Youth Training

“Dennie Welsh WAS the REAL HEIR APPARENT to Lou Gerstner to become chairman of IBM.  Unfortunately, he became incapacitated due to illness and was forced to retire.  Lou thought very highly of him and thought he was actually a very good businessman and an extraordinarily highly ethical man.”  -Wall Street Journal 

If you were blessed to know Dennie, you would understand that statement.  “God is good!” He would tell me in our weekly email exchanges during the last several years he battled a brutal terminal illness.  On January 1, 2004, he closed yet his biggest and most important pay day, as he met his Maker, whom he adored, face-to-face. Dennie, without a doubt, stored many treasures in heaven during his earthly life.   

Those that didn’t really know Dennie say he was a self-made man starting at an entry level with IBM and retiring in line to be its next chairman. I knew Dennie, and the reality was he achieved what he did because he was self-abandoned and did everything for the glory of his Lord.   

I first met Dennie in 1991, and as time passed I began to see he really liked me which I found peculiar since there was nothing I could offer him.   You see, I had many experiences during my professional golf career teaching other high-level guys.  I was even a personal golf instructor to the chairman of a fortune 500 company.  While working at their clubs, I was their “friend” because I had something they wanted, but as soon as I left, they would no longer take my calls.  It then became clear that what was between me and these other guys was a skill that could be replaced, but between Dennie and me was the Blood of Christ.   

In closing, these words of Brother Lawrence best summed up Dennie’s life.  “We ought to give ourselves up to God, with regard to things both ‘worldly and spiritual’ and seek our satisfaction only in the fulfilling of His will, whether He lead us by suffering or by comfort, for both would be equal to a soul truly resigned.”   

While I miss you dear buddy, I’m so happy that you are finally feeling better and full of God’s abundant grace which you so freely shared.  Your life was a true testimony! 

Bill Carlucci

Director

Game of Life Foundation, G.O.L.F.

January 2004

The purpose of The Dennie Welsh Business & Ethics Urban/Suburban Initiative is a dedication to the educational and vocational growth of at-risk children through promoting highly ethical living and excellence. This initiative will target high-risk children in the county. Some of the initiative’s components include life coaching for youth in the areas of skill development, financial basics, business basics, business development and reaching out to others who are where they were.     

This initiative’s design combines the knowledge and skills of suburbia with the rigorous faith and personal transparency of the urban community. It brings Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. to a culture that may never see their state college. In essence, it’s about rigorous honesty combined with abandoned faith leading to a degree earned from the University of The Have-Nots from which suburbia could benefit from attending a semester or two.  Together they develop a unity of cultural collaboration which develops a complete people lacking in nothing.   We build upon the discipline, ethics, and excellence in Dennie Welsh’s life and upon the philosophy, most high-risk families experience in parallel in the lives of suburbia, i.e., seeing one another as one, with (while not identical) multiple and interrelated life challenges. These multifaceted challenges require a comprehensive approach of excellence that recognizes and, most importantly, identifies with “haves versus have nots” lives.  The following outlines the initiative's components in more detail.    

Those kids in the suburbs don’t get a pass here. Many of them have grown up in an alternate reality of entitlement and most can wait to be sprung from the nest. They’ve grown up in big houses with overachieving part-time parents trying to fill a void while chasing an ideal they’ll never catch. They also put part of that ideal on their children’s backs as they leave the nest with no idea of “who” they are. They are then indoctrinated with radical views by another team of surrogate parents who ignites an misplaced anger and hatred which has been acutely manifested and turns it chronic.