The Rest of the WSJ Story

The Wall Street Journal has a story today on my decision to name Sabrina Parsons CEO of Palo Alto Software and dedicate my time to blogging, speaking, and my next book. It’s nice to get press notice, and Laura Lorber did an excellent job boiling down 75 minutes of interview to a few hundred words.

This may have started with Steve King’s story, Baby Boomer Un-Retirement over at Bizlabs, which was related to my post The Ideal Job on this blog, and one last April when I announced the decision.

I emphasized that this  isn’t retirement, it’s a delightful new job. “He wasn’t — and still isn’t — interested in retiring,” Laura wrote, and that’s important. “Now blogging full time, he posts up to 10 times a week to more than three blogs, including blog.timberry.com.”

I’m a bit embarrassed about the King Lear  references. Laura reported that accurately, but I really don’t spend my time reading Shakespeare classics (talk about out of date!). I looked up Lear after a reference in a conversation, and it seemed interesting because of the old guy and his three daughters. For the record, though, I also mentioned Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday, which is about baby boomers getting out of the way, and about blogging as well.

I also talked about how I never really liked the management side, but stuck with it for 19 years because this was my company, my work, and I felt that I had to run it or it wouldn’t be run. Then I turned around and saw that there are others around here who can run it as well or probably better than I. So I get back to my writing. During that long interview, Laura asked me about career paths. I mentioned how I gave up the VP spot at Creative Strategies to do the work myself instead of managing others, which I described as First Day of a New Business in a previous post on this blog.