute in Colorado. As he moved forward, however, he realized that he couldn't possibly bring together the entire comprehensive model he had envisioned because it would demand far more capital and capacity than his personal service business entity possessed. In that initial planning phase, Keith Darcy lost what he estimates to be between twelve to eighteen months of his time, but he adds, "In hindsight, I might also say that gave me a time to grow and learn the subject matter I'm now dedicated to."
The realities of generating revenue helped Darcy to focus on a slice of his original model-consulting and training in ethics and leadership for corporations. Today, after two years of focusing on building that one aspect of his plan into a viable business, Keith Darcy is finding that ideas from his original, comprehensive model are beginning to reemerge, and he realizes that the future growth of his company will probably depend on developing strategic alliances with other portable executives to incorporate other facets of his plan into the business:
I never really stopped nurturing some of the other pieces [of the plan] that can probably still be developed. At first, I was not able to attend to them-I had to prioritize. But I was able to incorporate at least some of the essence of those other pieces into the business, and I can probably still develop them in alliance with other people, just not by myself. So if I meet someone with an interest or an expertise that somehow fits in with a particular part of the plan, I immediately think, "Maybe there's a way to form an alliance."
Looking back, Keith Darcy admits that in the early part of his career he was dependent upon the organization in the sense that he had a compulsive need to take care of the bank's needs as if it were "the great parent of all." "I became dependent on it," says
Darcy, "until I was able, through a sense of brokenness, to let go." Today, Darcy says:
I have found that I have become increasingly confident in what it is that I have to offer the rest of the world. I approach other people as a whole person, and what they think of me is irrelevant to what I think about myself, because now I feel whole.
