by Bob Buford
Leader To Leader, No.43, Winter 2007
You are probably going to live a whole adult lifetime that wasn’t available to your parents and grandparents.
Their life expectancy at birth was 50 years.
We have two lifetimes now.
Life I is what occurs before halftime, and Life II comes afterwards.
Most people have a pretty good plan for Life I, but few can see their way forward into Life II.
Halftime is the in-between season that occurs at about age 45, plus or minus a few years.
It’s the time I described in my first book, Halftime — the season of “now what?”
In our time, halftime really marks the end of Life I and the beginning of this whole new second adult season that I’ve identified as Life II.
Halftime used to be the beginning of the end.
Now it is the beginning of a whole new beginning: a season that for me and many others has turned out to be the richest and most meaning-filled season of all.
Peter Drucker once told me, “The strongest insight you had in Halftime was that there is more than one lifetime.”
Life II takes most people by surprise.
It’s as if they woke up one day in a new world.
Suddenly the landmarks are different.
Thanks to cutting-edge technologies and the rapid advance of science, we’ve explored all the geographic frontiers.
From microbiology to outer space, we’ve seen some amazing things.
And now, it turns out, the most challenging frontiers are human and demographic.
Here’s how Peter Drucker put it in the Foreword to my third book, which sought to explore why so many capable people are having a hard time getting traction on their second halves:
In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, I think it is very probable that the most important event these historians will see is not technology, it is not the Internet, it is not e-commerce.
It is an unprecedented change in the human condition.
For the first time — and I mean that literally — substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices.
For the first time, they will have to manage themselves.
Unfortunately, as Peter also observed, we are totally unprepared for it.
Up until maybe 1900, even in the most highly developed countries, the overwhelming majority followed their father — if they were lucky.
If your father was a peasant farmer, you were a peasant farmer.
If he was a craftsman, you were a craftsman.
There was no such thing as upward mobility.
And now suddenly, a very large number of people choose what they want to be.
And what’s more, they will have more than one career.
Most people are unprepared and they are searching for meaning in mid-life.
That it is up to us is the good news.
It’s the bad news too.
For choice brings with it uncertainty and a burden of responsibility.
The Code Breakers
Life II takes most people by surprise.
A couple of years ago, I set aside the better part of a year to embark on what I would call an interview odyssey for people seeking to crack the code on Life II.
I wanted to find the pioneers, the pathfinders out ahead of the rest of us in the new territory.
These code breakers redefine what it means to be 50 and beyond.
I wanted to find out what they were thinking and, more important, what they were doing to find meaning in Life II.
I interviewed more than 120 exceptional people — those making a meaningful difference in the lives of others and, as a by-product, living with passion and contagious enthusiasm.
These weren’t a random sample of American life.
Some were celebrities — a Heisman trophy winner, a White House chief of staff, a best-selling author, a winner of six Grammy Awards — but most were products of the so-called American Dream: all but two came from modest means, good education, finding and building on a core strength, and a sense of calling to serve others in Life II.
They were all multipliers who were making a lot of what they’ve been given to work with.
Far from just wasting away by themselves, they were deeply engaged in contributing to the lives of others.
That’s where the legacy of their lives will live on.
It’s what I call socially productive aging.
So what did I find these exceptional people doing?
Lots of different things!
They were as pluralistic as America in their approaches to Life II.
All of them were successful in the first half of their lives and each of them did what Peter Drucker described to me as repositioning for full effectiveness and fulfillment in life’s second half.
The patterns were similar, the outcomes diverse.
First, there was an intense engagement with Life I goals.
Then there was a period of questioning, “What now?
What next?”
Usually this was followed by a period of experimentation, a time for trying out new things characterized by what I call “low-cost probes.”
Often these flowed into parallel careers that ran alongside their first-half lives.
The core of the person remained the same, an entrepreneur stayed an entrepreneur … but the venue began to change.
Here are five examples of people who are finishing well:
The Visionary Public Servant
Tom Luce is a super-lawyer who repositioned himself to follow his passion for public education.
As we sat down, I asked Tom to tell me what parts of his life’s work had given him the most satisfaction.
“When I started the law firm,” he said, “my goal was to build an institution that would outlast me.
From the very beginning, my goal was to build something strong enough to survive my departure, and doing that allowed me to be free, because I knew that I could step down when the time came without regrets.
I could leave because I’d know I’d accomplished my goals, and others would take it from there.
“Most of us have different seasons in life,” I said.
“Our passions change.
Was there a point at which you felt the law firm was becoming more institutional than entrepreneurial?”
“It was entrepreneurial for a number of years,” he said.
“We worked very hard at establishing our practice and acquiring clients, but I never wanted to be a managing partner, even though I did that job for many years.
I felt that job demanded different skills, and I was more of an entrepreneur, not an institution runner.
I wanted to use my entrepreneurial gifts, so turning the job of managing partner over to someone else was an easy step for me.”
Tom’s halftime came when he ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Texas.
When people get to halftime, they have three basic choices:
- Go back: Return to Life I; in Tom’s case, that would mean returning to the law firm that bore his name.
- Go away: Retire.
- Go forward: Fulfill the destiny that Life I had prepared them for.
Tom chose to go forward.
It’s often surprising how unexpected changes of direction can lead us back to the things we’re supposed to discover.
In Tom’s case, he realized that the thing that had given him his start in life — education — was really where he wanted to focus his service.
He was the son of a single mother who worked as a sales clerk in a small shop in an upscale community.
They lived in a modest apartment, but because they were in the Highland Park School District, Tom had the opportunity to go to some of the finest schools in the country.
Good schooling made Tom’s upward mobility possible, and he never forgot that.
“I first got involved in education reform,” he told me, “because Ross Perot asked me to.
Ross was our biggest client, and he volunteered me for a couple of projects, so that’s why I did it.
Once I got involved, I was overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude for the education I’d received.
But in the background was this sense of righteous anger because I’d had such a good education, and here were kids who were being crippled for life by the very schools that should be helping them to succeed.”
Tom formed two nonprofit ventures that led public schools across the United States to measure performance based on standardized tests.
These ventures provided ideas that were central to the Bush Administration’s “No Child Left Behind Program.”
As I write this, Tom serves as Deputy Secretary of Education for Policy and Accountability in Washington, D.C.
The Nonprofit Organization Leader
Frances Hesselbein, well known to readers of this quarterly, was a devoted wife and mother who repositioned herself as a nonprofit leader.
Frances is an American icon, a genuine hero to me and countless others.
A winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award, Frances resigned 17 years ago (she most emphatically will not use the word “retired”) as head of the Girl Scouts of America.
After leaving GSA, she worked with Dick Schubert and me to start the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management (now the Leader to Leader Institute).
I asked Frances, “What do you think of when I say the word retirement?”
“I don’t understand it,” she told me, “because I come from a family that thought that was an obscene word.
My grandfather at 96 had not yet retired.
At 94 he ran for his last term of office, a four-year term.
At 96 he played a pipe organ recital for his friends and family.”
Say no to the good thing to say yes to the great thing.
Frances says she is called to the work she is doing and “when we are called we are given the energy to do the work.”
Now she is a leading champion of the nonprofit cause.
She made 50 speeches last year and she edits this quarterly journal.
The Repositioned Consultant
Tom Tierney stepped down several years ago as chief executive of Bain & Company.
Tierney is credited with building Bain into a major consultancy.
An advocate of “constellation leadership,” he is now devoted to building his brainchild, the Bridgespan Group, an independent nonprofit consulting practice designed to bridge the gap between the seemingly disparate worlds of corporate management consulting and nonprofit organizations worldwide.
He recently launched Bridgestar, an Internet-based charity designed to strengthen the leadership of nonprofit organizations.
When we talked, I wanted to get a little background on the mental and spiritual transformation that led to his change of direction.
I said, “Tom, ever since you graduated from Harvard, you’ve been on a fast track.
You’ve had a pretty fantastic ride, but as you’ve told me before, you came to the point where you wanted to give something back.
How did that happen?”
“While it was terrific to have a prominent position in a big organization like Bain,” he told me, “and while it was terrific to have that kind of money, I knew for some time that I was going to make a transition.
I asked myself, Is this my life’s calling?
Is this really my life’s work?
And when I analyzed it, I knew the answer to those questions was no.
“I really wanted to make the world a better place,” he continued.
“And as much as I respected and appreciated the work Bain was doing, it just wasn’t obvious to me that a $2 billion Bain versus a $1 billion Bain was going to satisfy that need.
So I started pursuing a parallel career.
It felt exciting.
It felt impactful,’ if that’s a word, using skills I already had.
I knew how to grow personal service businesses.”
“And best of all,” I said, “it was building on your passion to make a difference in the world.”
Change the scene before the well runs dry.
“Absolutely, But I had to let go to hold on to that passion,” he said.
“I had to let go of Bain.
I had to let go of the CEO thing.
I had to let go of the corner office.
But once I released my grip on those things, I was no longer encumbered by all the attributes of that, I was free to say, Now what do I really want to do?
What excites me?
Not what should excite me, but what really excites me.”
Tom learned that he had to say no to the good thing in order to say yes to the great thing.
The Thought Leader
Jim Collins is a best-selling author of books about business management who repositioned himself to write about nonprofit management.
His stunning monograph, “Good to Great and the Social Sector,” only 35 pages long and only available on the Internet, is probably the only self-published work ever on the best-seller lists.
It’s terrific.
Not a wasted word.
Probably the most relentlessly curious person I know, Collins has morphed from teaching at Stanford to consulting at McKinsey to opening a rock climbing school.
He now describes himself as a “self-tenured self-endowed researcher.”
Along the way, he discovered his life theme and repositioned his work around it.
“At a fairly early age,” I said, “you found your theme.”
“Actually, it was three themes,” he responded.
“The first was teaching, the second was learning, and the third was trying to find out how social systems — meaning companies and large organizations — really work at the deepest and best levels.
But in all those themes, it was clear that I was interested in research and intellectual inquiry.
When I made that discovery, I decided to go back to teach at Stanford.
And an interesting thing happened.
All my life, until that moment, I had a nasty habit of chewing my fingernails.
But from the first day I taught in a Stanford Business School classroom, I never chewed them again.”
“Because?”
I asked.
“It was as if all my life up to that point I’d had some underlying anxiety,” he said.
“I was off track and hadn’t found my niche.
But when I got into teaching and research, everything sort of clicked into place.
I thought, I’m a professor figuring out how great things work, and that’s the essence of what I am.
From that point on, I locked in on the field I’m interested in.”
Collins at a young age has accomplished everything others might covet, so I asked, “When I say the word retirement, what comes to mind?”
“I understand that change is refreshing,” he said, “but I don’t understand retirement as a concept.
In terms of economics, I could retire right now.
I’ve achieved enough that I could go off and become a full-time rock climber.
But the biggest reward for me is not to cash out; it’s to have the opportunity to continue my work.”
The Social Entrepreneur
Randy Best is a serial business entrepreneur who has repositioned himself as a serious social entrepreneur.
Randy has been starting businesses of one kind or another since he was a teenager.
He has a passion for testing himself against the limits, especially when it means challenging the status quo.
“Almost every venture I’ve been in,” he told me, “involved going against the status quo.
I was always trying to fundamentally change the way industry operates.
From the very first venture I ever attempted, there was always some significant paradigm shift in the approach I would take.”
Over more than 20 years, Randy started dozens of companies.
At one point he was involved in the management of 21 businesses at the same time.
But one day he woke up and said, “Why am I doing this?
Why do I have this need to start so many companies and take such risks?
I suppose a psychiatrist would say that I was constantly testing myself, to compensate in some way,” he said.
“But I began to think how selfish I was, always putting my family at risk, always pushing myself to see what my limits were.”
Sometimes becoming a social entrepreneur begins with one’s own issues.
Randy is dyslexic.
To this day, he told me, he has never read an entire book for himself.
He realized that his own struggles in that area could be the foundation for a new venture in the field of education.
From this emerged the Voyager program: an innovative learning initiative that has involved him in public education in a big way.
After mountains of research, Voyager chose to focus on the much-needed area of literacy.
“First, I thought, Somebody ought to do something about this.
And then I thought, That person is me.”
Ready for a new challenge, Randy knew that the goal wasn’t making millions of dollars for himself but making a difference in the lives of millions of children.
“Fortunately,” he said, “this was something I knew I could do.
I had a habit of sticking with things even when we were taking on water, and I could see that reforming public education wasn’t going to be easy.
But I knew that if I got started in this, I would never give up, and that maybe — with that kind of determination and coming at it from a slightly different angle — I could make a difference where others had failed.”
The Voyager program, which is designed to prepare public school teachers for their classroom duties and to refocus the curriculum to make sure that kids learn how to read, has been controversial from the start.
But it has also been effective, and it is now being adopted by some of the largest and most troubled school districts in the country, including New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and others.
Conclusion
In the course of these interviews, I found people who are all in charge of their own biographies.
There is a certain nonconformed majesty in the way they conduct their lives.
They are resistant to stereotypes.
Their identities are secure.
They walk to the beat of their own drummer.
They are characterized by freshness — by joie de vivre in the midst of changing and sometimes uncertain circumstances.
They don’t let things grow stale.
They are neither bored nor boring.
I found that themes endure.
Relationships endure.
Skills endure.
Basic personalities remain stable.
The scene begins to change before the well runs dry.
It’s the opposite of the famous Yeats poem.
The center holds!
They are consistent.
When a natural season is coming to an end they go on.
Go back?
Go forward?
Go away?
They always seem to find a way to go forward.
The Ten Principles:
1. Find out who you are
2. Reposition yourself for full effectiveness and fulfillment in life's second half
3. Find your existential core
4. Make your life your endgame
5. Planning doesn't work
6. You have to know your values
7. You have to define what finishing well means to you
8. You have to know the difference between harvesting and planting
9. Good intentions aren't enough. You have to define the results you're after
10. There's a downside to "no longer learning, no longer growing."
Start very early
The Emerging Knowledge Society
Allocating one’s life
Have options
Thought collector
Wisdom
The Daily Drucker
Decisions
Thinking
Effectiveness
The Essential Drucker
Leadership
From analysis to perception
Find out who you are.
One of the lessons Peter taught me through our long-term personal relationship is to find out what my strengths are and put them to work.
Managing Oneself
“Whenever people are on the road to success,” he said, “they tend to think of repositioning as something they do if they’re a failure.
But I would say that you ought to reposition when you’re a success, because that’s when you can afford it.”
Repositioning for significance makes more sense when you know who you are and where you belong.
Reposition yourself for full effectiveness and fulfillment in life’s second half.
It’s only with this knowledge of ourselves, Peter said, that you can reposition yourself for full effectiveness and fulfillment in the second half.
“Early in their careers,” he said, “people tend to have a fairly limited time frame of four years or so.
They can’t visualize what comes after that.”
By the time they achieve a measure of success, the time frame expands.
“Suddenly they begin to think about options that are 20, 30 or more years ahead of them.”
Imagine how the range of possibilities increases when you add 20 or 30 years to your frame of reference — a whole second adulthood!
Leadership
Find your existential core.
The most important thing, Peter said, is “to have faith as your existential core.”
What faith does, he said, is to provide the framework for your work, your job, your value system, your personal relationships, and all the other things that make you who you are.
Religion is a meta-system.
“A meta-system provides a reason for doing something which does not lie within the immediate situation itself.
A meta-system is a higher system outside the immediate system in which one happens to be operating.”
“There’s a strong correlation between high achievement and the ability to come to terms with life’s basic questions.”
The Daily Drucker — December 20 - 27
The Temptation to Do Good
Limits of Social Responsibility
Spiritual Values
Human Existence in Tension
The Unfashionable Kierkegaard
Return of the Demons
Integrating the Economic and Social
And he added, “I think the most successful people are those who have a strong faith.
They’re people who all their lives have believed in faith, hope, and charity, and who believe that the greatest of these is charity.”
If they have faith and hope, he said, “now they’re ready to move to charity, and there is a very substantial correlation between religious faith, religious commitment, and success as doers in the community.”
Religion is a meta-system.
“A meta-system provides a reason for doing something which does not lie within the immediate situation itself.
A meta-system is a higher system outside the immediate system in which one happens to be operating.”
Drucker and Me
The Unfashionable Kierkegaard
Citizenship through the Social Sector
The Happiness Purpose
Make your life your endgame.
The goal, Peter said, is not just a long life or even a prosperous one: it’s to make a meaningful life out of an ordinary one.
At some point everybody wonders, “What’s it all about, anyway?”
Life is often perplexing, and merely chasing “the dream” may not be enough.
The question most halftimers ask themselves is, “What do I do now?” ↓
The answer is to set your sights on achievements that really matter, that will make a difference in the world.
And set them far enough ahead of where you are today that the journey will be demanding but worth the effort.
As Peter put it, “Make your life your endgame.”
Josh Abrams story
Look at your options | Thought collector | Wisdom | Wisdom of Peter Drucker | The World is Full of Options
Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greatest results in business and career if you drop the word ‘achievement’ from your vocabulary. Replace it with ‘contribution.’
Aiming high — Peter F. Drucker
Planning doesn’t work.
Peter maintained that planning doesn’t work.
You can prepare yourself, learn what you ought to know, and expand your experience and professionalism, but ultimately, he said, “opportunity comes in over the transom,” and that means you have to be flexible, ready to seize the right opportunities when they come.
“Too much planning,” he said, “can make you deaf to opportunity.”
Knowing what you want to do, and being prepared and equipped to do it, is more important than the specific “how.”
Peter said, “Opportunity knocks, but it only knocks once.
You have to be ready for the accident.”
You have to know your values.
What questions should you be asking about yourself and your life?
Peter said, “If you don’t respect a job, not only will you do a poor job of it but it will corrupt you, and eventually it may even kill you.”
If you are a person of faith, you assume a certain value system.
But there’s a value system for your work, as well.
By way of example, Peter said, “Ninety-nine percent of all physicians should not become hospital administrators.
Why?
Because they have no respect for the job.
They’re physicians and they feel that hospital administration is a job for clerks.
Most physicians I know, including my brother, don’t respect the job.”
Knowing what you value and what you don’t can keep you from making some bad choices along the way.
You have to define what finishing well means to you.
Peter said, “I don’t think I ever in my life considered making a lot of money as major success.
My definition of success changed a long time ago.
I love doing consulting work and writing — I regularly lose track of time when I’m doing those things.
But finishing well, and how I want to be remembered, those are the things that matter now.
Making a difference in a few lives is a worthy goal.
Having enabled a few people to do the things they want to do: that’s really what I want to be remembered for.”
Peter’s definition is right on track for halftimers.
Ultimately, success has to be viewed in context, and the best context is knowing what finishing well means to you.
You have to know the difference between harvesting and planting.
For most of us, the early part of our careers is a time of planting.
It’s about finding out what we do best and where we get the most satisfaction.
During our “warrior” years we spend the majority of our time planting, building, expanding, and tending the farm.
But planting season eventually comes to an end, and the time comes to start thinking about harvesting the rewards of what we’ve sown.
Peter said, “For many years I measured my work by my output — mainly in terms of books and other writing that I was doing.
I was very productive for many years.
I am not so productive today, because these are years of harvesting rather than years of planting.”
As Ecclesiastes says, “there is a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted,” and you need to know the difference.
Good intentions aren’t enough. You have to define the results you’re after.
There has been a huge expansion in the number of nonprofits and charitable organizations the past several years.
A lot of people want to put their resources to work where they can do the most good.
Unfortunately, as Peter noted, many of them get poor results — or no results.
“The problem,” he said, “is that they don’t ask about results, and they don’t know what results they want in the first place.
They mean well, and they have the best of intentions, but the only thing good intentions are for (as the old maxim says) is to pave the road to hell.”
The best results are achieved, he said, when people ask the right questions and then partner with others who have the expertise, knowledge, and discipline to get the right results.
There’s a downside to “no longer learning, no longer growing.”
“I see more and more people,” Peter said, “who make it to their mid-40s or beyond, and they’ve been very successful.
They’ve done very well in their work and career, but in my experience, they end up in one of three groups.
One group will retire.
They usually don’t live very long.
The second group keeps on doing what they’ve been doing, but they’re losing their enthusiasm, feeling less alive.
The third group keeps doing what they’ve been doing, but they’re looking for ways to make a contribution.
They feel they’ve been given a lot and they’re looking for a chance to give back.
They’re not satisfied with just writing checks, they want to be involved, to help other people in a more positive way.”
And they’re ones who finish well.
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