Life After Full-time Work Blog

My happiest memories are all personal, not work-related. (Plus, at the end, a note from the World Pension Summit) 

Russell Investments was founded (initially as Frank Russell Company) in 1936 by George Russell’s grandfather Frank as a post-retirement exercise after a successful financial career in New York. George joined it in 1958, after graduating from Harvard, and three months later found himself running it when Frank passed away. George eventually shifted the firm’s direction towards pension funds, and I joined it in 1984 to start its Canadian office (with JJ Woolverton and Renata Tomaszewski) – leading to moves to Tacoma, London and New York as I eventually headed up its global consulting practice.

So 2026 marks Russell’s 90^th anniversary, with a get-together in Seattle on May 14 to celebrate. I was unable to be there, and was delighted when before that date I got an email requesting a video interview to record memories of my 26 years with Russell, with perhaps some of it screened for those present. A pleasure, and an honor!

I made some notes for the interview, and reproduce them here. A spontaneous reflection on my 25 years made the final cut. As you’ll see, all my happiest memories are personal rather than client-related.

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The culture

The company felt like a family with close friends, so many interactions were personal rather than work-related. To this day I’m still in occasional touch with a number of former colleagues.

It was a given that family always came first. For example:

• After we started the Toronto office, George used to visit us periodically, and he and I would have dinner together that evening, one on one. Once, early on, my son was in hospital; George came with me to the hospital that evening, and we ate in the hospital canteen.
• When I moved to Tacoma, the house that I had intended to buy was not yet finished. George told us to use his sister’s condo for as long as we needed to.
• When my wife Susan’s dad was ill with Alzheimer’s back in Canada (after we moved to the States), George’s wife Jane would call Susan from time to time to check on how he was and to boost her spirits. Jane was a gem in her own right, and it was her identity that helped set the company’s culture.

Below is a photo of George and me, taken (I think) 25 years ago.

Bill Sharpe

I was the first actuary ever at Russell, so the notion of linking assets and liabilities (which today is a given, but was new then) – that was something I could explain to my colleagues and our clients. And when Bill Sharpe, from Stanford University, took a leave of absence from academia because he wanted to work with large pension funds – at the time, that would have been our clients such as GM, IBM, AT&T – Bill approached Russell, and I was assigned to work with him. What a thrill! A few years later Bill was awarded the Economics Nobel Prize, and I was with him at a Q Group Conference in 1990 when he was called and told he’d been awarded the prize. Imagine that – being with a Nobel Prize winner on his big day!

The Russell 20-20 Group

George started what he called the Russell 20-20 Group, 20 clients and 20 money managers, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He knew the world would open up, and this would be the biggest new investment opportunity in our lifetime. And with any kind of opening, invariably the entrepreneurs led the way, followed by established companies, and pension funds were the last to get engaged. George wanted pension funds to be in at the start this time, so every year he organized a visit to an emerging market country, with a day off for sight-seeing. And that was how Susan and I found ourselves standing with George and Jane in front of the Taj Mahal in India, on Valentine’s Day 1995. I’ll never forget it.

A photo attached, naturally.

Travel

Personally I ended up heading the global consulting division, so I became part of the senior team. But I told Mike Phillips (George’s successor as CEO) that I didn’t enjoy management, and didn’t have the goal of rising to the top of the organization. Imagine, by the way, the culture that I took for granted, that I could tell the CEO this and know his reaction wouldn’t be: well, that’s your career finished, for a start! Mike asked what I did enjoy, and I said: learning and teaching. So he gradually evolved a new role for me, being Russell’s ambassador around the world, explaining new practices and techniques to our offices and clients. It turned out I was pretty good at this, and was always a welcome guest. And one of the side benefits for me was that I ended up going to the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and doing the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb ten times! (And another photo, of course.)

Some books

George always insisted that he hired smart people, so that the average degree of smartness would always go up. And, my goodness, there were a lot of very, very smart people around. I happened to enjoy writing. So, along with an outside friend, Keith Ambachtsheer, I wrote a book, Pension Fund Excellence, about what the most advanced defined benefit (DB) plans were doing. Over time, as DB started to be replaced gradually by defined contribution (DC), along with two of my magnificent colleagues, Bob Collie and Matt Smith, I wrote a book about how DC plans could operate successfully. Some years later, Matt and another Russell associate, Tim Noonan (yet another gem) wrote about DC from the individual’s perspective, and asked me to write the Foreword to their book, which they called Someday Rich.

Final comment

Can you see how much I enjoyed my huge luck at being hired by Russell?

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A note about the P&I World Pension Summit’s Excellence and Innovation Awards

It’s time to make an entry for this prestigious award! The closing date is June 25, 2026. Here’s the link: https://wpsinnovationsawards.secure-platform.com/a/

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