Episode 15
Meet John Anderson, C-founder of the CEO Advantage and Author of Replace Retirement
During the pandemic, as routines are turned upside down and corporate playbooks tossed aside, John Anderson—entrepreneur and author of Replace Retirement—brings a fresh perspective on leadership, vision, and the concept of Retirement with his rallying call: “Don’t retire, refire.”
John’s story starts at IBM, where he began his career before building a successful office furniture business. Along the way, he found mentorship in Verne Harnish and worked with thought leaders like Jim Collins and Patrick Lencioni to develop transformative coaching practices for executives.
A key part of his approach is the 10-year vision—a tool he uses to help leaders set clear goals, handle challenges, and align personal and professional priorities. Inspired by Ari Weinzweig’s visioning methods and Stephen Covey’s focus on “what matters,” John explains how leaders can use a long-term vision to guide their teams, even in uncertain times.
Instead of chasing the traditional “work-life balance,” John suggests focusing on energy management. For him, a fulfilling life is about identifying what energizes you and intentionally designing your career and personal life to maximize those pursuits.
Throughout the episode, you’ll hear advice, including tips on developing vision statements, communicating transparently during crises, and building routines that support personal and professional growth.
By the end, John inspires listeners to rethink their legacy and embrace self-transformation, regardless of age. For leaders facing uncertainty or figuring out their next steps, his insights provide a roadmap to navigating change with confidence, resilience, and a renewed sense of purpose.
Featured guest: John Anderson
What he does: John Anderson is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and co-founder of The CEO Advantage, a coaching and consulting firm dedicated to helping organizations achieve exceptional results. With extensive experience guiding companies across public and private sectors, John specializes in helping executives and entrepreneurs develop clear visions, build strong management teams, and drive meaningful outcomes. He is also the founder of Replace Retirement, where he inspires leaders of all ages to rethink their future, adopt an exponential mindset, and craft a purposeful, rewarding, and fulfilling life plan.
Mentioned in this episode:
Episode Highlights:
[00:04:16] John’s story
[00:09:54] Developing a vision for your business
[00:22:21] Crisis leadership style
[00:26:16] A daily routine to set you up for success
[00:41:45] Time to rethink retirement
[01:03:55] The tapestry of your life
[01:12:05] Your legacy map
[01:14:38] This is the time
Transcript
[Transcript]
[:We remain in the midst of the pandemic. Yes, we're all living the realities of the Corona Virus crisis. And we are working from home. We're in isolation. We're in quarantine. Life as we once knew it has completely changed, but this also offers a great opportunity. Not only is this a tremendous opportunity for us to step up and lead and make this the most exhilarating leadership experience of our lifetime, it's an opportunity to challenge the norm. The day-to-day rule book of routines and corporate playbook that's out the window right now. So, let's use this time as an opportunity to think about where we're going. What do we want for the rest of our lives? Two different perspectives, whether it's a vision for our company, for our business, for our team, for our industry, or whether it's for ourselves, our own personal vision for our life. What does that look like? What's our legacy look like? What do we want to be in 10, 20, 30, maybe 40 years’ time? This is a great opportunity to step back away from normal life; let's face it, we have no choice and really spend some time mapping that out. I can't think of anybody better to help us with this than the disruptor himself, John Anderson. John is the author of the book Replace Retirement, where he challenges the retirement model, and in his words says, "Don't retire, refire." And right now, we're questioning what retirement could look like. The stock market is down; maybe that pot of money that we want to have at a certain point in time is not going to be there, but that's okay. There's an opportunity to rethink that model and John is the perfect guy to help us through that. John is a lifelong business strategist and entrepreneur. His entrepreneurial spirit has guided much of his professional life, starting in the office furniture business. He was the first Gazelles business coach to work with Verne Harnish. And now, this organization is considered to be one of the leading executive coaching organizations. John is an active, corporate speaker and coach, and he has had equity in a variety of entrepreneurial companies, including the CEO Advantage, Dogtopia, Visby, and Exponential Advisor. In the late nineties, John founded the Detroit chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization, recognized by Michigan's Future 50 Award, Today's Workplace of Tomorrow Award, and in Crain's list of 40 under 40. He served on the Leadership Oakland Board and the Oakland County Business Roundtable and is considered one of the most networked entrepreneurs in the region. Please welcome John Anderson.
[: [: [: [: [:That's the same process I've gone through for my own company. And even today, I continue to do that and write a vision just for the end of 2020. Now, the end of 2020, of course, is more linear, but it comes from this bigger, expanded 10-year vision that I have in terms of where we're going and what we're going to look like, despite the upheaval and changes that are happening right now, in real time.
[:[:
So I have found by practice, I've gotten better at it, and I enjoy it more, and maybe because I've written a book, it's also easier to write, but with a client recently, the way we went about it, so there's a little prescription, is we started by having everybody read Ari's little recipe on visioning. So, they read Ari's vision; they read how sort of visions are developed, and the process he recommends. Then I said, "Why don't you guys on the whiteboard, I'll write it down. Just tell me why do you think this vision is so impactful? You know, why is it powerful? How did it touch you? And they used words like emotion and it was real. And they felt like they're part of the team and all these different descriptors. So now we have those descriptors, we would want our vision to look the same. Then I had him do another exercise; I won't get into all the details of it now, but basically, it described for me what the employee experience would be like. Describe for me what the customer experience would be like. Describe for me what our financials would look like and so on. So that we had sort of painted this broad-brush framework, if you will. And then, we stopped for the day, we're probably three and a half hours, four hours in. We stopped, we let that incubate, and then we came back a couple of weeks later, and I actually took responsibility for it because I enjoyed it. And I got on the keyboard, and we did it on the big screen, and I took all those notes and ideas, and I started building out the sections, you know, paragraphs into each of these sections. So, they had the beginning of a written vision, and then their job was to take that and go through it again and enhance it and enrich it, then share it with their expanded leadership team, get their input, then share it with their board of directors and get their input. And then, finally, when they felt really like they owned it and they were excited to share it, then go forward with their entire employees, you know, the whole company and share that vision.
So, those were the steps that we took. If you can't write it yourself, and I understand that's hard for some people, then get someone to help you write it. But, again, go through this process because otherwise, you're going to always get sucked back into that quadrant one thing, the urgent and important, which feels comfortable and familiar. And, of course, in a time of crisis, we're going to go to what's comfortable and familiar, except nothing right now is comfortable and familiar. So, it's really the quadrant two, the vision, if you will, the things that are important but not urgent, that keep you focused on going forward and not falling back.
[: [:So, in my case, pre-pandemic, I felt like if I was going to go in and meet with my customers, 'cause I don't have employees, right? I have clients. If I'm going to go in and do a workshop with a client, I have to go through this two-hour routine that kind of gets me ready for the day. It includes mental, physical, and spiritual exercises so that I'm game on. I'm suited up for the day. I created that for me as an advisor, because I can't show up in front of, excuse me, in front of clients with my confidence shaken, with frustration, with untied issues, with lots of noise in the background. Otherwise, I can't be fully focused on them. So, I created that as a client delivery mechanism before this. Now I realize it fits really well today because I have this whole process and philosophy that I need to sort of game up every day, or suit up, I guess, is the better description. And now, I'm getting to apply it in a bigger game. Does that make sense?
[: [:Because, so I'll back up at my story earlier, I did a really accelerated one. I talked about Verne Harnish and going to MIT, and he was kind of like Obi-Wan Kenobi for me; when I met him, I'm like, "Oh, I got to study this guy." Like, I want to learn the ways of his force, if you will, and so that's been a 25-year journey. About, oh, it's almost 10 years ago now, somewhere between 8 and 10 years ago, I met Peter Diamandis, and Peter had just written his book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. And I sat in that audience, and I'm like, this is the next, this is Yoda. Like, I need to know this guy. I need to become friends with him. I need to study his ways. I need to hang out with him. I got to figure out how I'm going to become friends with this guy who was listed by Forbes as one of the 50 most influential people in the world, so this was no easy feat, but I accomplished it. So, he considers me a friend today, and I certainly consider him one. Peter says that you're either going to be disrupted by technology or you're going to be a disruptor, which led to the idea of writing this book, Replace Retirement. So, I didn't want to be disrupted; I wanted to be a disruptor. So, all this is out of this concept, what he calls the exponential trends, right? Ray Kurzweil is kind of behind that. And so there's all this information and data on this technology uptrend, accelerating almost like a hockey stick, fair enough? That's what an exponential curve looks like.
Last week, I was sitting in. And the pandemic is essentially, if you look at all the curves on it, right? It's a hockey stick, and they're trying to get it back into a bubble and then flatten it back down, right? Flatten the bubble. So, this thing starts off really almost like innocuous. It's like it's not even showing up. We can ignore it. It's not a big deal. Yeah, it's happening over in China, but it's not going to affect us. And then, it starts this exponential doubling rate, and it starts doubling, doubling, until now it looks like a hockey stick. So, in my book title, I wrote Replace Retirement: Living Your Legacy in the Exponential Age. So, I threw this label out called the Exponential Age. I would suggest to our audience that we have officially entered the Exponential Age with the pandemic as the catalytic mechanism that launched it. So it's been around, some of us have been aware of it; a lot of us haven't. So, this idea of thinking linearly versus exponentially is really going to become the Achilles heel, not for 95% of the population, but for the 5% of us who are leaders and entrepreneurs; we have got to learn how to think exponentially. Stephen Covey gave us a little insight into quadrant one and quadrant two. Essentially, what he was saying is that quadrant two is how you create time to think exponentially when you're not dealing with the urgent but with the important. So it's like, that's the new era we're in. We have officially locked into that, and if you don't know how to think exponentially or put time in quadrant two, now's the time to build the muscle. Does that make sense?
[: [:And then I read the Bible; because I've read thousands of books, I figured I might as well read that one. So, I read a little bit of the Bible each day and then journal from that. And then I have a business book. And I mentioned Ari's books sometimes those I'm into. But I'm very selective on what's the book I'm reading and writing from. So, I want to sort of draw content from that. I do sort of my final set. Now, my exercise is out of the way. Thank God for that. And then maybe brew some coffee and then finish the journaling. Then I go, and I start to do the writing, you know, I mentioned earlier. So I get on and I work on either of them, a blog or writing a vision or whatever I'm writing on in the book when I was doing that. So there's some writing, and then I write a personal note of gratitude to somebody, a handwritten note. And I do that because years and years ago, I was working with the CEO of Domino's Pizza, David Brandon, and he taught me the value of writing personal handwritten thank you notes. Here he is running Domino's, for God's sake, and he would write me a personal note thanking me for meeting with him. Like, he's the guy, right? The important guy, and he's writing me a note. So I'm like, well if he has time to write a personal note, I certainly have time to write a note. So because of that influence, I have picked up this habit of writing notes every day. So, just a little handwritten note. And then, I jump in the shower after all that. So that whole cycle takes me about two hours, fair enough? And then I can head off to my meeting or whatever. So, in this case, the meeting is sitting down with you. So that's the process I take every day that's designed out of this greater tool. So those are my daily alignment habits that come from my legacy map, which is a tool I developed. So, I have a whole plan for my life, and in order to become the person I've defined in my life plan, I have to do these things on a daily basis. One other piece of information: I do that five days a week, not seven days a week. However, I developed habits like meditation, 'cause that's the newest one, that I am doing seven days a week. I find if you're trying to cement a habit, this is my personal experience, it's not 21 days. Yeah, basically you got to go 90 days. If it's something you enjoy, journaling was the very first one I ever took on. Journaling was relatively, I found, and there's a London study in my book I mentioned it says 66 days, but somewhere in that 90 days, approximately around the 66th day, it went from being something I got to remember to do to something I enjoy doing. Fair enough? The only habit when I touched on earlier was exercising is not something to this day; I enjoy doing it. I only enjoy it because I enjoy the benefits from it. But, journaling, writing the personal notes, blogging, all these other habits, the meditation, the prayer, these are things that I do not because I have to do, but because I enjoy them, almost like brushing your teeth. And so, I went from seven days a week, then I backed it off to six days a week 'cause my wife was kind of teasing me, "Can we like, you know, spend time in bed before you go off and do all this stuff?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I guess I could take a day off." And then I realized, "Oh, I could take the weekend off." So, it's so cemented, and again, some of these are more than 10-year habits. So that's kind of the routine of the morning.
[: [:So that made sense, and it's like, well, if morning's my best time, then I had to start out with the first, most important thing. So I thought prayer was the first most important thing, and then the second most important, well, I think maybe meditation's the second most important thing. So, even the order of that morning as it grew from 10 minutes to two hours was basically aligned with that idea. What's going to be the first most important, second most important, and so on? Before I go engage with a client or whatever the next activity is, before my day starts to get all crazy and frantic and urgent and so on, I need to make sure that I know what's most important in my life and that I made it a priority in that day before I go on to anything else. I think that's what leaders do. I think that goes back to my insight of last week is that we're in this new age. If you don't know how to do it, you need to figure it out and do it soon. Otherwise, you're going to get overwhelmed by fear and change and all this stuff because the world's moving at this hockey stick rate, and it can be quite overwhelming.
[: [:So, I said, I can see how I can be disrupted. So, I don't just see how people are going to be disrupted and Ford's going to get disrupted. John Anderson's way of life could be disrupted. And so, I started to think about it and say, okay, and I mentioned Earl Nightingale before; he was a mentor to me in my twenties; I've listened to his program thousands of times. So, Earl would always say, "There's a field of diamonds right in front of you. Don't go searching all over the world for it. They're right in your backyard." So, I said, okay, well, I'm a baby boomer, and I don't think this retirement thing doesn't really work for me. And I think there's others out there. So, if there are approximately 80 million boomers, and let's assume using a statistical bell curve that 20 percent of them will resonate with my message, that's how you and I got together, right? Jan's like, "I totally get it. I'm on board with you. Show me this path." Then, if I were really to make a penetration, it'd be 1.6 million. So, I'll take the 20 percent or 16 million baby boomers who would resonate with this message. If they simply heard it, they're like, "I get it. I want it. Show me the way." And that 10 percent of that group, or 1.6 million, would actually sign on and be a follower of this. I call it a movement; they would get on board with the movement. So, that became my BHAG, if you will, or moonshot, is that we're going to, by January 1st, 2026, we'd reach 1.6 million boomers. It doesn't have to be all boomers. It's really people between 45 and 65. So, some boomers are older than that. So, now we've got this idea. We're going to replace retirement. We're going to change the existing paradigm of retirement to one in which you are contributing and working all the way through, although on your terms. So, in the book, I use myself as an example. Essentially, and somebody recently just asked me this, one of the things I'll kind of share my year from a planning point of view, I take the month of February off, I take the month of August off, and I probably, if you take holidays and so on, I extend it another month. So, I take about three months off a year. And it still gives me plenty of time to work with clients. And all my clients understand this. They know this is the whole design of our program. And so, on the month off in February, I'm a big-time snowmobiler; it's one of my passions. And so, this season, I snowmobile about 9,000 miles; clearly, I'm very passionate. Other people have other passions; that's my passion. So, while I was snowmobiling, I was up in Quebec, and this guy said, "Are you retired?" I get that question a lot because here I am snowmobiling for three weeks. And I'm like, "No, yeah, sort of?" Like, 'cause I designed it myself.
So, what I found, and in my book, I talk about this, I used to use kind of the balance wheel idea, and then I realized, maybe it's not balanced. Maybe there is no balance. Maybe it's really energy management. So, everything in the universe is built off energy, right? And so, we know we can tap into this energy. So, I said, one of the things that seems to wane as we age is our energy. So, what are the things I do? What are the people I spend time with? What are the books I read? How do I get up in the morning? I want to do things that give me energy, and I want to slowly get rid of things that take energy away. And so, I would say that my book and myself are on a self-transformation, a 10-year self-transformation to slowly get all the energy drainers out of my life and attract more energy givers. And I share that because, again, as we age, our energy does start to wane. And so, I want to be more judicious where I can spend it. And in presentations, I talk about that. When I was 20 and worked at IBM, I remember, and IBM it was a really tough company. To get into sales, you needed a minimum of 90% passing grade on all the internal sales training. So, when I was an IBM salesperson, they trained us for 12 months, and in those 12 months, if you didn't achieve 90%, you were let go. You lost your job. So there was a lot of anxiety in all these people going through the training, yet some of us still did the all-nighters. We're done for the day of training. Maybe it was like a Thursday night, and then we went out and did like an all-nighter, and we came in at 4:00 AM, all hungover and stuff. And then, at eight o'clock where we, you know, do our sales calls and all this stuff with our trainers, and I could do that. I could get away with that. I had that ridiculous amount of energy. I was foolish with it. I don't have that kind of energy today. And so, what are the practices in my life plan that attract and give me energy? And how do I get rid of energy?
So that was essentially the nucleus of this book is that we're entering this period of disruption, there's a group of us who don't necessarily want to quote unquote retire. We're not used to parts that need to be cast to the side, and I'll even take a personal journey on that; I watched my father, and I used him in my presentation. He was the, first he served in World War II, and he was the first in his family to get a college education. He worked 37 years for the same company, going from a draftsman all the way to president of the company. So, he had a great career path. He put all three of his kids through college. We didn't have to pay for college. He picked it up. So, we were all launched successfully in life, and he inherited nothing from his family but was able to save a little over 3 million at the time of his retirement just from being very frugal. He was a good Scott. And so, he had done everything right. He had the career, he had the kids launched, he could now enjoy his retirement and yet within just a few years, I would call him up and say, "Dad, so how's it going? What are you doing?" "I'm surviving," that was what he would say on the phone, "I'm surviving." And it wasn't that he didn't visit his grandkids; he did. And it wasn't that he didn't travel; he did. But this "I'm surviving" statement, which I really kind of said, you got to stop saying that, did kind of set the tone for his retirement. He was just a shell of that former leader that I had seen. And I would suggest, well, why don't you engage in this and that and so on? "Well, I can't do that anymore." You know, he lost that sort of spark. So I said I do not want to follow that path. I have a client right now; he's in Grosse Pointe, and his home is on Lake St. Claire. So, we all know what that area looks like. Sold his company for a gazillion dollars. He has a home in Florida, a home here, he's got boats. He's in great health, his wife and he are happy, his kids are all successful, but he has anxiety from eight to five every day. And by the way, he doesn't have anxiety on vacations; he doesn't have anxiety on the weekends, but in those hours that he used to work, he has anxiety. So, we created a legacy map for him, and that's one of the challenges he was going through. At 75, he would often say, "I wish I never sold my company; I'm so happy running that business, and I miss all those people." So I'm not suggesting that we work like workaholics all our lives, and I'm not suggesting we don't sell our companies or whatever particular things we're working on. I'm just saying that you should be intentional about your life and have a design for what that ideal looks like. What does it look like 10 years hence? And how are you contributing the way that you choose to contribute with the people you choose to contribute? And by the way, I even have a push-pull on that. Here I am, I authored this book, and we've got replaced retirement, and we're reaching out to the public and pursuing customers and all the things you do with a business. And yet I take the month of August off, and I take the month of February off. My business partner, my CFO, and COO understand that, and I'm like, "I wrote a book on this stuff, so I'm not going to not enjoy my life, but I wanna have this balance." So, even our business has to modify and adjust to this lifestyle, if you will, so that it's full and complete, because I don't wanna finish, right? We see that happen too, where I work, work, and then I realize, "Oh, I didn't spend enough time with important relationships in my life." And that's what August is. August we're at the cottage, all family coming up, and spending time there. And again, there's no rush, there's no agendas, it's just chime time to be together. So, those are all things that I designed into my plan, but everybody has their own plan. And, my partner, by the way, he was great; he got involved in this. And he went from, kind of working out sometime to then becoming, start running, then he decided he wanted to run a race, so he ran, I don't know, the Free Press Marathon or whatever, which was the longest marathon he ever did, and qualified for the Boston Marathon. So, now he's training to do the Boston Marathon. So, these are things that give him energy, and these are goals that he never thought he could accomplish, right? Well, wouldn't it be nice if I had the time? So, he designed his life to have the time to do this thing that makes him healthy and hang out with others that he wants to spend time with, doing the things he wants to enjoy. So it is a retirement of sorts, but it's not the paradigm we were accustomed to.
[: [:So now, self-transformation, what would it take to transform yourself so that you're comfortable, that you don't worry that you can't put food on the table, that you can't survive in whatever the world throws me? You feel that way. And I feel that way. And we understand. You just got to go out and create tremendous value. It may take more work to do the value and then, boy, you better be getting energy from it because what's the point in working to death and not getting it? Like, then you've ruined it and you missed the whole point of the thing. Like, okay, so I'll do this, I did this on another podcast. I'll try it here.
. And in the last downturn of: [: [: [:Thank you for listening to the Automotive Leaders Podcast. Click the listen link in the show notes to subscribe for free on your platform of choice. And don't forget to download the 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership PDF by clicking on the link below. And remember, stay true to yourself, be you, and lead with Gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership.