Staging Retirement

Staging Retirement

          The way I write these blog stories is to think about what’s on my mind, think about what topics might be interesting enough to write about and then asking myself if it fits into the basic categories I have defined for myself and written about for the past five months.  Not that complicated, but fortunately, still requiring some chin-rubbing and pondering as I like to be more than just mindless in most of my pursuits in life.  I always start with a title that catches my fancy in the arena that I am seeking to write about.  Out of 225 posts so far, I have only tabled only one blog piece. I started a story called Big Sky (don’t be surprised if you see that come around sooner or later since I rarely throw anything out and always assume there must have been something to my interest of that moment), and that is still up in the air (pun intended).  I have also only a few times gone back and changed the title after writing a story.  I believe that sort of flexibility is important since I like letting my imagination wander to where it wants to go.  Call it bowing to the muse or call it being too lame to stay on track, but there have only been a few of these so I’m not too worried about the tangent-taking problem.  Indeed, my last post was to be called Driving Mister Daisy and then I changed it to Lord of the Dance once I had written all but the last bit.

          I am sitting here this afternoon, contemplating going in an hour to a reunion of my old pals at Bankers Trust.  This is not the regular gang of oldsters, but a much broader and larger group that has been organized.  As one of the Management Committee members in the final stage of BT’s life (1999), I felt it was my responsibility to attend.  Some of the people will be fun to see and there are probably a few I could skip, but I am going and missing the second Democratic Debate (or part of it) and going out the night before I leave on vacation for two weeks.  That all means that I obviously feel it’s more an obligation than a “want-to-do” thing for me.  What it makes me realize is that many of those people have been retired since that day in 1999 when we passed our swords over to Deutsche Bank.  And here I am, older, wiser, but still not retired.

          The title Staging Retirement came to me during that thought process and suggests several different things. The phrase is most likely intended to mean that there is a path to retirement that can go through a series of stages to get you gradually to where you want to go.  It could also mean that someone’s retirement is being staged, as in set-up or simulated for the audience.  Then again, my musical-theater wife and I have talked a lot over the years about how theater people give up their dreams and move on with their lives to someplace where they can even contemplate a normal retirement.  I meant the first when I came up with the thought, so let’s stick to that and not wander too much (I don’t have the time to come up with a new title).

          My old academic pal Bob told me that there were two ways to retire.  You could just quit cold turkey and stop doing what you have done for years and either do nothing or do something totally different.  The alternative, as he saw it, was to do less of what you do (three days a week for example) and ease yourself into less work and more leisure time such that you do not lose your expertise, but just deploy it less and less until you fade out of the picture.  I find both of these ideas appealing in different ways.  It is surely easier to ease your way out of work rather than just stop, but I sense that is not as fulfilling.  The freedom and liberating feeling of just stopping one day is certainly a big attraction to retirement to many.  But then again, are you at risk of losing your identity if you just stop?  Are you more prone to coming up short of money with that approach?  Is your skill lost forever and are you irreversibly headed for the slag heap?  Tough questions, but valid ones for anyone who has the freedom to choose.

          As a leader (mostly a CEO), I don’t really have much of an option to work less and less.  Leadership demands focus and immersion.  Some will say you can be of counsel to businesses and then perhaps become an advisor or board member, but I have done both and I find them to be vastly different jobs than being a leader.  But now I may have found a way to accomplish a version of the staged retirement.  One of the things I was smart enough to mention when I took my current job was that I might want to move to my house in San Diego in the future.  That was eighteen months ago.  I have now declared that I will do just that in another eight months.  People have asked if that means I will leave my post and I have said no.  It means I will work remotely and travel as needed.  That timing is now set, which was my objective in putting the stake in the ground for a set time.      

          Truth be told, I don’t know exactly how it will all work and I am not particularly bothered by that because I know how focused I am and I know that most of our business is located somewhere other than where I sit anyway. Most of my work is by email, phone and conference call or meeting.  That is all manageable from wherever I am.  But that is not what drove me to make the move.  What drove me was the knowledge that life has a way of just slipping by and I did not want retirement (a subject I have spent hours and hours contemplating and even writing and teaching about) to just happen.  I wanted to stage my entry into it and I figured that was more likely to happen if I lived remotely from where I work.  Let’s be honest, I chose San Diego as a place where I would rather be, so being there certainly factors in a more casual existence.  But my existence now is getting more casual by the day anyway.  I only wear suits when I must and I live 150 feet from my office, so I don’t have a burdensome commute.

          But I have always considered New York City to be a place of work.  After all, it is where I have worked for 41 of my 43 working years (the two years were in Gulag Toronto).  For my wife, she is a musical theater person heavily involved in cabaret these days.  She is more on the board member side than the performer side, but she does both still.  She was ready to move west a few years ago, but now the reality of a timeframe is making her eyes bug out ever so slightly.  The good news is that it is all set up like a long engagement.  We have lots of time to get ourselves ready and to stage our entry like old people getting into a swimming pool.  I just hope I find a warm spot.