The last exam wasn't the last exam. Callum Borchers reports in Tuesday's Journal that chief executives are heading back to class. AI changed the job faster than any of them studied for it. So they sit in weekend programs at Harvard, Texas A&M and Wyoming, sometimes under a nondisclosure agreement, and trade stories.
The market for this is big and getting bigger. Persistence Market Research puts executive education at $55.1 billion this year and forecasts $115.7 billion in 2033. Nobody leaves with a degree. Some executives come home with a single lesson. The subject isn't theirs to master, and someone else should own it. Many go for the company as much as the coursework. Bosses say the job has grown lonelier. The flatterers are gone. In their place are employees who'll rate the boss on Glassdoor, and not kindly. “There's a lot of commiserating,” says Troy Cormier, CEO of Jason's Deli, which has 200-plus locations in more than two dozen states. He earned an executive M.B.A. at Texas A&M while he was the chain's finance chief. He still goes to lunch-and-learns. The latest was about AI.
The University of Wyoming runs the Cowboy Leadership Experience, which Borchers calls the best-named program going. Participants get a hypothetical about dinging a car in a parking lot. Everyone says they'd leave a note. Then Chase Thiel, a senior associate dean, shows them the data. “The data says 70% or 80% of you are lying,” he tells them. That opens the real talk, about why the right thing is hard when it costs a client or a job.
Write the speech first
The assignment we'd steal is at Harvard Business School. Former dean Nitin Nohria helps run its New CEO Workshop. Only one in four leaders who are invited say yes, which stunned Borchers. The ones who come often feel overwhelmed. They tell Nohria they don't feel like a “master of the universe.” One of their first tasks is to write their own retirement speech. Picture the room ten years out and the words you'd want said about you. Writing that down sorts the big things from the small ones. Borchers notes anyone could do it. It sometimes takes a classroom to make us.
Our read
This is Career and Retirement · M10, and the speech is the whole point. Many retirement plans start with a number. How much, by when, at what return. The Harvard exercise starts at the other end. It asks what the years were for. Write the speech and the number gets easier, because you can see what it has to pay for. A speech about grandkids points to a move and a travel line. A speech about a second act points to keeping some work income and drawing less from savings. A speech about the boat points to the boat. We've sat with plenty of people who had the number and no speech. It's a hard way to retire. The Wyoming test matters too. Everyone says they'd leave the note. Most of us also say we'll save more next year and sit tight in a downturn. The record on that isn't much kinder.
So here's the plan item, and it isn't a spreadsheet. Write your retirement speech this week. One page, in your own words, as if it's your last day at work and the people who matter are in the room. Then open your current plan and check one thing. The biggest line in the budget should match the biggest line in the speech. If it doesn't, that's the agenda for your next review. Nobody waits for the rain to learn where the umbrella is. Nobody should wait for the party to learn what the plan was for.