An Inheritance not to Squander - The Ampersand June 2026

The Ampersand Unplugged brings you an audio version of our June 2026 edition of The Ampersand, read aloud by the author. In this edition, Adam reflects on the recent passing of his father, Dan Pekarsky—a legendary Edmonton lawyer and the man who, without either of them fully realizing it, shaped the foundational principles behind everything Adam has built.

From dinner table aphorisms to tough love critiques of this very newsletter, he makes the case that reputation isn't soft stuff, rather, it's the infrastructure upon which lasting success is built. And that sometimes the most valuable things we inherit can't be measured on a balance sheet.

You can find the full written blog on our website here.

Want to stay connected with us?
Follow us on our LinkedIn!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, um hello everyone and um welcome back to the Ampersand Unplugged. So uh this month's piece was not the piece I had intended to write. Uh you might remember that uh last month in Walking the Shop Floor, which was the 200th edition of this uh newsletter that I've been writing for 17 years, I mentioned that the June edition was already uh in production. And that was true. I I had a completely different idea in mind. It was gonna be about our firm's culture and the parallels between professional services firms and teaching hospitals and all the rest of it. Uh it's an idea I've been mulling around for for some time. Um brand, maybe a little tired, I'm a little tired, but but decent enough. And then uh six days after publishing that May edition, my dad died. And very quickly uh it became obvious to me that this was the piece I actually needed to write. Now I I hesitated for a bit because one of the things I've always tried to do with the ampersand is make sure it isn't just uh self-indulgent uh navel gazing. Uh years ago I wrote something called the test. The four criteria that I think every ampersand has to satisfy before it earns the right to hit your inbox. It first has to be well written, it has to contain actual thought leadership, it has to connect somehow to leadership, business, or executive search, and most importantly, it has to answer the question, why should anybody care? And that last one mattered a lot to me here. Because while this piece is obviously about my dad, Dan Pekarski, I realized as I was writing it that it's also about inheritance, not financial inheritance necessarily, but reputational inheritance, what gets passed down to us, what values shape us long before we fully understand them, what it means to carry a name, to build trust over decades, to try imperfectly to leave something solid behind for your kids, your colleagues, your community. The older I get, and frankly, the longer I work in executive search, the more convinced I become that reputation is undoubtedly the most valuable asset any of us ever possess. And it's also the most fragile. The theme ended up uh becoming sort of the spine of the whole piece. There's a bit of sadness, certainly, but there's humor too, I hope. Um stories about tennis matches and budgeting exercises, and my dad famously questioning my decision to go into recruiting all those years ago. But there's a little bit about leadership too, and about fathers and sons, and about business and principle and community, and the strange realization that our parents were kind of improvising too. And honestly, I I think it may be one of the more important pieces I've written in quite some time. So whether you're listening while walking the dog or driving to work or sitting on a plane somewhere or hiding from your family for twenty quiet minutes in the garage, uh thanks for being here. This is June 2026. Ampersand. Dear friends and colleagues, last month I wrote about the milestone of Ampersand edition number two hundred in Walking the Shop Floor. I described it not as a finish line but as a marker. I noted that as with any assembly line, the work continues and the June edition was already in production. The working concept at the time involved drawing parallels between our firm's culture and that of a teaching hospital. A bit tired, as is often the case by June, the tenth consecutive month of content before the summer hiatus, but a solid idea all the same. Then, six days after publishing that May edition, my dad died, and it quickly became obvious that I should instead use this space to write about him. It wouldn't be the first time I've eulogized a mentor here. In June of 2017, following the death of David Robottom, one of Alberta's towering legal figures, I wrote about a man I regarded as a friend, a client, and a teacher. Then last fall in Q school, I wrote about Quincy Smith, another mentor, another larger than life personality, another deeply influential figure who helped shape how I view business, perspective, loyalty, and success. Mentor stories, I've realized, are comparatively easy to write. Mentors arrive in adulthood, they shape pieces of you, they offer wisdom, perspective, encouragement, and scars, but from enough distance that you can still observe them somewhat objectively. Fathers are different. Fathers leave dense. To ensure that I wasn't abusing the privilege of my pen and writing something you didn't sign up for, I revisited my june twenty twenty two ampersand in which I codified the test, the four criteria that I believe any ampersand post must satisfy before publication. First, it must be well written. Second, it must demonstrate genuine thought leadership. Third, there must be some tie-in to the world of executive search and leadership. And finally, and most importantly, it must answer the question why should anyone care? If a piece doesn't satisfy those criteria, it generally stays where it belongs, tucked away in the drafts folder, perhaps awaiting discovery years from now as part of some anthology of forgotten works. On review, for any good introduction is written last, and at the risk of immodesty, I think I've accomplished the first three. As to whether you should care? Well, we'll find out. Born in nineteen thirty seven, my dad, Dan Pakarski, was a lawyer in Edmonton in the sixties and seventies, and in those circles, something of a legend. Long before I attended the University of Alberta Faculty of Law myself and embarked upon what can most charitably be described as a brief and unspectacular legal career and in all the years since. Truthfully, his looming reputation played no small role in my eventually deciding not to practice law at all. Big shoes long shadow. There are easier ways to make a living than following a highly respected father into the same profession, likely at the same firm in the same prairie city. Dad's own path had not been easy. His father died when he was sixteen years old. Suddenly, with three siblings and a family requiring support, he became the man of the house, well before anyone that age could possibly understand what that responsibility actually meant. So he did what many in that generation simply did. He carried responsibility. He put himself through law school, completing his BA and LLB in a joint five-year program, and quickly made partner at his law firm, eventually one with his name on the letterhead, Witten, Pikarski, and Vogel. After that, the family moved to Vancouver and it was on to First City Financial and then Rothschild, Canada, before ending his career at the firm he founded, the Corporate Advisory Group, a strategic advisory firm proffering wise counsel to executives in need. But increasingly I've come to understand that what he really built wasn't merely a law practice, a trust company, a Canadian banking operation, or an advisory firm. It was a reputation. Dad often lamented that he didn't work in a business that he could pass down to my brother Josh and me, no manufacturing company, no hotel chain, no family restaurant, nothing tangible for us to inherit and operate. Yet he passed down something far more valuable credibility, integrity, and the importance of community, without which very little of lasting value can be built. Those things provided both my brother and me with a tremendous head start in building our own firms. In my brother's case, Longview Communications, now FGS Longview. In mine, Pekarski and Co., now Amrop Rosen. It wasn't seed capital he gave us so much as reputational capital. One of the most consequential business decisions I made was shaped directly by those very principles. About sixteen months ago, my partners and I made the difficult decision to leave a firm we'd been recruited to and helped build because ultimately we no longer felt aligned on some core issues and bedrock values. By then, Parkinson's had already narrowed Dad's world considerably, and we never discussed the situation in any real depth, but I know him well enough to know he would have understood the decision immediately and admired it instinctively, because while reputations can create opportunities, principles are what protect them. And once those are compromised, everything else becomes very difficult to recover. One thing I've come to appreciate more deeply in recent years, both through executive search and through life generally, is that reputation is an extraordinarily fragile asset. It takes decades to build, moments to damage, and generations to either strengthen or squander. In many ways, executive search is little more than the business of reputational assessment masquerading as recruitment. Clients think they're hiring us to find resumes. In fact, they are hiring us to assess judgment, to identify trustworthiness, to determine whether someone's character will hold when things become difficult, political, exhausting, or lonely. Can this person lead? Can they be trusted? Will people follow them voluntarily? What do people say about them when they leave the room? Those are ultimately reputational questions. And increasingly, I realize my understanding of all this began long before I conducted my first interview or wrote my first candidate summary. It began around our dinner table. Dad understood something many modern leaders and businesses occasionally forget. Community and reputation are not soft stuff. They are not ancillary to success. They are the infrastructure upon which lasting success is built. He understood the importance of showing up, returning phone calls, helping younger members of the team, supporting community organizations, doing what you said you would do. Not because there was immediate commercial value in doing so, but because that was simply how serious people conducted themselves. Do people believe you? Do they trust your judgment? Will they place their own reputation in your hands? Every client who hires us is taking reputational risk themselves. Every candidate who entrusts us with confidential career conversations is extending trust. Every reference who speaks candidly is putting their own reputation on the line. And although he didn't initially understand my decision to leave law and start my recruiting career at Robert Half, who's the other half? He quipped as I nervously explained that decision over twenty-five years ago. He understood matters of trust, principle, and reputation instinctively. He was full of little aphorisms he repeated endlessly throughout our childhood and well into adulthood. They were often overly simplified. Life, as it turns out, tends to resist neat binaries and trite exercises like making a list of pros and cons. One of his favorites. Dad once told me many years ago that if someone is trying to pitch me on something, an investment, an idea, a merger, and I try my hardest to understand it, and I still don't understand it. That's not because I'm not smart. It's because it doesn't make sense. When I was away at university, which he gratefully underwrote, Dad insisted I prepare detailed budgets before each semester. The outcome was never in doubt, but that wasn't the point. The educational value lay in learning to account for things line by line. That lesson had very little to do with money. It had everything to do with accountability. The same accountability extended to tennis. My childhood passion, where dad weaponized psychological warfare decades before sports psychologists became fashionable. During tight matches, he would stare across the net, point to the palm of his hand, and signal, I've got your mind in the palm of my hand. It was infuriating. It was also highly effective. Though a fan of this newsletter, often the first to read it and send along a note, Dad could be a tough critic too. Back in October of 2022, on account of being out of the country getting a kid settled in Scotland, I, for the one and only time in 17 years, shirked my monthly responsibility of writing something original and instead reposted an article from Manage HR, a multinational publication proclaiming Pakarski and co the new leader in executive search. It was a highly complimentary article, touting our firm's successful rise in the Canadian executive search landscape. My dad's response If I may be so bold as to offer critical advice, you have to guard against coming across as growing bored, complacent, tired, etc. I know that's easier to say than to practice, but as they say, that's why you get the big box. In my eulogy, I describe Dad as, quote, the stone against which we sharpened our tools. I think it explains something important about fathers generally, and perhaps ambitious fathers specifically. Dad was tough, but fair. Principled, but pragmatic, demanding, but deeply invested. And over time I realized many of the foundational principles upon which I built my business were inherited long before I understood I was inheriting them. Things like your word matters, how you treat people matters, consistency matters. You cannot be charming and self-effacing in one moment and rude and temperamental in the next. You cannot treat clients one way, staff another, and suppliers a different way again. Reputation compounds, and eventually everyone finds out who you really are. The older I get, the more convinced I become that professional success is built less on brilliance than people think, and more on consistency, trustworthiness, and accumulated goodwill over long periods of time. In other words, it's back to that word reputation. Built quietly, repeatedly, consistently. And while our relationship could at times be complicated, there was never ambiguity about Dad's investment in me. He cared deeply, he pushed hard, he expected much, mostly from himself. It took me years to understand that part. As children, we experienced parental expectations as pressure. Only later do we realize that many demanding parents are hardest on themselves. At some point in adulthood, you also realize your parents were improvising too. Beneath the certainty and authority that was simply another human being, trying to navigate responsibility, ambition, marriage, parenting, aging, and mortality as best they could. And that brings me once more to the test. Why should anyone care? Because many people reading this are trying to trying to build something to businesses, teams, families, communities, reputations in a culture obsessed with scale, optimization, and personal branding. It's worth remembering some of the most valuable things we leave behind cannot be measured on a balance sheet. A respected name, the trust of colleagues, the goodwill of a community, children who carry forward your principles. Yes, mentor stories are easier because mentors shape parts of you. Fathers shape the foundation. And that is legacy, too. Maybe the purest form of it. At the end of his life, what dad left us was was a good name. And ultimately, that may be the most valuable inheritance of all. For my family and me, and for our kids, and theirs after them. That should be more than enough.