Look Outside Your Personal and Professional Comfort Zone

Sun Life was an old-line insurance company based in Baltimore, Maryland, and when we bought it in 1971, it operated much the same way it did when it was founded in 1890. It had a history of modest growth, no better or worse than most other insurers. The company focused on the basics of the insurance business: taking in premiums, holding on to them, and making sure there was enough in the bank to pay claims. They kept their cash from premiums in traditional, low-return investments.

About eight years after we acquired the company, I looked at the industry to see where we might find a niche. Other insurers—most of them bigger and better known—were introducing new kinds of life insurance policies. I figured they would do well selling those products, and we would just lag behind if we tried the same. Instead, I pushed Sun Life away from life insurance and toward retirement savings. Our customers would be the same baby boomers who purchased Kaufman and Broad’s houses: a big generation of spenders who would live long past retirement age and, therefore, would be thinking more about retirement than death. That’s when I thought to introduce fixed and variable annuities—which actually were mutual funds in life insurance wrappe....