Farewell Thoughts

This is from an article in BusinessWeek about the farewell thoughts of Gene O'Kelly, former CEO of KPMG, who died of brain cancer. You might find his thoughts "thought"-provoking.
(For full story go to BW).

Last paragraph from article:
At KPMG one of Gene's priorities had been to change the firm's culture -- to make it more compassionate, a place where, he would later say, "we felt more alive." He wanted his staff "to get the most out of each moment and day -- for the firm's benefit and the individual's -- and not just pass through it." But as the head of the 20,000-employee company, he had remained relentlessly focused on the future, willing to sacrifice his home life for the satisfactions of the job.In those last few months, though, he came to realize, he says, that his thinking had been too narrow, his boundaries too strict. "Had I known then what I knew now," he says, "almost certainly I would have been more creative in figuring out a way to live a more balanced life, to spend more time with my family." That, says Corinne, was his one regret. He had been getting better at finding that balance before he became sick, she says, but then he ran out of time.

Gene's Final Farewells:
One of Eugene O'Kelly's hopes in the last days of his life was to be able, as he would say, "to unwind" relationships of all kinds. He placed his many colleagues, friends, and family in five concentric circles; those closest to him were in the innermost ring. He began to say goodbye through e-mail, phone conversations, walks in Central Park, over a good bottle of wine. And always on his terms. He wanted the conversations to be positive, to focus on what he had learned. And, for many people, he wanted these encounters to be the last ones. Toward the end, he says, he realized that during his previous life as a business leader he might have been "too consumed by the outermost circle." As he puts it: "Perhaps I could have found the time, in the last decade, to have had a weekday lunch with my wife more than...twice?... I realized that being able to count a thousand people in that fifth circle was not something to be proud of. It was something to be wary of."