Retirement send-off
The trap in a retirement speech is the résumé: joined in 1994, promoted in 2001, led the such-and-such project. Nobody is moved by a timeline. What lands is the way they ran a meeting, the thing they always said, the person they quietly trained. Podiumi turns your examples into a send-off that honours the work without reciting it.
Usual length
3–6 minutes
The shape it takes
- 01Why you are speaking
- 02What they were like to work with
- 03Memories
- 04Their mark
- 05What is next
Where these go wrong
- Reading their career chronologically.
- Speaking only to the people who were there for all of it.
- Skipping what happens next for them.
What to dig out before you start
Two to five of these, written as fragments, is everything the tool needs. Specific beats impressive every single time.
Open the writing room- 01The first time you worked with them.
- 02Something they said that you still repeat.
- 03A moment they took the blame or gave away the credit.
- 04What the place will be missing on Monday.
Finished retirement speeches
Formal · 5 min
Twenty-two years, and the door he never closed
Good evening. On behalf of everyone who has worked alongside him, I would like to say something about the last twenty-two years.
In 2011 a launch went badly, publicly, and not because of him. He said it was his call. It was not his call. Several of us in this room know precisely whose call it was, and he has never once corrected the record.
Four of the people he trained now run teams of their own. That is not a coincidence, and it is not luck. It is a method, applied patiently, for two decades.
- Good evening.
- On behalf of everyone
- who worked alongside him.
- Four people he trained
- now run their own teams.
- Not luck. A method.