My slow path to retirement at GM has come to an end!!! Not sure I'm quite ready to fully retire yet though. The last six months or so I have been involved in mentoring new financial analysts in the Oshawa Manufacturing plants. There's a depth to financial reporting that is not well understood -- the role of the financial analyst is not only to report the financial position -- but rather to understand all the processes that generate "the numbers" and use that knowledge to get accurate reporting -- and save the company money. All activities affect the financial reporting and the successful analyst is plugged into everything that's going on so that the financial results aren't a surprise at month end! I've developed great relationships over my career with all the non-financial folks that have helped me to be effective in my job and help the company, whether it's been in the manufacturing or in CHQ. My previous experiences in many areas -- from sales, service, marketing, pricing, budgets, project management and tax -- have given me a unique set of lenses with which to view company processes. A signficant portion of my time in the last little while has been focused on audit and control processes within the complex, as well as Information Lifecycle Management -- ILM in GM lingo -- what needs to be kept and for how long and how is it stored and labelled so that it can be retrieved if need for legal/governmental/environmental requirements. It's simple in theory -- but much more difficult in practice when processes have both traditional paper and electronic interfaces. So now what? Who knows? I would still like a challenge to use my broad base of financial and marketing skills and the special projects and strategic planning that I have done in my career have been some of the things that I have enjoyed the most. I will have to see what life serves up next.