Career Sunsetting

COVID has fundamentally changed our lives and careers. The last year has been an exercise in improvise, adapt, and overcome. We home office and home school. The wise have made choices right for them with getting vaccinated and social distancing.

I live on 10 acres of high desert and pine trees in Northern Nevada. I have home officed for 30 years, so not much has changed for me except avoiding people. I have also learned to use Zoom. We go grocery shopping every three weeks and I get a haircut every month.

Last July, I lost my business partner and friend of 53 years to COVID. That loss motivated me to take a cathartic look at my life and career. I will be 76 in a couple of months. I still work full time, doing virtual consulting and virtual expert witness work. My partner and I were starting a new venture when he went into the hospital.

The word retire was not in our lexicon. With any luck I will still be viably working at 86 or 96, but I must face the reality of how to prepare for the sunset of my career. My philosophy is that it would be a sin for me not to give back my vast experience to the next generation of entrepreneurs and those who are motivated students. I’ve written 13 books and given countless seminars. I don’t have another book in me and the new normal is that I will never be in another conference room.

For the last 5 months I have been writing courseware based on my quality management and expert witness experiences. It is called Forensic Business Pathology?. It is targeted at quality professionals who will become the new champions of enterprise-wide business excellence ad risk avoidance. I am partnering with Quality Digest, The Kaizen Institute and Exemplar Global. We will begin putting my course content into an LMS and hope to have it go live this summer.

One motivator in my sunsetting plan is to live long enough to reap the royalties. That has caused me to take better care of myself and keep the vessel healthy. Next is to continue to develop courseware. That will drain my brain and endow my knowledge to others. Third is to learn and adapt to the new world post COVID. One upside is that I will never have to get in another airplane.

For those of you still active in the real world, Forensic Business Pathology? can afford you a new career as a proactive campion. For those of you who are looking at the sunset of your career, I suggest you find collaborators who will allow you to put your lifetime of experiences for sharing it with others