How to retire executives

By the time he is sixty-five—if not before—an American executive usually has a solid, built-in aversion to thinking about his old age. And his aversion has been reinforced in recent years by an extraordinary mass of dismal facts and figures that show how rapidly the U.S. population is aging. In view of what science has done to prolong life expectancy, he might easily conclude that he is destined to live out a long, dull retirement in a nation swarming with very old people.

Such a conclusion would be quite wrong, for there is one statistic on the aging population that is seldom cited. It is the arresting fact that while more Americans than ever are living to sixty-five, the average span of life after sixty-five is not much greater than it was fifty years ago. At sixty-five, a man’s life expectancy is about thirteen years, or only a year or so more than his grandfather’s—if grandfather was lucky enough to live that long.*

What may easily be more disturbing to aging executives is the prospect of sudden death after retirement. Reports about executives who have died a few months after leaving their jobs are certainly plentiful, and have created a widespread conviction that executives die much sooner than other men. But here again statistics do not support the legend. Insurance companies, in fact, know that executives and others who can afford to buy annuities actually live longer than those who simply buy insurance, which is why annuity rates are higher. Moreover, among those covered by group annuity plans, those holding large annuities (usually executives) live just as long as those with small annuities.

Shelved by the calendar

It is not the fear of early death under the stress of inactivity that makes the thought of retirement most repugnant to the average elderly, manager. What really repels him is the prospect of being forced to quit his job because his company’s pension policy arbitrarily calls for retirement at a certain age, usually sixty-five.

Until very recently, all the arguments over compulsory retirement have been focused on the aging worker. Sociologists, doctors, psychologists, economists, union leaders, social workers, bureaucrats, and politicians—and many managements—have condemned compulsory retirement as wasteful, antisocial, inhuman, and unnecessary. Their views are heated and involve issues that do not concern executives—notably the unions’ insistence on the rule of seniority. FORTUNE will examine the problems of worker retirement separately in an early issue.

Yet, basically, much of the debate over compulsory retirement applies to managers as well as workers. For example, those who oppose this policy invariably point out that chronological age is no true measure of a man’s capabilities. Conversely, many managements defend compulsory retirement, largely on three grounds: that it gets rid of inefficient personnel, opens up channels of promotion, and avoids discrimination among those retirable.

Now all these arguments, both pro and con, can be supported by some sort of evidence. All of them, however, tend to confuse the issue of retirement in an industrial economy. The case against compulsory retirement, for instance, is frequently based on (1) a questionable premise and (2) a false assumption:

The premise is that a company’s pensioning policies should be framed primarily for the individual and society, rather than for the company’s benefit. A sounder thesis would seem to be that what is good for the corporation is good for the individual and society.

The false assumption is that all companies strictly enforce their retirement policies—which they very seldom do.

The high cost of senescence

The curious thing is that the executive has been almost totally ignored in all these arguments. In the recent flood of literature, surveys, and statistics on old age, the implication is that elderly executives present no great problem, perhaps because they are so small a group and so often receive what seem to be generous pensions. Actually, it is not difficult to show that the aging manager is essentially a more significant problem, economically and psychologically, than the aging worker.

Economically, the high cost of senescent executives is painfully clear to those managements that have learned that one aging manager can lose more for the corporation than scores of inefficient old employees. Failure to retire old managers not only can stifle initiative, deaden morale, and cut efficiency all down the line; it can sink management in a bog of old ideas and over-conservative decisions. The bog may develop so gradually that managers easily mistake it for “tradition.” It is, moreover, as comfortable as any old habit. To be sure, an exceptional manager can drag himself out of it. While working on some familiar problems, one executive suddenly saw he was making the same decisions he had made twenty years before, and decided right then to retire himself. But he was truly exceptional.

Illusions of immortality

Psychologically, the decision to retire is a more complex problem for managers than for workers. At top levels, management finds itself in the difficult position of deciding its own retirement. And on lower levels, the very process of becoming a manager changes the attitude toward retiring. The higher he rises, the sharper his realization that failure to rise further is in effect the start of his retirement from the top ranks. But the more his responsibility increases, the more a manager cherishes his status and tends to identify his success with the corporation’s. He readily comes to regard himself as indispensable. Here, too, the awakening may be sudden. Thus one owner manager, who had built his income up to $150,000 by working day and night, was about to put in another evening when he realized that if he worked, that evening with his family would be lost forever. He has cut out practically all night work ever since—and his income has steadily increased.

Too often the manager also considers himself immortal—or at least one to whom a policy of compulsory retirement could not conceivably apply. This attitude, widely revered as part of the old tradition of “dying in the saddle,” is now supported by the discovery that with advancing age intellectual abilities do not deteriorate so rapidly as physical abilities—e.g., tests show that after the age of twenty the I.Q. falls off on the average only about three points per decade. Judgment, of course, should increase with age. But it can harden into “sound judgment,” which avoids the risks and changes that profits are made of. In short, those who die in the saddle may well kill the horse.

Paradoxically, management has been very slow to face these facts. And those that have begun to face them are of many minds. Some managements stoutly maintain that compulsory retirement is the only way to clear out executive deadwood and bring new ideas to top management. One executive thinks that Montgomery Ward’s autocratic, seventy-eight-year-old chairman, Sewell Avery, is “a one-man argument for compulsory retirement.” Other executives argue that the indiscriminate shelving of management brains is a serious breach of their duty to the corporation. A few managements, convinced that aging workers and managers are too radically different to be covered by the same retirement policy, favor making retirement voluntary for employees, compulsory for executives. Yet one company—Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co.—last year installed a progressive retirement plan whose operation, illustrated by the chart on this page, seems to accomplish an effective compromise among the interests of the corporation, its managers, and its employees.

Breaking the pension ceiling

Management has yet to make up its mind about a basic question: How much responsibility should the corporation assume toward its aging managers and employees? Is a decent pension enough, or should the company prepare them for the inevitable shock of separation? Many companies are now counseling old employees about their futures; few, however, are trying it with managers. But there are signs that managements are at least beginning to look their old age in the face. So far, the fact they have recognized most openly is that managers’ pensions should be bigger.

While it is true that only a few top executives work primarily for money, as they approach retirement their desire for a good pension steadily rises until it may easily dominate their thoughts about stepping down. This desire, of course, has been sharpened tremendously by inflation, by rising income taxes, which have shrunk pensions as well as the ability to save, and by falling interest rates, which have cut the return on past savings. In addition, the pension plans of many companies still put an absolute ceiling on the retirement income any executive can expect.

Until recently such pension ceilings were relatively low, and were adopted for three main reasons: (1) management assumed that well-paid top executives could provide for additional independent retirement income; (2) maximum limits would cut the cost of the pension plan; and (3) such limits would avoid unfavorable public and employee criticism. Though the last two reasons may still be valid, many companies, recognizing what taxes and inflation have done to retirement incomes, have raised the limits on pensions or removed them entirely. Thus, du Pont in 1950 lifted its pension ceiling from $15,000 to $30,000 (which was about 6 per cent of President Crawford H. Greene-wait’s salary and bonus for that year), while Best Foods, Consolidated Edison of New York, Irving Trust, National Biscuit, and many others have eliminated arbitrary ceilings entirely. A few companies, like Republic Steel, have pension ceilings as high as $50,000.

A strong case can be made for not putting any limits on executive pensions. One firm of pension experts, Towers, Perrin, Forster & Crosby, Inc., cites the experience of U.S. Steel, which started its plan in 1911, setting the compulsory-retirement age at seventy and the pension ceiling at $100 a month. The age limit was generally ignored, but when the pension ceiling later proved unpalatable to retiring top-management men, a special list of additional pensions was set up by the corporation’s New York office, and eventually several of the subsidiaries were paying a third pension to some of these men. Nevertheless, a small army of slow, old executives continued to paralyze top management. Finally, in 1931, when the corporation’s income was not enough to pay its preferred dividend, it dropped the pension limit. The corporation then felt free to enforce compulsory retirement and thereby shook off a lot of executive deadweight.

Discrimination and deferment

Under a pension plan based on average earnings an executive may be relatively worse off than lower-paid employees since his pay rises much more rapidly during his last years. This discrimination occurs even under a liberal pension plan, which, including social-security payments, will provide for each year of service a retirement income equal to 2 per cent of average annual pay. Under such a plan, a retiring worker making $3,600 who has averaged $2,400 a year for thirty years would receive $1,440, or 40 per cent of his final pay. But for a retiring $75,000-a-year executive who had averaged $25,000, the pension would come to $15,000, or only 20 per cent of his last salary. Some companies therefore have adopted supplementary formulas, such as paying those who earn over $3,600 an additional 20 per cent of average earnings for the last five or ten years. Often, however, companies have been getting around the problem of low executive pensions in other ways, notably with stock options, annuities, and deferred compensation

Deferred-pay plans have become exceedingly popular, and some are generous indeed. Most celebrated is Chrysler’s, which contracts to pay Chairman K. T. Keller $300,000 a year until he retires in 1956, and thereafter, in addition to an annual pension of $25,200, the corporation agrees to pay him $75,000 for life. (An extraordinary clause further stipulates that if the stockholders “fail” to elect him to the board, or the directors “fail” to elect him chairman, the corporation must pay him damages of $300,000 a year until 1956, after which he will still receive his pension and $75,000 a year for life.) A more usual form of contract is that under which the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. agreed to pay its chairman, P. W. Litchfield, $75,000 annually for ten years after he retired. Almost all such contracts, however, stipulate that the executive to be retired must work for the company until retirement, then serve as a consultant, and not work for a competitor. These and other provisions serve to monopolize the executive’s services, making the payments to the executive under such contracts tax deductible for the corporation, and at the same time reduce the tax burden on active executives by spreading it over the years of retirement.

Whether corporations and executives will continue to enjoy these tax benefits is still a big question. Only one of these contracts—covering a retired employee of Gimbel Bros.—has the support of a specific bureau ruling, and the inheritance-tax aspects of a similar Gimbel contract are now before the tax court. No other deferred-pay plan enjoys the bureau’s approval, let alone the backing of the courts.

In any case, bigger pensions for management apparently will be provided wherever top management considers the company able to stand the cost. Large companies generally seem ready to stand it. It has been estimated that for big manufacturing companies executive salaries represent from 4 to 6 per cent of total payroll, and pension costs for managers might amount to less than 1 per cent of payroll. The size of executive pensions varies widely, regardless of profits. But not many companies are yet willing to pay what management consultants consider a fair retirement income, i.e., 50 per cent of final salary. Even Socony-Vacuum’s generous maximum, for instance, limits pensions to 50 per cent of the average salary for the last five years.

Three side steps

Many companies, particularly small ones and those with high labor costs, have usually sidestepped the obstacle of increasing executive pensions. They do so in one of three ways: they simply retire the executive on a modest pension (or no pension at all); they keep him in his job; or they retire him and then immediately rehire him.

The choice among these three policies is seldom a simple matter of corporate economics. A company may be so young that it has not yet developed an upper stratum of old managers. Top management might then think a small pension ample enough, or might, like United Parcel Service’s management, prefer to let its executives solve their own retirement problems without a pension. When one United Parcel engineer recently retired, he moved to Florida and built himself a house. He is now growing fruit, and has arranged with the Army (he was an officer in the last war) to lecture to military and civilian executives on economic problems of preparedness. These activities, plus savings, support him and his wife.

A more common corporate decision is to retain an aging executive’s services. If he wields considerable power within top management, the company’s policy will certainly reflect his views, and the more important he considers himself, the less likely will the company be to apply compulsory retirement. Even though the directors, who are probably his close friends, may think he is no longer an effective manager, they will naturally hesitate to tell him he should “take it easy” on a pension that may amount to a small fraction of his present salary. It is much less embarrassing to let him go on managing; indeed it may be impossible for them to do otherwise, if he has financial control of the company.

Where a manager’s abilities really are essential to the company — a difficult thing to prove—he is sometimes pensioned off and rehired at a salary that will bring his pension up to what he was making before retirement. This may be done even though company policy calls officially for retirement at sixty-five, and management generally justifies such a move on the ground that it is “for the good of the company.” This may, of course, be true, and certainly was during the war when an arbitrary retirement policy would have crippled many companies. Since then, some companies that have reverted to compulsory retirements have begun to question the policy.

Recapturing the talent

Take New York’s National City Bank. The bank, which had made a few exceptions during the war, went back to a strict policy of compulsory retirement at sixty-five, because the officers believed strongly in keeping the channels of promotion open at the top. As a result the bank has lost some good men. When one of its foreign-service officers was recently retired, he immediately joined an import-export firm and thereby deprived the bank of invaluable connections and political friendships he had developed over the years. Losses of this kind have stirred National City’s pension-trust vice president, G. Warfield Hobbs III, to dig into the whole subject of retirement, and last year he became chairman of the National Committee on the Aging, which the National Social Welfare Assembly sponsored in 1950. While this committee has not taken any position on the subject of compulsory retirement, Hobbs’s conclusions are definite.

One of his convictions is that a company should have two retirement policies, one for employees, another for management. During full employment, employees should be allowed to work as long as they are able and willing, while managers should submit to arbitrary retirement at sixty-five. At the same time, Hobbs holds, a company ought to try to retain the experience and knowledge of superior executives who wish to continue by rehiring them as consultants. In doing so the company should transfer the executive’s former title and responsibilities to his successor. Hobbs would like to see National City—and other corporations—form advisory committees composed of rehired executives to work on special corporate problems.

Making the tough decision

Hobbs realizes that this retiring-rehiring system would impose on management the very task it aims to avoid with a compulsory retirement plan, i.e., deciding who should be rehired and who should not. But he claims that making tough decisions is what management is there for, and that after evaluating one another for years, the executives know whose talents and services should be retained for the benefit of the company. “These decisions will be made easier,” he says, “by adequate pensions for all executives in the company — and by adequate I mean about 50 per cent of final salary.” The danger of favoritism can be avoided, in his opinion, by having a retirement committee administer the process under explicit rules, the two main rules being (1) that the corporation actually needs the executive’s services, and (2) that he is able and willing to perform them.

The virtues of a retirement board are even more explicitly expounded by Theodore G. Klumpp, who is also active on the Committee on the Aging. Dr. Klumpp, who is president of a Sterling Drug subsidiary, Winthrop-Stearns, Inc., thinks the selection techniques now used in hiring should be applied to retiring. The retirement board should include a line executive, a staff executive from the personnel department and another from the medical department. Such a board could not only recommend who should be retired at sixty-five, but also periodically assess executives from the age of fifty-five on. Its decisions would be flexible — strict if business were slow and the company overstaffed, lenient if the company needed more managers than it had. And by reporting to the directors, the board could relieve the president of the embarrassment of discriminating among his colleagues.

To many executives, who have seen how top management usually handles the problem of retiring managers, these proposals may sound naive, for they apparently assume an impersonal attitude that rarely exists within management’s ranks. The corporation may be heartless, but management certainly is not, if only because individually each executive may expect special treatment when his own time is officially up. Consideration for the retirable manager still dominates the policies of almost all companies, and it is deep-rooted in the tradition of the owner manager who retired on his own terms and only when he was ready.

The prime problem, of course, is that few executives ever seem willing to stop. Most managements apparently still think this proprietary attitude of executives toward their jobs is far too delicate a matter for the corporation to handle. Perhaps the president will broach the subject of retirement lightly to an aging assistant during a round of golf. But as one man put it, “Top management generally considers the subject as unmentionable as bereavement.”

The indirect approach

Those managements that have begun to accept responsibility for preparing their managers for stepping down are going gently. In some cases the preparation is so indirect that the executives are probably not aware of it. One approach is through the company house organ, many of which now regularly carry stories about retired employees. While most of these feature an old favorite, the happy, carefree hobbyist, there are also reports on new money-making enterprises that retired managers, as well as employees, have undertaken.

Typical is the story in the Harvester World about the credit manager who, nine years before he retired from International Harvester, bought ten acres in Florida, planted citrus trees, and has grossed as much as $11,500 a year. The assumption is that executives in the company will read such stories “over the employee’s shoulder” and be stirred to think and plan ahead for their own retirement. Another indirect approach is to induce executives to participate in company hobby shows, which[superscript 1] may suggest the virtues of an outside interest.

Making them face it

Personnel men, however, know that it takes much more than mild suggestion to make executives face the question of retirement. A few companies have therefore set up informal counseling programs to “prepare” older managers, but such counseling rarely involves more than advising the executive what his pension will come to and perhaps asking him to decide some beneficiary details.

At Standard Oil (N.J.), whose subsidiary, Esso Standard, has developed an ambitious counseling program for employees, counselor R.L.B. Roessle usually finds it hard at first to interest executives in his services. “I have to get my head in the door,” he says, “and ask for five minutes of the executive’s time. Once I get that far, I’m lucky to get out in less than an hour.” His experience would seem to prove that, with a little urging, executives may not find it painful to discuss retirement.

There are other ways of preparing aging managers for retirement. One is to give them long vacations or leaves of absence and to give their successors the full responsibility of their jobs. When senior officers at Bankers Trust in New York reach sixty, their vacations are lengthened to two months. Similarly, Bigelow-Sanford Carpet Co. plans to grant six-month leaves to its older managers next year.

A more direct way is to hold the aging executive responsible for training his successors. At Procter & Gamble, top management men are expected to spend their last two or three years on such training. Top management doesn’t consider this “counseling”; indeed, manufacturing Vice President J. Gibson Pleasants scorns the idea that it is possible to coach an executive about his retirement. But P. & G.’s older managers who are developing men to take over their jobs obviously are going to start thinking about the future.

One man’s brain storm

So far only one company has announced a system that promises to solve most retirement difficulties. This is the plan, previously mentioned, conceived two years ago by Lewis E. Harland, personnel director of Win. Wrigley Jr. Co., and its evolution by Wrigley’s management is instructive. Up to 1947 most of Wrigley’s employees over sixty-five had chosen to go on working under the company’s voluntary-retirement plan, since pensions were inadequate, and it was possible for them to continue working and still draw pensions. So in October, 1947, Wrigley liberalized its pension plan to give those retiring, for each year of service, 1 ½ per cent of their average last three years’ pay, up to $10,000. The company also formed a retirement committee, composed of Chairman Philip K. Wrigley, President James C. Cox, and Harland, to decide who was qualified to continue working after sixty-five.

But despite larger pensions, half the employees reaching sixty-five still wanted to stay on, and 90 per cent of their requests were granted, including those of several aging executives. As the contact man between the retirement committee and employees reaching retirement age, Harland found about 50 per cent of them unhappy and reticent, because they felt they couldn’t afford to retire and because “they didn’t know what the hell to do with themselves if they did.”

Harland calls his idea for solving these problems a “brain storm.” While studying the pension plans of Wrigley’s foreign subsidiaries, he discovered that British insurance companies paid “actuarially equivalent” pensions—i.e., they spread the total value of the pension at age sixty-five over the expected life span after retirement.* Thus if a man were entitled to an annual $10,000 pension at sixty-five but did not retire until he was seventy, he would then receive $14,800 a year, since his life expectancy would have dropped from thirteen to ten years.

Harland saw that such a system of actuarially equivalent pensions would encourage older people, executives especially, to stay on and thus retard the promotions of younger men. To avoid this, he suggested to Mr. Wrigley that the pension system be joined to a system of progressively longer leaves of absence. Employees who wanted to keep on working after sixty-five could do so, but for each extra year worked they would be required to take an extra month off without pay, in addition to vacations. If an executive stayed until he reached sixty-eight, for example, he would be paid for nine months in his last year—his working time plus regular vacation.

It is the combination of these two systems that provides the essential virtues of the plan that Aetna Life Insurance Co. agreed to underwrite. Under the plan, installed by Wrigley Co. in January, 1951, employees are sent detailed information on their pension status six months before they reach sixty-five, and those who then decide to continue must state how much longer they want to work. They know that the longer they work, the larger their final pension and the less their annual pay. But at one point—somewhere between their sixty-eighth and sixty-ninth years in most cases—their pensions would be more than they would earn for eight months’ work.

To lessen the discrimination against those earning over $10,000, Wrigley has assumed the risk of granting pension credits of 1 per cent per year’s service on the last three year’s average earnings over $10,000. An executive with thirty years’ service and averaging $24,000 in his last three years, therefore, could go on working for about five years before his rising pension exceeded his shrinking salary (see chart on page 111).

The weaning process

The chief virtues of the plan, according to Mr. Wrigley, are that it puts those working after sixty-five through a gradual “weaning process,” which is financial as well as psychological. While they are getting used to a lower annual income, they are also getting used to being off the job and thinking about what they want to do in retirement. The plan “will also give the company a chance to find out if the understudies are able to carry on during the leaves of absence of the older employees.” In addition, Harland thinks the fact that their monthly rate of pay is not reduced is psychologically beneficial, since it avoids the implication that after sixty-five they are worth less to the company.

The first results of the plan look good to the retirement committee. One executive earning more than $15,000 seemed completely lost during his first month off last year, but this year, during his two months off, he reported he was beginning to enjoy life as a Florida beachcomber. Of the thirty-seven employees and two executives now trying progressive retirement, none has asked to continue working for more than four years.

The elders resist

The oldest executives, however, are not taking to the plan so easily. One is James C. Cox, board chairman at present, who is past seventy-five. During his first month’s leave last year, he came into his office once a week to clean up his desk and throw things into his wastebasket, and to attend to his only outside interest as chairman of a Chicago bank. After over fifty years with Wrigley, he is still “not thinking about complete retirement.” At the same time, he is ready to stop when his salary drops below his pension.

His long-time colleague, seventy-two-year-old William H. Stanley, sounds far more bitter about the plan, whose tapering-off process he compares to “the good meal you give the condemned before his execution.” He vigorously believes that “the pleasantest way for men to die is to work until they drop,” and that “those who created the wealth of this country worked for success—not money—for being able to tell a man to go to hell.”

Nevertheless, the new plan made him face retirement. Two years ago he started taking law courses at DePaul University—which is what he really wanted to do thirty-eight years ago before he started pulling in the Wrigley harness. And last month he resigned as vice president and secretary to devote his full time to his studies.

The Wrigley plan will undoubtedly reveal its weaknesses in time. Some managements expect that the expense of letting old managers and employees continue on a part-time basis may prove exorbitant. Harland admits that younger men may grow impatient waiting for their seniors to let go. But at least the plan answers the question of the corporation’s responsibility to its aging personnel. It wakes men up to the fact that they are responsible for their own futures.

Retirement before sixty-five?

Insurance men usually find that to young executives the idea of compulsory retirement is much less repugnant than it is to their elders. Moreover, pension plans now often include provisions for early retirement at fifty-five or sixty, with the company in some cases agreeing to pay those retiring early an additional amount equal to social-security benefits until they reach sixty-five and are eligible to claim such benefits from the government. Many employees are retiring early under such plans; the average retirement age for all Socony-Vacuum’s employees over the last twenty years, is sixty-three.

Nevertheless, very few aging executives, at Socony-Vacuum or anywhere else, have taken to the idea of quitting before sixty-five. Their interest in such a move, in fact, declines precipitously as they approach the dread deadline of stepping down at sixty-five. And even if executive pensions should go up as precipitously, it seems likely to be a long, long time before management’s big problem turns out to be premature retirement.

*For women, life expectancy at sixty-five is about fifteen years.

*Among these ex-managers: Curtiss-Wright’s chairman, Guy W. Vaughan; Sargent & Co.’s president, . Murray Sargent; Lukens Steel’s v.p. Darwin S. Wolcott; Lehigh Valley R.R.’s v.p. Harold German; National Dairy Products’ v.p. Thomas K. Carnes; Shell Oil’s v.p. J. F. M. Taylor; Mathieson Chemical’s v.p. and treasurer Howard Berry; Irving Trust’s assistant v.p. Robert H. Elmendorf; and Owens-Illinois Glass’s assistant treasurer Charles B. Rairdon.

*U.S. pension plans usually grant a fixed annual sum with payments starting at sixty-five, and if a worker retires later than this, he gets no more, even though it has been paid for. His loss is a gain for his company or its trust fund.

——————————————

Box:
HOW OLD EXECUTIVES FADE AWAY

What do executives do if they don’t die in the saddle? One former vice president, for instance, rides almost daily into New York on his old morning train just to talk with his old commuting cronies; and then, after killing most of the day gaping at newsreels, he joins the crowd on the five-twenty for the rids back to the suburbs. He has bean doing this for seven years. Apparently he refuses to accept what executives are apt to find so harrowing when they first retire—the necessity to adjust to “a woman’s world.” Another retired vice president confesses that the primary reason he comes in town to a small office each day is “to get out from under the carpet sweeper.”

In Florida and California, ex-managers are burying the frustration of inactivity in various ways. In a plush club at Miami Beach, a wealthy retired engineer from Detroit was asked why he didn’t leave the gaming tables and organize a company to develop some of the mechanical devices he had thought up in his spare time. “Aw,” he said, “I couldn’t make any money out of them.”

Another reaction to retirement is evident in that growing band of ex-managers who have hitched their Cadillacs to fancy trailers and gone down to park on Florida’s strands. Often all they seek is anonymity. One retired executive who had joined a trailer colony near Fort Myers didn’t want his new-found friends—carpenters, mechanics, and clerks—to know what his job had been, since “it would spoil everything” if they knew he was getting a big pension.

Some ex-managers last longer than others, but very often, once the tension of the job is broken while overeating continues, arteriosclerosis soon catches the idle executive with a stroke. Those who stay alive have no great secret. Their best advice seems to be to get interested in something new, and preferably before retirement. Executives in their forties and fifties are planting trees on their farms, and plan to sell Christmas trees or nursery stock when they’re retired. Many ex-managers are taking government jobs; the purchasing agent for the state of Illinois is a retired Sears, Roebuck executive. Others are running welfare campaigns, serving on hospital boards, doing anything that gives them the sense of being useful. There is Harold R. Hall, who retired as manager of Procter & Gamble’s Drug Products Division in 1949 to become a research professor at Harvard’s Business School, where he is working on a study of executive retirement—and is guarding his findings as though they were the formula for a new dentifrice.

And there are now several management-consultant firms manned by retired executives. One of these firms, Management Counselors, Inc., of New York, was organized two years ago by Alfred L. Hart, an energetic ex-distributor for General Electric who decided to retire at fifty-four after building up a nice business on Long Island. Hart first tried raising purebred cattle on his farm, but found it too hard to hire hands during the war. Still full of business drive, he finally interested a few other retired executives in pooling their services as management consultants. The firm now includes fifty former top management men* offering “2,000 years of experience” in practically everything from comptrollership, production, and sales to “governmental relations.”

Some executives do better than others in retirement, and those who have been wise enough not to devote themselves totally to business seem to do best of all.