A Model For Employing People Like Us. The Wendy Project.

By Karen and Erica

Have you ever read about a really brilliant young person who had a really brilliant idea, and became rich, and then flamed out, at great cost to employees and investors? Have you ever thought that the crash might have been averted if the young genius had had access to an older person who might have been able to offer seasoned judgment about how the world works? Someone charged with helping the genius see something the genius could not otherwise see—because the older person had perspective the younger one could not yet have had?

We have long been of the view that a Wendy in every company would be worth her weight in gold.

What is a Wendy? She is a job idea based on a character in the long running series Billions. She is smart, loyal, skillful. She is embedded within a firm, but she does not have a regular reporting channel. She is available to those who are in the daily scrum, but she is outside of the fray. She keeps confidences, and she dispenses frank advice to those who are caught up in the quotidian machinations of money-making.

Those of us who have had long careers would make perfect Wendys. We have the specific knowledge required by our careers, but we also know what a crisis looks like, and what muddled thinking looks like, too. We have solved many problems over the years. We could evaluate which risks are worth taking and which are not. We could dispense advice based on our experience, with no agenda other than keeping people’s heads on straight. Younger people at the top—or moving up the ladder—could benefit from our experience.

Employers who are smart should consider employing us, but they need to be creative about the structures they propose. Having achieved a career already, our work is distilled. We are not starting out, or in the middle of our careers. We are post-career, which means we know what we are doing. Work hours, and pay, do not necessarily have to fit within the regime governing people on the way up. For one thing, our time is worth a lot more—though we may not need to be paid at all. For another, many of us do not want to work 24/7. But we want to work, and we love to help younger people get ahead, while enjoying a life styled to encompass the benefits of having completed our careers.

Employers should have an incentive to be creative. They have a dire need for people with experience. We are really effective. So if employers are interested in a fabulous, profitable, forward-thinking workforce, they need to recruit us. The Wendy model is just one idea.

Make us happy, we will make you successful.