The company I spent nearly 40 years working for is having their 100th anniversary party this month. Five different entities have owned the corporation over the years, alternating between private ownership and Fortune 500 companies, and I was privileged to work for three of those during my tenure. I started as a summer intern and ended up running the company. I had bosses higher up in the corporate structure but I was the top corporate officer on site responsible for, basically, everything going on in the billion dollar facility. Although that entailed being on call every minute of every day, including holidays and vacations, somehow it was still a very enjoyable job. I rarely met anyone who loved what they did as much as me.
But having said that, the last six years of retirement have been even better. I’ve had to weather some health crises but I ended up sailing through those with best case outcomes. Maybe I should have retired earlier, but I don’t think so. I like having the financial lagniappe those last few years of Fortune 500 stock and bonus rewards added to our portfolio. Plus it was kind of a fun challenge to make the transition from a paternal family owned organization to a high growth hard charging corporate environment.
Companies rarely last 100 years. In fact the percentage of companies currently qualifying for that is only 0.009%. There are 540 such companies out of universe of over six million total corporations. Its kind of cool to have been a part of one of those unicorn companies for well over a third of its entire history. We all spend most of our time with our radar switched to the lowest range possible because the threats and opportunities of most concern are literally right around the corner in life. What happens in five years or in twenty is fairly abstract and subject to infinite permutations. However, there are occasions when life forces you to look at time differently. Certainly loss of a loved one does that, it confronts you with your own mortality even though it may be decades away. And this centennial celebration has confronted me in a similar way.
The year was 1922. The United Soviet Socialist Republic was founded. And we are now in a proxy war 100 years later with its remnants on both sides of the conflict. World War One, the war to end all wars, had only ended four years previously. It was a recent memory, leaving hundreds of thousands mentally and physically scarred. The Lincoln memorial was dedicated that year as well. And now we struggle as a society with which, if any, of our great historical figures had feet of clay. Wimbledon Center Court was constructed in London. The Irish civil war began. Gandhi was imprisoned by the British government. The first successful use of insulin occurred in Canada. King Tut’s tomb was discovered in Egypt. Mussolini came to power in Italy. Judy Garland was born. My late father turned three years old. And the facility where I spent most of my life working was constructed and started up.
In the next 100 years a lot more has happened, including every day of your life and every day of mine. None of us were around when my company was born, we all showed up somewhere between then and now. I got here before most of you but we are all present and accounted for today. Its fairly safe to say few of us will be around when the next 100 year anniversary of my company arrives. Maybe medical research will preserve the youngest of you, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t even bet on my company being in the next 0.009% of centennial survivors, those are staggering odds. So this will be the only 100th anniversary party I’ll be attending.
And I’m kind of excited. I left the company on good terms and still do some consulting for them. I’ll get to see a lot of former employees, some who have been retired for as much as thirty years. It will be fun to see many of my former coworkers and catch up with what’s going on in their lives. It will be a little sad as well, as I’ve lost a number of old friends I used to work with who have died since I retired. Maybe someone who used to work for me will take the opportunity to vent about some perceived wrongdoing on my part, but I doubt it. I was a fair and perhaps overly tolerant boss and did not have any enemies at work that I’m aware of.
I’ve read that having purpose is a key to being happy. Also that having purpose entails feeling like you are a part of something bigger, something with duration, that isn’t fleeting. I felt that way during my working years. My company had been providing an income to tens of thousands of people over a century of history. How many kids had we made college possible for? How many lives had our health insurance saved? How many happy retirements had we helped build? At every retirement party I attended, and there were many, my retiring employees almost always told me how lucky they felt to have worked for our company. We had very little turnover because we paid high wages and treated people fairly. All of that feels bigger than me, makes me feel like I was part of something worthwhile. And I still feel that way. And I’m grateful that a simple thing like an anniversary party caused me to stop and realize how blessed I am to have had a good job.
What about you? Do you share any of those feelings about your career if you are retired?
Or did you not particularly enjoy the work environment you were in and are very happy to have escaped it?
Or are you in the middle of the spectrum, like most people, recognizing that work is a mixed bag of good, bad and mediocre. But its something you gotta do until you can afford not to?
As usual if you don’t see a comment box click on the title of the post.
Very cool–congratulations to your company for defying the odds and making its centennial anniversary! And I’m sure your part in the matter was nothing to sneeze at 😉
Thanks Froogal, it was a pretty cool ride!
i can surely recall my earlier career when part of working for a large privately held company was the pride ownership took in providing good paying jobs. it’s great to provide that for 1000’s of people. i think that company and so many others have changed over the years with all the cuts in the name of cost savings. all that being said i’m not too proud to work for this big public company the past 17 years. but… i did good work and made the money i needed and it isn’t too far from home. in two words it was “good enough.”
Hey Freddy, good enough is still pretty good. There is no doubt that privately held companies are on the same path as megacorps, just not as far along. The relationship between employer and employee is changing.
and i almost forgot to mention i love the way you worked “lagniappe” into the post!
I love sticking in words like that. Thanks to my mom I was a voracious reader as a kid and built up a very large vocabulary. I’ve got a million rarely used words just dying to make it into print. Laniappe is one of my favorites but I will admit I always have to look it up to spell it correctly.
Congratulations, Steve.
How did it feel when you moved up from the low point of the ladder to the high points where you were basically on call 24/7?
For me, I realized that I’ve really only been a low rung of the ladder kind of person for the vast majority of my life, no one to manage, and the expectations were generally low. The higher ups had to bring in business otherwise they’d be fired. I can’t imagine moving up from this low expectations role to higher ones.
Was the transition difficult/hard/ and/or memorable?
Hi David. Oddly in refinery technical service, where I started, you are on call almost from day one. Everyone was given a pager (pre-smartphone days). You didn’t have to stay in town or anything but if something bad happened at the facility, like a power failure, all the tech service engineers got called out to help start the plant back up, that’s a several day process sometimes. Or if there was a fire we were all on the fire fighting team or the medical first responder team so we got called for that too. You did not get in trouble if you weren’t reachable so not the same as having assigned on call hours, but it happened a few times each year. As I moved up though, instead of one part of the plant being the part I was the expert on, I started being responsible for everything. At the same time I had hundreds of employees who worked for me so I could delegate fixing the problems to them. It was a pretty seamless growth path. I’ve always enjoyed the adrenaline rush of crises. In my younger days I skied too fast and on dangerous terrain, because the thrill of knowing that if you fall you could die made it crazy exciting. I’m not into entertainment that could kill me in my wiser older years. I’ve had too many friends die on the slopes or on a motorcycle or in an airplane crash. My skis do not leave the surface of the snow anymore. And I do not miss the stress of my former career at all.
It is good to see that you are happy in your retired life.
To answer your last question, I do believe that work is a mixed bag. Work puts one in problems, forces one to solve the problems, and in the process, rewards appropriately for the quality/quantity of problems one solves.
This entire problem-solving process and objective feedback (primarily in the form of money) generates happiness. I have seen people missing their joy when they retire and come out of this problem-solving-and-getting-rewarded cycle.
There is not a single person in my circle who is happy after retirement. They have no financial or health problems. Their kids are well-functioning adults. Still, these people have become unhappy.
I follow your blog because your retirement experiences are contrary to the ‘experience’ of retirement I see around me. I am middle-aged and still working. I want to fine-tune my mental model of retirement based on the experiences of happily retired people like you.