Why the Smartest CEO’s Flunk Retirement

When I spoke with Sam Reese, currently CEO of Vistage Worldwide, it had been a decade since he miserably flunked retirement. “I thought, yeah, I’m somebody who can step away and feel like I’d accomplished a lot.” he told me.

After fifteen years at the helm of Miller Heimann, the sales training company, his plan was to cruise into the sunset or, in his case, to serve on a few boards and help private equity firms find deals he might personally invest in.

“And that’s what I started to do,” Sam said. “And I had a belief that I’d be taking every Friday off and fishing and golfing, you know, that’s what I thought was going to be a perfect life.”

“The first three or four months were fun, but then I knew it wasn’t going to work for me, because it was just completely unfulfilling. I think it’s the action that I missed—I need to feel like I’m doing something important every day that has high stakes to it.”

It’s a familiar refrain that I heard, time and time again, from the brightest, most accomplished CEOs and senior executives, while doing interviews for my new book, Unretired: How Highly Effective People Live Happily Ever After. 

Near the end of his more than six-decade consulting career, Peter F. Drucker, the dean of management gurus, warned that this would happen as 21st century chief executives found themselves unable to cope with a leisurely retirement lifestyle in the way their predecessors had.

The problem, Drucker pointed out, was that, as a consequence of leading highly technological, multifaceted and often global organizations, they would find themselves uninterested and unwilling to power down the brains they had developed to be successful at their complex jobs.

“Manual workers who have been working for forty years are physically and mentally tired long before they reach the end of their normal life expectancy,” Drucker wrote. “They are quite happy spending ten or fifteen years doing nothing, playing golf, going fishing, engaging in some minor hobby and so on. But knowledge workers are not finished.”

Far from it—in fact, the latest neuroscience has revealed that the brains of experienced knowledge executives and professionals, unless injured or diminished by illness, are equally if not more capable of high-level achievement than those of younger counterparts.

Yes, you read that correctly. Leading neuroscientists and neuropsychologists have recently documented, through experiments and new imaging methodologies, what has been apparent to many of us for a long time: our experience counts and prepares us for even greater challenges to come.

How is this possible?

Through the development of what is commonly called wisdom, but in halls of neuroscience is frequently referred to as cognitive templates, or mental shortcuts,                 which ready and position us for future accomplishments.

When we met in his New York office, Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, a noted expert on this topic explained: “this a very powerful tool that our brain possesses, which clearly requires time to develop, and which enhances our cognition.” 

“There are modules of experience, not just any kind of experience, but certain kinds of experience which enable you to encounter a technically new situation, and immediately recognize the essential features in it which are familiar, and for which you have strategies to deal with.” 

Simply put, if we’ve already been successful at launching or running a business, we don’t need to think long and hard about how to go about this again–we automatically have the required knowledge and know-how, even if it’s a very different kind of company, filled with different challenges, than we faced last time around.

Which brings us back to Sam Reese who, now in his 60’s, is CEO of Vistage Worldwide, the global peer advisory organization.

Sam’s job today involves growing the size and value of his company by offering                   cutting-edge executive development programs and services to a highly demanding and selective target crowd: younger, up and coming, business owners and CEO’s.

It’s like nothing he’s ever tackled before, but it’s stretching his brainpower and leadership skills in new and different ways and, to hear him tell it, is a heck of a lot more fun than golfing, fishing or otherwise trying to fill the void of retirement.

“I have no plans to ever retire,” he told me. “I mean, I know that I won’t. I feel embarrassed about saying that, sort of like it’s an ego thing. But I think for me it’s a feeling that I need a sense of purpose every day.”

Like an increasing number of knowledge organization CEO’s, executives and professionals in their 60’s and beyond, Sam is unretired, and intends to stay that way.

Written by Mark S. Walton.

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