“I don’t quite know what to do next,” said Simon, a media CEO. Simon had been a chief executive for 15 years, and CFO before he was 30. He had turned around private and public companies, quadrupled profits and quintupled revenue. But, with his company recently sold, Simon was considering retirement. Like many CEOs, he had had no time to plan his retirement — all his focus had been on running the company.
Each year, over one hundred CEOs retire from the S&P 1000. Even in the most well-oiled CEO succession processes, one piece is almost always missing: preparing the current CEO for the next phase in his or her career. “I was so focused on the CEO job, I didn’t spend time figuring out what I would do next,” says Scott Davis, former CEO of UPS. Bill Weldon, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson, echoes what most CEOs tell us, “I didn’t do a lot of thinking about post-employment while I was still the CEO. As a result I went off the off ramp at 110 miles an hour and quickly hit zero. Retirement was a black hole.”
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