Goodbye 30-Year Retirements, Hello Encore Years

By | Feb 3, 2012

We need a new map of life. We’ve been making do with one that was fashioned for an expected longevity of threescore and 10. We shouldn’t knock that legacy. At one time, that constituted progress. But we can’t stuff a 21st century life span into a...

What Is Retirement, Anyway?

By | Oct 7, 2011

That’s the question NPR asked a few days ago, in the final segment of a series they called Life in Retirement: The Not-So-Golden Years. Here’s my answer: Retirements that promise 30 or 40 years of leisure are no longer sustainable for individuals or...

Steve Jobs’ Message for Boomers

By | Oct 7, 2011

I will remember Steve Jobs not for product design, but for life design. In the commencement address Jobs gave to Stanford undergraduates in 2005, he recounts reading a quote at 17 that said if you live each day as if it were your last, someday you’ll almost...

These People Are Changing the World

By | Nov 9, 2010

In some ways, five years doesn’t seem like such a long time. And yet, in the past five years, so much has changed, economically, politically, even demographically, as the first wave of baby boomers moved into their 60s. With many of those changes in mind, two...

How to Move Beyond the DIY Transition to Encore Careers

By | Nov 16, 2009

Editor’s note: This column appeared in BusinessWeek’s special report, “The Case Against Retirement.” After 25 years of climbing her first ladder at Hewlett-Packard, Gina Cassinelli knew it was time for a change. “All of a sudden, you wake...

Rosabeth Kanter Calls for Social Logic in ‘SuperCorp’

By | Oct 27, 2009

Last week I spent the evening at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, listening to Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter talk about her new book, SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good, and field...