Freedom at Daylight

An ex-colleague and good friend of mine recently asked me in the course of a casual conversation, "How is your retired life?".

That question ignited my reflective neurons and set me thinking feverishly. I realized that I was feeling quite peaceful along with a sense of gratitude ever since my exit from the organizational arena, that spanned a vast zone of punctuated turbulence in my moderately exciting career. Perhaps, I may be one of those rare breed of "survivors" who retired unhurt after being "matrixed" in more ways than one across the corporate landscape that I traversed over the years. I was always uniquely placed at the fulcrum of the "matrix" (like or unlike Keanu Reeves):

• between two managers in the same organization and department.
• between the business unit leadership and corporate headquarters in the same city.
• between the country entity and corporate headquarters, each in a different continent across time zones.
• between two different organizations, one being the client for the other, again located in different geographies (when I jokingly used to quip - "working for two companies with the salary of one").

Reflecting on the simple but profound question once again, I understood that with retirement, I had gained "freedom", in more ways than one, that appears more precious than any crown jewel or a platinum gift today, because of the following late realizations of the obvious....

1. No self-inflicted or external pressure to race ahead.....of others in the game in the corporate field. A race where the "finish-line" keeps moving, disappearing or non-existent.
2. No need to play one-upmanship games with colleagues, peers or juniors to prove a point. Actually, now there are hardly any points left to prove!
3. No gun held by the boss at my head, around expired assignment deadlines or work not done to his/her expectations.
4. No boss to please in the first place! I can proudly claim to have obtained two practical degrees simultaneously (without incurring any cost to the organization): B.E.(Balancing Egos) and M.E (Massaging Egos), That is proof of a successful "continuing higher education while being employed" policy.
5. No pressure to be perceived as smart in meetings by asking intellectually convoluted questions or spewing out confusing management jargon during animated discussions to impress the audience, or even arguing with one or more participants to dominate the proceedings.
6. No need to grab the limelight, attract a spotlight or jostle for power and influence through backstage maneuvers or pre-meeting hush-hush conversations with authority figures and corporate figureheads.
7. No rear-view mirror tactics required to protect our backsides from wily unanticipated clandestine assaults or politically motivated insidious surgical strikes by crafty detractors.
8. No turf battles to engage in, no territories to protect or defend.
9. No apprehension of getting back-stabbed by any lurking "Brutus" within the team or by an invisible Machiavellian mastermind at any level in the organization.
10. No more performance reviews, thankfully! This dimension provides immense relief, especially since the infamous "bell curve, forced distribution etc. and other performance management fads took the stage along with multi-source feedback that felt more like being shafted 360-degrees, in spite of giving your blood, sweat and tears to the organization.
11. No more craving for hefty increments (that turn out as peanuts anyways), bonuses or illusory promotions; in other words, no need of climbing career ladders that lean against the "wrong" walls.
12. No plotting, scheming, shadow-boxing or performing mental gymnastics or mind-games with random inconsequential fringe-elements who intend to waste their own time and others'.
13. No more reading between-the-lines in oblique messages and hazy communication from the senior management bigwigs or corporate head-honchos, when we missed reading the actual lines themselves in the bargain.
14. No more explosions from an overflowing email inbox with a daily score of a hundred unread emails, cluttered spam folders and vanishing supposedly super-important messages.
15. No more pouring over complex Excel spreadsheets with millions of columns and zillions of rows filled with six-digit numbers each to the third decimal, which had to be "sliced, diced and analyzed" for the next review meeting(s), where pointless presentations had to be made using worthless power-points illustrated with grandiose graphs and colorful "pie (in-the-sky)" charts!
16. No more worrying about attrition in the team, business unit or organization for which you needed to offer explanations or justify reasons beyond your control, particularly when "key-talent" or "critical performers" called out their flight-risks that were expected to happen anyway.
17. No anxiety about audits where "men (and women)-in-black" suits breathe down your neck to inspect the most granular trivial details of errors or omissions which generally have no material significance.
18. No politics to play, no fear of being victimized and no feeling of insecurity or vulnerability. No "Teflon-coating" needed to protect reputation.
19. No mandatory online never-ending training modules to complete within Damocles sword-like timelines, each with at least a 150+ slide-deck onslaught overlaid by pesky voiceovers, which if missed out or overlooked, would cause escalations of agony, never ecstasy.
20. No obligation to listen to incessant cribs or whining complaints by disgruntled employees and irate stakeholders, where you had no authority (but full responsibility) to resolve their problems without resources, back-ups or bandwidth.
21. No more "change management" platitudes and slogans from the senior leadership representatives, external consultants or self-appointed "change-champions" where the more things change, the more they remain the same.
22. No risk of being used as a "messenger-boy" and getting caught in the crossfire between two or more warring corporate chieftains playing "shoot-the-messenger" or "firing-over-your-shoulder" games.
23. No more blame-games, "passing the buck" syndrome or communication gaps between individuals, teams, departments or divisions to be fretting about, particularly on mundane issues; no further need to have the "win-the-battle/lose-the-war" mindset.
24. No seeking approvals from the boss, or the boss's boss, or perhaps the CEO.... even for the simplest of non-monetary requests (forget the larger ones that are generally called "proposals/concept notes/business cases" which may involve a mysterious "budget" that you had partial or nil visibility of). Similarly, no waiting or following up with approximately fifteen-plus Heads of Departments to get "buy-in" for a cross-functional organization-wide initiative.
25. No paranoia around getting fired, sacked or laid off due to corporate restructuring, downsizing, delayering, merger, business-strategy changes or for any other arbitrary (un)reason that organizations can conjure up.

One fine morning, the day of "retirement" arrived.

Freedom in broad daylight!.

When I look back at these interesting chapters of my corporate life, I feel supremely blessed by the wealth of experience gained over the years and hence my deep sense of gratitude, coupled with the expansive joy of liberation!

Hopefully, peace at last...:-)

Thank you, Larry and Dominique, for the inspiration w.r.t.the title of this piece!

Note: The above article/post, with its contents is the personal view of the author, expressed purely in his personal capacity and is not related to any specific existing organization, institution, group or individual. Any such perceived resemblance or derived linkage or relationship as such is purely coincidental and unintended.