Aflac’s CEO confronts the inevitability of change
It comes for us all. So do you actively seek it, reluctantly embrace it—or try at all costs to avoid it?
Duck Tales
If there’s one overarching question I’m most interested in when I profile someone, it is: How do you react to change?
It comes for us all, inevitably. So do you actively seek it, reluctantly embrace it—or try at all costs to avoid it?
How people choose to navigate life’s moments of transition is what drew me to Stephanie Linnartz, taking a leap after 25 years at Marriott and landing on the treacherous astroturf of Under Armour. The same curiosity made want to sit down with Aflac CEO Dan Amos, who’s been running his oddball life insurance company—yes, the one with that duck—for the past 34 years.
Amos’s CEO story is in many ways the inverse of Linnartz’s. (And yes, his gender helps.) He’s an Aflac lifer, with good reason: His father and two uncles founded Aflac back in 1955, in Columbus, Georgia. He became CEO in 1990, after his uncle John died of cancer. And today, at age 72, Amos is the fifth-longest tenured CEO on the Fortune 500.
That puts him squarely in the center of the national conversation about aging leaders, stoked by the presidential election. As Amos readily acknowledged, when I interviewed him in February for this recently-published Fortune profile:
Aflac’s CEO is deeply familiar with death by now. He’s spent 34 years making himself and his family and his investors wealthy by selling his customers some peace of mind about their eventual endings. And he knows that in order for his company to succeed for decades beyond him, it has to reckon with its customers’ aging and encroaching mortality—as well as his own.
That conversation has taken on national resonance these days: As President Joseph Biden, 81, faces off again against former President Donald Trump, 77, the headlines have been dominated by pearl-clutching over the mental fitness of aging leaders.
Days before I interviewed Amos in February, a special counsel report calling Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory” set off a breathless news cycle about the president’s fitness to stand for reelection. Amos is almost a decade younger, but was clearly exasperated by the political chatter: When I asked about his own succession plans, he brought up Biden.
“The more you communicate publicly, the less you’ll be effective as the CEO,” he says. “They’re circling Biden now, for that same purpose—and if he gives a hint, it’s a feeding frenzy.”
This profile was a fun story to do, in part because of how hard “AFLAAAAC!” leans into its duck bit. (The company even brought in a trained duck for our magazine photo shoot.) Amos introduced the TV commercials featuring the squawking spokesfowl in 2000, juicing Aflac’s sales and helping to change the entire way that insurance is sold in this country.
But some of our conversation also felt poignant. Part of my interest came from the very human questions that Amos, at 72 and clearly in lifelong professional love with his job, is inevitably facing as he gets older. He’s overseen his company for 34 years, at a time when the average Fortune 500 CEO only gets seven. He’s shepherding a family-founded business that, he told me, “feels like one of my children”—but his actual children are no longer in the running to succeed him. And his work clearly brings him personal and social satisfaction—meaning that contemplating its end is a cause not of celebration and retirement parties but some inevitable grief.
Of course there’s some privilege inherent to this conversation. Almost anyone who’s accumulated enough power for a national news outlet to be interested in profiling has also accumulated enough wealth to cushion the impact of their choices—and to make them comfortable during any change they can’t avoid. That’s especially true of Fortune 500 CEOs, with their eight-figure annual compensation packages; but it’s also true of most actors or athletes or politicians you might read about in non-business publications.
One of the most telling moments of my conversation with Amos came when he mentioned the retirement of one of his longtime top executives. This man, former Aflac chief operating officer Fred Crawford, is retiring at age 60. He earned more than $7 million in annual compensation in 2022—meaning that, by most conventional wisdom, he has the money to retire young and enjoy the last third of his life doing something other than work.
But embracing that sort of change—at least before he has to—is clearly not for Amos.
“I would go crazy if I had to quit that young,” he told me. “I’m not going to be a very good retiree.”
Read my full profile for Fortune here.
Lady Bits
“Increasingly, insurance corporations attract business not by building trust between their customers and local agents, but by successfully ascribing positive characteristics to the fictional characters who anthropomorphize the companies and products in ads.” Part of my interest in pursuing this Aflac story came from reading this fantastic New York Times profile of Stephanie Courtney, the actor who’s spent 16 years playing Flo from Progressive. Then I started wondering if I could find a Fortune way into making the insurance industry fun and lively to read about.
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