Find the Cure to Midlife Inertia—Part II

May your hands always be busy, may your feet always be swift. May you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift. May your heart always be joyful and may your song always be sung, may you stay forever young.

Bob Dylan

A Passion for Teaching

This is Part II in a series of blogs about reclaiming the passion in your life by making a particular lane change—getting engaged in education. I’m not talking about writing checks—admirable and needed, but it isn’t going to have the impact you’re looking for to help you overcome your midlife inertia.  It’s what you’ve always done when asked to give support to a good cause, wishing you could do more, but making the excuse that your career and family demands prevent you from getting personally involved. No, I’m talking about real engagement here, the kind requiring a commitment of your time and not just your checkbook.

Part I of the series focused on education reform, using Marco Petruzzi as the poster child for change artists who leave successful careers to make a difference in one of the most critical problem areas (and some would say, the most broken) facing our society.  Marco is president and CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, a leading agent for school reform and operator of 14 charter high schools in Los Angeles. After fifteen years as a high-flying management consultant, Marco asked himself this question: “Do I really want to spend my time making billionaires an extra billion dollars?” He answered the question by dedicating himself to education reform at the institutional level, accepting the much lower paying position of president of Green Dot. His renewed sense of purpose has been the best antidote to midlife career blues.

Did you Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?

Much as I love Marco’s inspirational story, I recognize that not everyone has the time or inclination to make such a lane change. For many boomers, working full time at an institutional level does not fit into their vision of an active retirement. There are too many other calls on their time that they must, or at least want to attend to once they are freed from the daily grind of their careers. So they are more interested in working part-time. Nevertheless, they demand that the investment of their most valuable asset—their time—has a positive, real impact on the problem.

Also, many boomers who as careerists made their contributions to society by writing checks and serving on not-for-profit boards now want to “give back” in a more direct and personal way. They want to be in the frontlines of the fight and to see the impact of their contributions in the eyes of the young people they are helping.

Allan Rudnick is one such lane changer who is making a significant contribution to education reform in his own way. His story may serve as a guide for others who are passionate about making a difference in educating our kids.

Allan Rudnick learned a lot from his father.

His dad never went to college, but he built a successful business in retail distribution of health and beauty aids. Allan recalls how his father reveled in the process of building his company. Growing up, Allan also observed his parents’ active involvement in community service which brought them great joy. Allan’s father sold his company and retired from business in his mid-50s. Big mistake. No longer engaged in the act of building something, he was not a happy man.

So among all the lessons Allan learned from keenly observing his father’s experience, these three stand out:

1.  When you are passionate about what you do and you are building something of value—it’s not work.
2.  You give back because people need it, but you get it back in so many ways.
3.  Never retire.

These three lessons informed Allan’s career choices as well as his post-career lane change.

In My Life I’ve Loved Them All

Allan feels lucky about growing up in Brookline, Massachusetts, in a loving Jewish family. Most summers, he worked loading trucks in his father’s warehouse and was treated just like all the other workers. Wanting to strike out on his own away from the Boston area, he chose to attend Trinity College in Hartford which he thoroughly enjoyed. He got a great liberal arts education, majoring in Economics. “I was excited about learning about what was going on in the newspapers and found myself reading 2 and 3 chapters ahead in the textbook,” he says. “That never happened to me before.”

After graduation, Allan was admitted directly to Harvard Business School and gravitated towards Marketing, a natural choice given his family’s experience in retailing.  He was recruited to work at Macy’s corporate office but soon found himself working in a tiny office as the drapery buyer in the flagship store—not the role he had trained for. His father visited him in his “closet” and remarked wryly, “Is this why you went to Harvard Business School?”

Meanwhile, Allan was making four times his Macy’s salary dabbling in airline convertible bonds. It became obvious to him that he belonged on Wall Street, not Main Street, and so he accepted an offer at Oppenheimer & Co. as a Securities Analyst focusing on airlines research. His buy recommendations got him promoted to co-head of airlines research, but his reputation grew even more when he made the call to sell when he saw the industry had too much capacity to sustain its growth.  On Wall Street, great sellers are rarer than great buyers.

At 30, he became manager of Oppenheimer’s small-mid cap mutual fund and took it from $16 million in assets to $300 million in just three years. “This wasn’t work—it was a passion—I was amazed every time I got a paycheck,” Allan says. What had been a sideline had become his career. The financial reward was substantial, to be sure, but the real payback was experiencing the high his father had taught him was possible in the workplace.

Successful investing is part art and part science and Allan excelled at both. He was good at the science of fundamental research and the nuts and bolts of portfolio allocation. But he was also exceptionally good at the art of stock picking which required “a good nose”—a sixth sense about the quality of management as well as what the investing public will get excited about and bid up. He is proud to admit that he learned best from his mistakes which honed his risk management skills. Allan leveraged these talents to start his own fund, AMR Management Company, which drew the attention of the big firms on Wall Street. Through a series of mergers, Allan’s domain grew ever larger and brought him out to the West Coast where he married Paula, a writer/producer and activist, and had two wonderful daughters.

Allan became well known for his “rising dividends” investing discipline which attracted a substantial list of private clients alongside the firm’s institutional base. Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors recruited Allan to add his blue chip style of investing to their alternative investment offerings.  In five years, he led an investment team which grew the original $40 million under management to a billion, and in ten years, they were managing $6 billion at Kayne Anderson Rudnick Investment Management. (KAR). Even in those heady times, this was quite a ride.

In 2000, at the top of the bull market, the firm was attracting the interest of some major investment companies who wanted to add KAR to their group of money managers. Recognizing the opportunity to increase their distribution significantly, KAR management merged the firm into what is now known as Virtus Investment Partners.  After fulfilling his commitment, and confident that he was leaving a strong team in place, Allan decided to leave the company while he was young enough to do other things. This is where his lane change comes into the story.

Oh Very Young What Will You Leave Us This Time

Like his parents, Allan had always supplemented his work-life with community activities—Children’s Hospital, Cedars-Sinai, and Trinity College to name a few. Since leaving his company, he enjoys serving as a trustee of three public mutual funds as well as managing his personal investment portfolio through his family office. But his passion has been re-ignited by a different kind of activity—teaching.  One of his clients at KAR introduced him to Roger Lowenstein, a former trial lawyer who defended the Chicago Seven and TV writer for L.A. Law. Lowenstein is the founder and Executive Director of Los Angeles Leadership Academy, a remarkable charter school in East L.A. “where youths from different backgrounds can come together to investigate and address social justice issues.” Lowenstein recruited Allan to his board, but more importantly, invited him to teach the Economics class to help the seniors understand how what they read in the paper affects people’s lives. Throughout his career, Allan had always enjoyed mentoring his employees so he jumped at the chance to put his skills to work in the classroom.

Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough

The class meets daily, with Allan as a guest instructor once a week, making the textbook material come to life for the students. His approach to practical economics is entirely experiential, giving the students real life exposure to budgeting, saving, and investing. He makes a point of cutting through all the mysterious jargon and communicating in plain English. The weekly class involves a lot of preparation to insure that the material is current and relevant to the kids—but Allan loves it. He speaks about this work with the same passion and pride that he uses when talking about his career as an investment manager. He loves to describe the reaction of the regular Economics teacher, who was wary at first, but hugged Allan at the end of the year in gratitude for his work with her class.

His reward is certainly not financial. His only compensation is an L.A. Leadership Academy t-shirt. In fact, teaching has cost him, since he was so inspired that he and Paula made a contribution to the school’s capital campaign. Allan’s real reward is his satisfaction from working with this diverse group of kids and making a difference in their lives. His father would be proud to see how his son enriched his own life by heeding his life lessons about working with passion, giving back, and never retiring.

If you have a passion for teaching and are having trouble navigating the school systems in your area, check out the organizations devoted to getting boomers connected with opportunities to give back to their communities, especially in the field of education. Here are a few to get you started:

The Sherry Lansing Foundation supports two such service organizations:  PrimeTime is an innovative educational partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District that places highly qualified retirees in local public schools to fulfill specific needs. And the EnCorps Teachers Program is a public-private partnership dedicated to recruiting and retraining retiring STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) professionals to increase the number of much-needed science and math teachers in California’s public middle and high schools.

Also, visit Encore.org, an information gateway and network for individuals establishing encore careers that combine personal meaning, financial security and social contribution. It’s a project of Civic Ventures, a nonprofit working to define the second half of adult life as a time of individual and social renewal through a variety of programs which engage baby boomers as a workforce for social change. Civic Ventures also launched Experience Corps, now a separate national service organization engaging adults over 55 as tutors and mentors for elementary school students struggling to learn.

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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