Flunking Retirement

The first straw was in the late fall of 2000, when Allan Raymond wrecked his back putting away his boat.

Even after surgery, he was in excruciating pain. Then came 9/11. As founder and managing partner of the Minneapolis office of Korn/Ferry International, a leading executive search firm, Raymond watched helplessly as his industry’s revenues tanked 40 percent. So in 2002, when his founder’s stock from Korn/Ferry’s 1999 IPO came unlocked, Raymond, then 62, handed the reins to a handpicked successor and retired to a beach house in Naples, Florida. “I had worked since I was 13 years old,” he recalls. “I wanted to find out what it felt like to not work.”

The nonstop activity that prompted Allan Raymond to retire beckoned him to return- relaxation got boring: "I was ready to go back to work."

It felt good, at first. Raymond wanted to improve his short game so he could play competitively with his wife, an ardent golfer. He also viewed golf as his ticket to good health. “Everyone I knew who had had back surgery told me to walk, walk, walk,” he recalls.

It didn’t take long, however, before Raymond’s philosophy had morphed from Drop out, sleep in to Life’s a beach, then you die—of boredom. “That first year of liberation was pretty wonderful,” he admits. “Friends would come down from Minnesota, and I’d be really excited. We’d play golf, line up dinner dates, and listen to speakers at special Minnesota breakfasts. But then they’d leave and I’d get left behind.”

Not only was there less to talk about and fewer people to talk about it with, Raymond didn’t like the feeling of not participating in and contributing to the business community. “My big events were sitting down to a meal and playing golf,” he says. “When I wasn’t doing those things or answering my too-few e-mails and phone calls, I felt guilty.”

After just a year away, Raymond’s workplace withdrawal had reached a critical point. “Whether you’re a doctor, lawyer, or executive recruiter, you’re involved in transactionally oriented projects that have beginnings, middles, and ends,” he says. “There’s a constant stream of results that are really gratifying and fulfilling. When that professional satisfaction is taken away and not replaced with something of comparable value, there’s a vacuum, a sense of loss.”

In short, Raymond was ready to go back to work.