Find the Cure to Midlife Inertia

You, who are on the road must have a code that you can live by. And so, become yourself because the past is just a goodbye.

Graham Nash

A Passion for Education Reform

I’ve got a license to steal and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it. As an author and blogger on the challenges and benefits of changing lanes at midlife, I have gained access to some of the most interesting and inspiring people who left high flying careers to become “social entrepreneurs”—men and women doing well by doing good. Happily, they are delighted to share their stories with other boomers, struggling to overcome midlife inertia.

 There is no shortage of seemingly intractable problems in our society crying out for the skills, passion, and maturity that we boomers could bring to the table. My personal area of interest is education, so I’m always on the lookout for change artists who are making a difference in the lives of young people. They don’t just wring their hands and bemoan how we put our children’s futures at risk by our failure to give them the education they need to make a success of themselves. Instead, they apply their passion to addressing this national disgrace.

I was fascinated to meet Marco Petruzzi at a dinner party and learn that both of us had been road warriors with successful careers as partners in major, international consulting firms. Marco is now the president and CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, a leading agent for school reform and operator of 19 charter high schools in Los Angeles.

In 2002, when he first got involved with education reform, the public school system was graduating less than 50% of its students, and many of those who did manage to graduate were ill prepared for college and successful lives.

Green Dot’s mission is “to transform public education in Los Angeles and beyond so that all children receive the education they need to be successful in college, leadership, and life.” Its successful model follows "Six Tenets of High Performing Schools:”

1) Small, safe, personalized schools
2) High expectations for all students
3) Locally managed schools
4) Increased parent participation
5) Maximum funding to the classroom, and
6) Keep schools open later.  

Since joining Green Dot, Marco has become the poster child for changing lanes to reignite the passion in your life by aligning who you are with what you do. This is his story.

Marco has lived in six countries and is fluent in four languages. He was born in Italy where his father was a textile factory worker. Promoted to build a suit factory in Mexico, Marco’s Dad was able to provide the family with a house, a pool and private schooling. When Marco was 14, the peso was devalued and the family’s fortunes turned down sharply. They returned to Italy where Marco engaged in the hard-left activism of the times. Marco describes himself as “Mr. Rage Against the Machine.”

Ironically, watching Happy Days on TV made Marco want to live in the U.S., so he applied to an exchange student program and was matched with a poor family living in Unionville, Tennessee, population 100. The father of the family subscribed to the KKK Journal and the “N” word was part of their daily vocabulary. “I was in culture shock,” says Marco, but it gave him an understanding of how pernicious and deep-seeded racial attitudes can be.

He was top of his class in everything, including English, his third language. At the end of his exchange commitment, he didn’t return to Italy to complete his final fifth year of high school because his father had gotten a big job in N.Y. to launch Giorgio Armani’s prêt a porter line in the U.S. Instead, Marco went to Columbia University, majored in industrial engineering, and was active in the anti-apartheid movement. “One day I was milking cows in Unionville, and the next I was a city slicker in Manhattan,” he laughs.

After getting an MBA, he plunged into his career as a management consultant. “I loved problem solving and it played to my rational side,” Marco explains. “By then, I had become completely Americanized—a total yuppy.” He landed a job with McKinsey in Italy and soon after joined some friends in a spin-off. After only a few years in Italy, he moved again, this time to Brazil, to help turn around a Pirelli tire subsidiary. There he met and married his wife and soul mate, Lana.

The international consulting firm, Bain & Company, recruited Marco with three other colleagues to set up their new office in Brazil where he gained a lot of entrepreneurial experience “doing cool things with my buddies.” In 1999, Brazil’s economy crashed just as the dot-coms were booming in the U.S.  Bain asked Marco to come to the Los Angeles office to service their big clients. By then, Lana had become pregnant and the couple decided not to return to Brazil to raise their family, where the threat of robberies and violence turned the life of successful individuals into a “golden cage.”

In 2002, Marco was asked to join the board of Green Dot by the President and COO, a former colleague at Bain. He accepted the role and soon after took on the responsibility for developing a strategic plan for growing Green Dot which at that point had only two charter schools and very big dreams. Determined “to do it right,” Marco persuaded the Bain partners to lend him a team of five consultants for 3 ½ months on a pro bono basis to help develop the strategy.

As was the case during Marco’s very successful 15-year career at Bain, the analytical side of his brain took over. Marco and his team plunged into the data on graduation rates, proficiency, college admissions, etc., and using these analytics, they developed a brand new model for delivering on Green Dot’s mission of transforming the public schools.

But he didn’t stop there. For the first time in years, his emotional side which had fueled his social activism in his youth came rushing to the fore. Passionate about what the team had accomplished, Marco drove Green Dot management to make good on its mission to push the Los Angeles Unified School District to move boldly to improve the city’s public schools.  He led the team in presenting the study to the Superintendant of the District. Marco recalls that the Superintendant loved the study but claimed “he didn’t have the political capital to pull it off,” unfortunately, leaving the status quo to prevail.

Marco remembers “it was like a stab in his heart.” He sulked for months, watching LAUSD continue its program of building more giant schools rather than accepting the Green Dot model of breaking up the schools into manageable academies and running them much more efficiently.

You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’
Lana noticed that Marco had lost the spring in his step and was in a deep funk. He was complaining about all the travel, working with Bain’s hedge fund clients. He no longer felt the passion he had demonstrated while working on the Green Dot project. Lana suggested a cure for what seemed to be ailing him—he needed to make a significant lane change. Why not go to work in a non-profit and apply his considerable skills and experience to make a difference in their community? Her only condition was not losing their home.           

Marco asked himself this key question: “Do I really want to spend my time making billionaires an extra billion dollars?” The answer was so obvious that it sealed the deal. 

Happily, Marco and Lana had never bought into the conspicuous consumption lifestyle they saw when settling in America. They had taken an oath to live frugally, paying off their mortgage so that they would be free to do other things later in life.            

Marco took the skills which were featured on his resume (e.g. corporate and product-market strategy, organization design, operations, and supply chain management) and repurposed them for the non-profit world. He founded r3 School Solutions, a not-for-profit company providing management and administrative services to charter management organizations, largely through the application of more robust technology and infrastructure.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road           
When the president of Green Dot left the company, the founder, Steve Barr, came to Marco and offered him the position, stating “he was the only one who could take Green Dot to the next level.” Marco accepted the offer and proceeded to meld r3 School Solutions into the company, implementing Knowledge Management systems, Performance Management systems and other innovative programs.            

His biggest challenge came in 2008, when Green Dot won Los Angeles School Board approval to take over the failed Locke High School near Watts, within three blocks of where the notorious Bloods and Crips gangs began. Actually, it was more like a hostile takeover. Getting control required Green Dot to win over at least 51% of the tenured teachers as well as the 5,000 parents. They rehired only a fraction of the teachers, re-structured the mega high school into eight smaller, college prep schools, and made dramatic changes in every aspect of operations.    

After two years, the Locke Transformation Project is viewed nationally as a successful turnaround. Retention rates are way up and the dropout rate has been reduced drastically. Attendance rates have improved dramatically and the number of violent incidents is way down. “The kids feel safe, the adults want them to succeed, and we maintain high expectations,” Marco states proudly. It is the realization of the dream that he conjured while working on the pro bono Bain & Co. consulting project. But he acknowledges that more time is needed to “undo the damage done to the kids by so many years of neglect” and deliver on the college prep goal.            

Does Marco miss the heady world of international business? Not at all. “Non-profit is not at all what people think,” he explains. “I am way more in the ‘inner circle’ than I ever was before—meeting with mayors, senators, philanthropists, all stars of society.” Despite the big drop in pay, there is no real sacrifice in Marco’s lane change. He isn’t outside the action, which is what many boomers fear most when facing retirement. On the contrary, he’s in the middle of one of the most important conversations in the country. And he has a renewed sense of purpose that is downright awesome.  

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For more on doing well by doing good, read the Pay It Forward chapter in Changing Lanes: Road Maps to Midlife Renewal.  Also check out two other blogs about former investment bankers like Adlai Wertman who chose to work on homelessness; and Connie Duckworth, on empowering women in the Third World. Each has made a positive and lasting impact on their respective areas of focus.

And if you have a story to share with our readers, please send it to us in the comment box below.

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