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Universities Teach Retired CEOs To Make The World A Better Place

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Rich Fahey traveled to Liberia as a young man to volunteer for the Peace Corps during the sixties. When he returned to the small African nation nearly 50 years later, he expected to see the country far more developed. Instead it had relapsed. Fourteen years of civil war had knocked out its power grid, leaving the economy paralyzed and thousands of homes shrouded in darkness.

Recently retired, Fahey set out to bring electric light to Liberia, but as an attorney by training, he knew very little about how to build a nonprofit from the ground up, cobbling together the funding and infrastructure to illuminate a struggling African nation.

He finally found a solution on the campus of Harvard University. He had read about a nascent program for recent retirees at Harvard called the Advanced Leadership Initiative. Only a year after returning from Liberia, he enrolled, becoming a member of its second class of fellows in 2010.

As one former fellow put it, most people come to the Advanced Leadership Initiative “looking for an encore.” The Initiative selects applicants from the highest echelons of their respective industries. Fellows have included a former secretary of transportation, a NASA astronaut, doctors, professors, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. But despite their diverse backgrounds, nationalities, and creeds, they generally share one common trait. Most are recently retired and looking to devote their energy and expertise to the common good.

Fellows spend one calendar year at Harvard auditing classes and engaging with both professors and students. They participate in think tanks designed to spark solutions to pressing social issues. Some have set up group trips to cities from Denver to Shanghai, where fellows met with public officials to discuss the problems facing those communities. And all the while fellows are expected to work on their own independent projects.

Over the last six years, graduates have tackled problems from poor nutrition to student debt, blazing fresh paths in education, health care, and sustainable energy. As they look back on their experience with the Initiative, the fellows credit Harvard with distilling their ideas, fostering creative criticism, and incubating projects that are already making a mark on the world.

Although the Advanced Leadership Initiative was the first program of its kind to groom retirees for social service, other universities are now piloting similar programs to cater to retirees who want to steer their careers in a new direction. Many schools have embraced an interdisciplinary approach to solving social problems that have perplexed academics for years.

The Harvard Initiative can trace its roots back to a working paper penned by three professors a decade ago. Their vision for higher education was tailored to the changing demographics of the American workforce. The authors pointed out that older people are “retiring later, maintaining greater health and mental activity, and proving themselves to be valuable workers.” Rather than letting their talent and experience go to waste, why not channel it into social service?

That was a question that resonated with their ideas about the modern university. The authors felt that institutions of higher education needed to refocus on their societal purpose. “The mission to serve society has always been there. It just needs to come further to the forefront,” says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Harvard Business School professor who runs the Advanced Leadership Initiative and who co-wrote the paper that got it started. “Universities need to connect with the society around them in a tighter way.”

An initiative that would bring together industry leaders on the brink of retirement would serve both goals. It would harness the manpower of a growing class of baby boomers and help tackle technical and political problems that, while seemingly intractable, could have innovative solutions if approached from new angles.

The program was intended to be interdisciplinary. “You can’t begin to tackle these problems by one discipline working alone,” Kanter says. “Education is more than the classroom. Health is more than the hospital. The city is more than City Hall.” To that end, fellows would be drawn from a variety of fields and would take classes anywhere in the University.

When Doug Rauch arrived at Harvard in 2010, he only had a kernel of an idea. He had served as the president of Trader Joe’s for 14 years, building the company out from a quirky local supermarket chain in California to the grocery behemoth it is today. Standing at the peak of the grocery market, he had seen just how much food goes to waste in the United States.

Today he rattles off statistics about hunger and nutrition with gusto, talking faster and faster as he grows increasingly impassioned. “One in six Americans are struggling to eat properly,” he says. “And yet we are the richest nation in the world in terms of food production.”

That was the challenge, the intractable problem that Rauch set out to solve. But like Fahey, he had no idea how to build a nonprofit to do what he wanted: make healthy food available to the working poor.

He turned to his peers and professors at Harvard for help. Ray Goldberg, a professor at the Business School, was particularly helpful in bouncing ideas back and forth. Rauch would offer up idea after idea—elaborate ways to rework food stamp distribution or change the incentive structure for grocers to sell healthy foods—only to have Goldberg push back on each one, asking Rauch how much he actually knew about the IRS, the tax code, or the Food and Drug Administration.

“You know retail. You know food. Try to find a solution in what you really know,” Goldberg said. “You need to find a way to solve this within the realm of your expertise.”

It was through that “continual chiding and pushing” that Rauch concocted the idea for Daily Table, a supermarket nestled deep in the heart of the Boston neighborhood Dorchester, where obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure are common in the wooden triple decker houses that line the streets. The goal was to repurpose food from local restaurants and farms and sell it at prices competitive with fast food.

The first Daily Table opened its doors at the beginning of June, and Rauch is now brimming with stories about the people he has met. Just a few weeks ago he stocked trays of juicy blackberries too ripe to be shipped out to traditional supermarkets. A woman entered the store and glimpsed the blackberries under a sign that indicated they were selling for 99 cents a tray. She told Rauch that she had never been able to afford a blackberry in her life. He encouraged her to splurge, and she took home trays and trays of ripe blackberries for her kids that night. “It was one of those moments when you just go ‘that’s so cool,’” Rauch says. “It was worth all the blood, sweat and tears.”

Robert Whelan, a fellow from the inaugural group in 2009, has started a nonprofit called 13th Avenue, which invests up to $15,000 in an individual student to help pay for his or her college education. When students graduate, they pay a certain percentage of their income, interest free, back to the group. Though bound by confidentiality, he says that he has an expansive pilot program in the works with a major American university.

Thomas Santel has also had success with a new endeavor, Raising St. Louis, a nonprofit aimed at boosting childhood development. He spent the bulk of his career as a CEO at Anheuser-Busch International. When he stepped down in 2008, he wanted to give back to his native city, where he says life expectancies can vary by as much as 17 years between neighboring zip codes. “My feeling is that if these people don’t succeed, I don’t succeed,” he says.

Although Harvard is piloting the only advanced leadership program of its kind, other elite universities have also begun to take a stab at serving retirees. Just last year Stanford launched its Distinguished Careers Institute, an endeavor that Philip Pizzo, the director of the Institute, says was unrelated to the Harvard program. It offers fellows a yearlong experience at Stanford, replete with classes, social events, and access to professors, students, and laboratories.

The Distinguished Careers Institute differs from the Harvard program in that it does not require students to come up with a concrete project over the course of the year. Instead it focuses on giving fellows some time to think and relax, exploring new avenues for them to pursue as they enter a new stage of life. “People need a pause to reflect and think about what they want to do before they leap into something,” Pizzo says.

The growing number of programs designed for retirees speaks to an increased focus on education for baby boomers. “Universities can and should be places that provide programs for continued learning through the life cycle,” Pizzo says. “A university 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now might look very different [from] what it does today.”

But while the modern university evolves, fellows at these programs say that they are simply enjoying seeing the fruits of their labor materialize. “To just share the wealth is a wonderful thing, especially at this time of my life,” Fahey says.