Thinking about Retirement …

John Elkington

May 23, 2009

… but not in that way.

Although I celebrate my sixtieth birthday in June, I have recently been thinking of retirement and retirees for very different reasons. One is that our visit to see Nick Robins at HSBC led me to pick up a copy of the HSBC Insurance publication, The Future of Retirement: Investing in Later Life. Another is that a growing amount of our work at SustainAbility and Volans, at least potentially, relates to the investment strategies and wider priorities of pension funds. But it’s also because I’m increasingly concerned what political role the Baby Boomers might play in the coming decades if their pension expectations are repeatedly shocked by pension industry crises. The Financial Times ran a pretty gloomy column today looking at the downsides of the Boomer story to date.

Talking to Doug Miller of GlobeScan last night, over dinner at Whit’s, Kensington, I began to think we that we should be trying to engage the Boomers much more actively, alongside the work people like Paul Hawken are doing to mobilise the young.