Ever Dream of Retiring Early?
By Nancy Moffitt
Meet Wharton Alums
Who Traded Soaring
Careers for Freedom
Judy Page was corporate success personified.
Page, PhD’76, the first woman to receive a PhD
from Wharton’s statistics and operations research
department, began her career at AT&T Bell Laboratories
as a member of technical staff in the
Applied Statistics Department. During the next
13 years, she moved through AT&T’s engineering
and technology departments, earning several promotions,
then onto the business end of AT&T,
holding posts in product management, human
resources, and engineering. In 1994, she became
one of the few women to be elected an officer and
vice president of AT&T.
By 1997, Page oversaw more than 6,000 people, had an annual expense budget of $1.5
billion and an annual capital budget of $4 billion. She was responsible for engineering the
AT&T domestic and international long distance network, for which she served as chief investment
and information officer, and managed more than 300 software systems.
That same year, her career at its zenith, Page decided to take a year off. She retired a year
later – at age 48.
The announcement of my initial leave of absence shocked most people I worked with,
who saw me as the consummate workaholic,” Page says. “My boss was convinced that I would
be back within a few weeks or months at the most. When I went to visit him after about two
months, he was sure that I was there to ask to come back.”
But she wasn’t. And today, three years later, Page is certain she’ll never return to a day-to-day
corporate job again.
She isn’t alone. Business magazines are littered with articles on Silicon Valley hotshots
taking lengthy – a year or more – sabbaticals, a trend that has recently begun to seep into
more traditional companies nationwide. Young dot-com owners have sold out and moved on,
sometimes to unstructured lives of volunteer work or part-time consulting. A two-year-old
website, called 2Young2Retire, gets 2,000 hits a week and is filled with tales of former
corporate workers retiring early and transitioning into what they consider more interesting
and fulfilling lives.
Today, thanks in part to a booming stock market during most of the 1990s and generous
stock option packages, “retirement” can take place much earlier than the stroke of 65 and
often doesn’t mean days of leisure and travel. For many, it simply signals a dramatic shift in
priorities that generally begins with the decision to leave regular employment for something
else, from leadership posts in non-profits to writing, spending time with family or creating a
patchwork of tiny businesses that relate to a personal passion. Above all, today’s early retirees
are dogged in their pursuit of one thing: the freedom to spend their time as they choose.
|
