Self-described as “semiretired,” after a 30-plus-year career in the executive fast lane, South African business dynamo Mark Lamberti continues to cruise through an impressive schedule that could leave men half his age in the dust. While Lamberti still actively participates in his family’s corporate and charitable concerns, he was content to let others take charge of day-to-day operations. However, ceding the reins of power was a rite of passage that led to both introspection as well as curiosity about how others in a similar boat were dealing with the end-of-career transition. Lamberti wanted to understand the process his peers were going through: how they’d come to make the life decisions they’d made, and what the repercussions of those decisions would be.
A devoted aficionado of higher education, Lamberti chose to channel his search for answers into a course of postgraduate study. Having already earned a master’s degree in business administration, his next deep dive was in pursuit of a doctorate. “I thought there’s no better way to learn than formally through scholarship at doctoral level,” Lamberti explains.
Mark Lamberti’s doctoral thesis, “Exploring Postretirement Role Identity Emergence in Public Company CEOs,” met with enthusiastic approval at the University of Pretoria’s prestigious Gordon Institute of Business Science. The newly minted “Doctor Lamberti” credits his knack for keen observation, reasoned analysis, and firsthand insights with helping him arrive at the conclusions he presented in his thesis.
“I observed a wide disparity between the postretirement lives of retired public company CEOs. Some seem to be fulfilled, active, alive, and well. Others were retiring to the coast, playing golf three times a week, and you couldn’t quite have a conversation with them in two or three years’ time. Their lives became very small,” Lamberti recalls.
Interestingly, Lamberti reports without exception, none of the CEOs he spoke with were truly prepared for retirement. Financial insecurity rarely factored into the CEO postretirement equation. Instead, the crises they were dealing with, although resource-based, were more existential: How was their health? What were their competencies? What were their networks, their support systems?
However, for the majority of CEOs trying to craft a life beyond the boardroom, Mark Lamberti says the biggest stumbling block turned out to be a form of postponement. Rather than looking forward, they were still trying to finish up old business.
“They were doing the last deal. They were trying to get their company into good shape before they left. They were trying to make sure that they had successors in place, and they were so obsessed with finishing off on a high note that none of them had really applied their minds to life after being a CEO,” Lamberti reveals. “The consequence of that was that there were serious separation issues for many of them … stresses, self-doubt, uncertainty.”
“[The] public recognition that accompanies a position at the top of an organization becomes the most meaningful dimension of their lives,” wrote Dutch management scholar and psychoanalyst, consultant, and professor Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries for an article in the Harvard Business Review. “Their life anchors are their identification with an institution of great power; influence over individuals, policies, finances, and the community; and constant affirmation of their importance as individuals and of their role as leaders.”
For many of the people Lamberti interviewed over the course of his research, one effect of retirement was akin to suddenly coming out of a long dark tunnel into an epiphany of daylight. “They would suddenly have these blinding insights into who they were and who the people around them were, because quite frankly, for many of them, that was the first time they’d been able to pause and think about themselves beyond their career” he notes.
So why do some CEOs sail into retirement full speed ahead while others get trapped in the doldrums? Generally speaking, Lamberti concluded CEOs who enjoyed active roles and identities beyond work fared much better in coming to terms with the next phase in life. “For me, the motto that comes out of that is, ‘Don’t let your business card define you,’” he avers.
Mark Lamberti took that mantra to heart early on, admitting his own transition has been relatively painless. “It’s hard to talk about this without acknowledging the good fortune of some career and life choice, but … I was always involved in activities beyond my core business roles I was on the boards of [several] external public companies. As a family we were busy people, involved in the children’s development, very keen water skiers and snow skiers and we traveled like crazy, (he and his late wife visited more than 90 countries) and I learned to fly a helicopter when I was 55. My wife and I never allowed the children to come in the way of our marriage, and we had never allowed a business to come into the way of our family … I never let my business card define me.”