True leaders never retire
They say you should retire gracefully. But these four CEOs didn’t get the memo. They tell Anne Maria Nicholson how they’re still leading the way by staying relevant and achieving work/life balance in their “retirement”.
WHEN Graham Kraehe, former CEO of Southcorp and former chair of Brambles and BlueScope Steel, first switched off from the intensity of the boardroom to embrace the peace and quiet of his Toorak home in Melbourne, something felt amiss. “While I was working, I was totally organised,” he says. “I knew exactly what I was doing. I could tell you what I was doing next month.” But that wasn’t the case in retirement. “Things were less well organised, less structured, less subject to change. That’s quite a different scenario and it has taken me a while to get comfortable with it.”
Less than a year on, Kraehe is thriving and, like three other senior executives who share their stories here of life beyond the corner office, he’s still involved in business – albeit with more time for family, sport and “giving back to the community”.
Like many Australian business leaders, he is living proof that getting out of the day job doesn’t mean getting into a rocking chair. Former CEOs tend to trade enormous daily workloads – including mammoth amounts of international business travel – with days they now control and balance. And there’s a remarkable commonality among them. If some have initially felt less relevant with retirement, the sentiment has passed quickly.
Aged from 63 to 80, they all maintain non-executive board roles, contribute to charitable and philanthropic organisations and travel for pleasure. Here are their stories. MELBOURNE corporate heavyweight Graham Kraehe wasn’t prepared for his wife’s reaction when he retired at 73, later than planned. “Part of retirement is to recognise there are two parties in this change of lifestyle,” he says. “One is me and the other is my wife, Jo. She supported me throughout my career but then she said, ‘I love you but not for lunch!’”
The former CEO of Southcorp and Pacific BBA and chair of some of Australia’s biggest companies readily accepted the brush-off. “I thought that’s fine because the home has been Jo’s domain for 30 years and she doesn’t want me to be hanging around.”
Instead, Kraehe keeps an office in the city, where he goes three days a week and works from 10am to 4pm on personal finances, board work for two not-for-profit organisations and his directorship with Djerriwarrh Investments. It’s a significant reduction from a 60-hour week and constantly being on call.
“I always had a concern about the word ‘retirement’,” he says. “For me, that can mean mentally retired and I just don’t want to do that. I felt a bit of relevance deprivation syndrome – not as important as I once was – but I’m through that now.”
Life in the slower lane was anticipated but didn’t go exactly to plan. “I wanted to phase down the number of days I worked by the
time I was 65 – to three then two then one. It kind of worked like that but I had bigger non-executive roles than planned so it took me longer to get there.”
Now, he’s traded chairing BlueScope Steel, Brambles and the National Australia Bank, directorships of News Corp Australia and the Reserve Bank of Australia plus a seat on the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council for more time on the golf course and a weekly school pick-up of his grandchildren. “It’s taken six months to get into a comfortable place with the transition to a new lifestyle,” he says.
Even “ramping up to play golf” more regularly – at the exclusive Royal Melbourne Golf Club and in beachside Sorrento near the family’s holiday house – was an effort. “I don’t want to play golf three times a week like some people do. But I play bridge because it’s good for the brain.”
Playing a leading role in the country’s wine industry left Kraehe with two major legacies: a huge wine cellar and a concern for the natural environment. While running Southcorp (now delisted), he lived on the Murray River. “I saw the gradual degradation, the fish you could once catch were gone, an invasion of carp and water becoming salty. That’s why we sponsored water conservation, advocacy and research.”
It’s an interest he’s kept as a member of The Nature Conservancy Australian advisory board. “Making a contribution to society” matters more than putting his feet up, says Kraehe, explaining his reasons for joining that and the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World advisory board. “I’m not a mad greenie but I do believe every intelligent person would want to think carefully about what they can do to modify behaviour and help sustain the environment.”
This may seem at odds with the person who, while at BlueScope Steel, led the campaign against the Labor Government’s tax on carbon. “It wasn’t about opposition to... reducing carbon,” he says. “It was a ridiculous approach. No question, it would have destroyed industries that relied on coal but had zero effect on world emissions.”
Health-wise, Kraehe says he’s lighter than he’s been for the past 30 years. He has eased off drinking many of those fine cellared reds and has regular alcohol- and caffeine-free periods. Back problems from sitting too long at a desk have eased with twice-weekly Pilates classes.
“We are fortunate people but what’s really important is family. If you’ve got that right, everything else can follow.” WENDY McCarthy is renovating a new family dwelling for possibly the last time as she winds down her hectic international working life as one of Australia’s most prominent public- and private-sector leaders. Aside from running a legal firm, McCarthy headed the National Trust (NSW) and has sat on many boards, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Star City. At 75, she’s putting the finishing touches to a heritage apartment in Sydney’s Potts Point that she thinks “will see us out”.
The “us” is McCarthy and her husband, Gordon, who was diagnosed with leukaemia in the 1980s, forcing them to live partly separate lives: Wendy in the city to earn an income and Gordon in the country to improve his health after a successful bone marrow transplant. For the first time in 40 years, the couple are reuniting under one roof.
“The time came to find the property that accommodates us now in our mid-seventies and hopefully this will be the last house,” she says.
McCarthy started out as a schoolteacher in an era when women in the public service had to resign when they married. She burst into the public spotlight in the 1970s as a champion for women’s rights in education, employment and health, including the contentious areas of abortion and family planning.
As the general manager of the Australian Bicentennial Authority and, later, the CEO of the National Trust (NSW), she was required to work long hours and attend frequent after-hours events. “But there are very few times in my life that I didn’t feel I was in charge of my working life and hours,” she says. “As a young mother, I was always home at five to have dinner with the children and then I might do more work in the evenings. But we didn’t work the huge hours that people do today.”
When she was 55, having also been CEO of legal practice McCaffery Cox and chair of law firm Gadens, McCarthy changed direction to allow herself more time to “read, write and think”, setting up her own business, McCarthy Management (now McCarthy Mentoring). While the past 10 years have been busier than anticipated, with constant demands for public speaking, mentoring and board work, she has been able to manage her own time. “I love variety. I love to do a commercial board simultaneously with a not-for-profit and something in the arts.”
Time management remains essential, she says, pointing to the three screens (laptop, phone and iPad) in front of her. “If I work 18 hours a day, it would not be for more than two to three days in a row. I would have time off and catch up.” And she always remembers early advice: “There are 24 hours in a day. You work eight, play eight and sleep eight. Basically, that’s how I manage my time.”
Today, McCarthy has addressed a large Sydney conference. She addressed one in Melbourne yesterday. “The night before [the Melbourne conference], I hardly slept and I had to make an early speech at 8am. The next night I went to bed at eight and got up at nine. I store sleep. I store stress and get rid of it. That’s how I manage.”
Although she has served on 34 boards, including chairing McGrath Estate Agents, the mother of three and grandmother of eight has no desire to put her feet up. Her current portfolio includes the performing arts company Circus Oz, which she chairs, and a directorship at litigation funder IMF Bentham.
“Retirement to me sounds like disengagement from the community I live in. I still care passionately about where women fit in our society. I still care a great deal about our country and how it’s led.”
Financially, McCarthy is comfortable but keenly aware of the gender pay gap. “I’ve worked more in the public sector and the not-for-profit sector. They’re not well paid and you can’t accumulate wealth,” she says. “What I see now is that men of my age, whose careers were far less adventurous and possibly not even as successful as mine, have earned a whole lot more money. As we lead long lives, I know the emerging face of poverty in this country is female: an older woman with little superannuation, probably no partner and not much chance of having a great third age.”
Health remains a priority for McCarthy, with weekly yoga and Pilates and long daily walks. “When Gordon got leukaemia with a bad prognosis, that riveted us as a family to seize the day.” FOR many of us, visiting shopping malls is a chore. But for Steve Kulmar, who is exiting the industry that has sustained him for almost 40 years, it’s a passion. “I spend my life thinking about the retail space,” says the retail marketing expert and former champion sailor. “I love walking in shopping centres; I love talking to retailers.”
In 1980, Kulmar founded IdeaWorks and built it from a “one-man band” into a leading retail marketing services organisation working for the who’s who of retail, from Woolworths to Westfield. “We undertook all creative and marketing functions that a retailer would require. We also offered business planning, store environment design, direct marketing and catalogue production.”
The eight years from 2000 were the busiest, with Kulmar constantly on the move between offices around Australia and New Zealand. “They say a good
I STILL CARE PASSIONATELY ABOUT WHERE WOMEN FIT IN OUR SOCIETY. I STILL CARE A GREAT DEAL ABOUT OUR COUNTRY AND HOW IT’S LED.”