Not retired
Almost four years ago, in a pub in Amsterdam, I had a chat with Udan Fernando and asked him what his plans were for coming back to Sri Lanka. I had picked him as the next Executive Director of the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), a position I had held for 10 years when I resigned in March 2015. Time will vindicate both my choice of a successor and the process of ensuring continuity in leadership, but my thoughts in this blog are about the concept of planning succession, and the difficulty that people have in understanding the idea. I am 62 years old, and please note that I have not retired. Many of my friends who are around the same age have, but I have never really had any intention of retiring. As I told a young man who was trying to sell me a private pension scheme when I was working in London, I intend to drop dead, not drop working. My decision to resign my position at CEPA was not caused by personal factors – I was not ‘tired of a 9-5 routine’ mostly because