Nobody prepares you for this.
There’s a lot of advice about the money. There’s almost none about the first Monday after the last big role.
The Second Summit is seven days with peers in the same position, working out what the next twenty years are for.
The inbox goes quiet. The diary clears. The phone that rang all day for thirty years is silent and nobody needs a decision from you before lunch.
Some people see that Monday coming for years and for others it arrives on someone else’s timetable. Either way, most people plan the money and nothing else.
And yet your name stands on its own now, and it sounds different. Underneath it there’s something harder to admit: you’re looking forward to this. There are things you set aside for later, and later has arrived.
None of this is a crisis. It’s ordinary, and it’s the part nobody plans. The first Monday without the title you’ve been known by is left to chance.
“On my first Monday I had time to sit with my thoughts and read. I came across a Heidrick & Struggles study that found only 13 in every 1,000 public-company chief executives move into a comparable role. The board seat is the assumed next step. Everything else that could come next usually goes unplanned.”
Christopher Akiwumi, Founder
Seven days. Peers in the same position.
A small group of people who have left, or are about to leave, their last big role, spending a week on what the next twenty years are for. It’s run by Christopher Akiwumi, who has done the job and is going through the transition himself.
A small group, chosen with care so that everyone in it recognises everyone else’s situation. Not a coach across a desk, and not an audience. Peers.
Seven days with a set arc, from Identity Reset to Commitment, in a private setting. Each day has a shape and a subject, and what happens inside it is a conversation among people who’ve been where you are.
Everyone leaves with My Second Summit Plan: one page, dated, specific, in your own writing. What the next twenty years are for, the three things that matter most, and the person who’ll hold you to it.
It isn’t coaching.
Nobody sits across a desk from you with a framework, and the conversation runs between people who have done what you’ve done.
It isn’t a holiday.
The setting is private and a long way from home because that’s what it takes to focus properly, but the days have a shape. There will be work to do, at a pace that leaves room to enjoy it.
It isn’t a conference.
There’s no stage, no speakers and no name badges. Some of the week is the whole group in one conversation, some of it is two or three of you on a walk, and some of it is you on your own with the view.
And it doesn’t cover the money.
Your advisers have that in hand. The week is about everything they don’t ask you.
From the Journal
Christopher writes about the Monday as he goes through it.
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Nobody prepared me for this
After four decades of working in leadership roles, as a husband, father and executive, nobody prepared me for this.