Welcome to the age of opportunity

By Neil Patrick

In life there are things we can change and things that we cannot. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR) is something none of us can change. It's demolishing the life expectations of a generation. But from amidst the smoke and debris, new hope is coming into view for those who can embrace it...

We can adapt to survive and thrive in this fast changing world.  And the first step is recognizing and ditching the baggage that we have been accumulating for our entire lives about how the world of work works. The only reason millennials are taking all the glory in the world of business start-ups is because they just did it. No-one told them they couldn't or shouldn't.

And just as older people can become victims of ageism in their job-search, so too do recent grads. They get passed up because they haven't got enough experience. The difference is they say, "Well if no-one is going to give me a job, I'll make my own".

Forget all the headlines about multi-million pound crowd-funded start-ups. About franchises. About network marketing. All these are just working for someone else's benefit - for investors, for franchisors or some shady character you'll probably never meet.

The FIR may be destroying 'old' jobs, but its also creating new ones. It's time that boomers learned how to make their own jobs too...

Creativity, flexibility and adaptability are key requirements for every person and every business that wants to prosper in the fourth industrial revolution.

According to Dr.Yuval Noah Harari, best selling author of  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, our abilities to adapt and collaborate are the principal reasons humans came to be the dominant species on the planet.

But the world we spent most of our careers in, the old world of corporate control, hierarchy and obedience, was pretty successful at repressing these essential human qualities. Despite having teams of people who supposedly 'managed' human resources, they didn't and they don't. Mostly they seek to control and administrate it. Not nurture it.

We have to recover our abilities to adapt and collaborate. And this involves thinking outside the box, learning  new skills, developing new networks, and nurturing our creativity. It's no co-incidence that these are the traits that the most progressive and promising businesses and organisations place high value on.

They are also the key requirements for anyone who wants to stop relying on whatever job they can get and make their own way in the world.

We have to get used to the fact that everything we learned about how the world of work worked is either wrong now or will be soon.

There’s not much that most of us learned at school which carries much value in the FIR. Traditional education places value on facts and understanding. Facts have become devalued to such an extent that they have little value in and of themselves. They might be useful in a pub quiz or crossword puzzle, but in the workplace they are worth pretty much zilch because the internet has reduced knowledge to a universally available and virtually free commodity.

You might think understanding and raw intelligence is less devalued. In part it is, but understanding only has economic value if it is coupled with creativity. So for example, you may understand how a solar panel works. But you can only harness this knowledge and extract significant value from it, if you can create a new version which works better, or find new applications for the technology, or solve problems within the industry. Otherwise, the best you can hope for is a low paid job making, installing or repairing them.

The previous industrial eras made incomes possible for people because at almost every level, the same type of work needed doing more or less endlessly. In the FIR, almost any task which can be reduced to repetitive sequential activities can and will be done by AI and/or robots. Including the ones which can be done better by real people - yes I'm talking about you, you rage-inducing recorded phone menus...

We cannot stop this change. But we can seize hold of the opportunities it delivers, to do things faster, cheaper and better than ever before. It's putting power into the hands of everyone that in the old world was only available to big corporations.

We have to re-engage our creativity. Rediscover our core talents and use them. Everyone has talents, but most people work in jobs where they have none. And last but not least dive into the online world to really discover all the power that's now at our fingertips.

We have to become comfortable with uncertainty and spotting change before it hurts us

For the first time in history, the shape of things to come is harder to predict than ever before. Every decade in the 20th century was a reaction to the preceding one. Change happened relatively slowly, there were inter-generational changes but these were more about social attitudes and ideas than a changing world. Today and in the future, the world will be changing faster than ever before.

So understanding what will change in our own areas of professional activity will become an ever more important career survival skill. Early last year, a friend of mine in the oil and gas industry realised that his industry was on the cusp of flipping from a high profit, steady growth sector with great career security and prospects, to one which was going to be increasingly unstable. He spotted the coming change and immediately went about setting up his plan to cope with the threats. His colleagues continued as normal, relying purely on hope that all would be okay. Today his expectations have been realised. He escaped relatively unscathed. Many of his colleagues didn’t.

We have to be able to see ahead of the curve. And this means keeping our antennae alert for change and threat, not just ploughing on hoping everything will be okay. And it is exactly the same sensing apparatus which spots opportunities as well as threats.

We have to understand and constantly grow our career assets and intellectual capital

It doesn’t matter if you are an architect, a steel worker, an accountant or a bus driver. If our only career asset is knowing how to do what we do today to earn money to live, we are extremely vulnerable. The moment our work or employer changes for any reason, we are high and dry.

So we need to not just predict change, we have to take action to create career assets which may not be useful today, but which will support us and our incomes in the future. This requires spotting where our income opportunities will be in future and figuring out how we can make ourselves a prime candidate to exploit them.

Our time needs to be carefully managed so that we are continually amassing assets which may be of little or no value to the job or work we are doing today, but which we will need when the day comes that we no longer have that job.


We have to nurture diverse and global networks

Increased connectivity is a key aspect of the FIR. The world now operates globally and it is as easy to have a video chat with someone on the other side of the world as it is with someone in the next office. Social media gives us the opportunity to meet people online that we would never even have been aware of in the pre-digital world.

My own clients are all over the planet. Almost every single one of them found me through social media. The only limitation on who I can communicate with is language, but how long before real time translation apps remove that barrier too?

And my network is growing daily. New Twitter followers, new Linkedin connections and last but far from least, new people who even though they live on my doorstep, only became aware of me because of the internet.

I can never tell who is going to be of value to me and who isn't. I just know that someone will. So I treat everyone I meet with care, courtesy and generosity. And more often than not that's what I get back in return.

We have to understand how technology is going to impact our area of professionalism and get ahead of the change curve

This is an age of opportunity. It just doesn’t feel like it for people who have spent their entire lives being conditioned to deliver what the pre-internet age required.

What is tricking people is that opportunities don’t look how they used to. Do you really think that a 25 year old, fresh out of university is smarter than you? More valuable than you? More skilled than you? I don’t.

The only difference is that he or she has less fear; the boundless optimism of youth. He or she has nothing to lose and everything to gain. And it is this fear which is our greatest enemy.

In the next post, I’ll look at the five things I think everyone needs if they want to find and exploit their own opportunities in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

And it seems I am not the only one who has this opinion. Gary Vaynerchuk has expressed pretty much the same view with his own unique brand of raw energy:

Why boomer careers will never be the same again (VIDEO)

By Neil Patrick

The threat to baby boomers' careers and financial outlook won't go away even if the economy improves. Here's why and and what we must all do about it.

Thanks to this blog, I keep on running into amazing people who help inform and shape my view of the way mature professionals can deal with the career crisis.

A few weeks ago I hooked up with John Tarnoff in California. He's spent most of his career in the entertainment and film industry. John first came to my attention when I watched his highly entertaining and thought provoking talk at So Cal TEDx.

John's had 18 jobs in his 38 year career. And he's been fired from 39% of them.

He's changed jobs therefore on average every 2.1 years. So among his many talents, he's also a master at career reinvention. And if you think with all your qualifications and accomplishments you don't need this skill, I beg to disagree.

John Tarnoff

As we chatted on Skype and emailed, it was clear that we'd reached the same conclusions about the critical career challenges the boomer generation faces.

Personal reinvention isn't an option - it's a critical 21st century survival skill

This is going to be possibly the most important career skill you'll need to survive and prosper in the 21st century. Did anyone ever teach you this at school or university? No, me neither.

The trouble is that the education system that the baby boomers went through was geared to a different century and a different set of global economics.

As I talked about here, we are at the end of the second industrial revolution and are entering the third. And in the third industrial revolution, the key technology is the internet and digital media. Just knowing how to send emails, set up your Linkedin profile and browse stuff online isn't enough.

It doesn't matter what sector you work in, if you are not savvy about the way digital technology is reshaping your profession, you need to be. And you need to be at the front, not behind the curve if you are to have any chance of continuing to practice your other hard won skills.

If you're behind, you can be sure that you are or will be at risk of losing your place to someone much younger even if they don't have all your years of experience.

A cozy retirement starting in your sixties is going to be a rarity

If we were all coasting comfortably towards retirement, this wouldn't be so much of an issue. But 2008 and it's aftermath has changed all that. The professional middle classes in the US and Europe were struck by a tsunami so  huge that it has devastated their personal assets.

Property asset values tumbled, investments had billions wiped off, pension plans shriveled, savings interest rarely even matched inflation. All the while, living costs and particularly food and energy bills rose and rose. Hardly anyone in the professional classes became wealthier between 2008 and today.

Few are currently able to look forward to a comfortable retirement when they reach 65 unless they drastically reevaluate what they are going to do to keep the money coming in..

The skills required to be employable in today's jobs, let alone those in 10 years time, have changed beyond recognition. Because technology, communications and media have changed beyond recognition.

An economic recovery can't rectify this damage

Whilst there are encouraging signs about economic recovery in the US and UK, don't be tempted into thinking all may be coming good again and the terrible threat to our future is receding. It isn't. Because the root of the current economic woes of the baby boomers, isn't the trashing of their balance sheets, it's something much harder to quantify. It's the dawn of a whole new industrial era. And that means a whole new set of survival skills are called for.

If you've not seen John's talk, I am happy to share the video below. If you wonder what your career future holds for you...then watch it. It's also probably the most fun you'll have today (with your clothes on anyway).

And more importantly, it might just get you thinking.

Here's John's introduction:


On July 14th, I was asked to give a TEDX Talk for TEDxSoCal in Long Beach, CA (home of the big TED event) on the theme of "The Alchemy of Transformation ... Our Selves, Our Work Places, Our Living Spaces." In looking at this question, it occurred to me that while my professional work is focused on helping the next generation of media content professionals adapt to the amazing and pervasive paradigm shifts introduced by digital technology, here was an opportunity to discuss some of these same paradigm shifts for an audience that I had never really addressed: my own Baby Boomer generation.

While the students that I work with (and the schools they go to) are trying to figure out how to prepare for entering the media industry and developing new careers, the Baby Boomers are on the other side of equation, looking at how to wrap up their careers and transition into what we commonly refer to as "retirement."

The well-known problem for the Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964), is that, as a generation, we have not prepared for this transition. There are many statistics available here, but the most striking number to me is this one: 80 percent of us have saved less than $100,000 for our retirement. Given the economics of the last five years, and the prospects ahead of us, what this means is that the Boomers are going to have to keep working - and the problem there is that neither we nor society at large are prepared for us to remain in the work force.

My point in the TEDx talk is propose some ideas on how to reinvent ourselves in order to maintain our relevance in and relevance to the workforce. We need to start reframing who we are and what we think we're capable of doing, and to reject the idea that old dogs can't learn new tricks.

After all, we have some pretty amazing life experience to draw from. If our kids are actually listening to all of our music (my daughter is currently negotiating vociferously for access to my 600 hundred-album stack of vinyl...), then we can't be all that out of touch. If we were able to piss off our parents and master the art of talking on the phone, doing homework and listening to the radio, we should be able to figure out how to multi-task between Text, Email, Voicemail and Skype while sitting at Starbucks in between meetings.

As I know from working with my graduate students, there's a lot that they know, and there's a lot that they don't know. They and we want and need guidance from one other. It's one big ecology: our wisdom and experience + their digital awareness and limitless passion.

In the midst of so many paradigm shifts that I'm observing in the digital age, one emerges out of this situation that I'd like to share. In the 20th century, we thought of life in three broad stages: Education, Career and Retirement. In the 21st century however, I believe that these three need to be replaced by Self Awareness, Creation, and Service. While this is guidance for young people starting out, it is also an important concept for those of us on the other side of the curve.

I invite you to view the TEDx Talk to hear some specific suggestions on how the Boomers can take back some control of our careers as we press on into unexpected and uncharted territory. Hint: The kids can be alright!

Why Baby Boomers and Gen Y need some mutual understanding

By Neil Patrick

Last month, my friend Marc Miller posted a timely and thought provoking piece on his blog Career Pivot entitled, Could you work for a Gen Y boss?

Gen Y, also known as ‘Millennials’, are those born between the early 1980s and early 2000s.

As Marc pointed out; “For most baby boomers, thinking about working for a Gen Y boss might seem like a nightmare. Could you work for your kid…or someone your kid’s age?

Projections show that by 2014 millennials will account for 36% of the American workforce. In 2025, that number balloons to 75% of the global workplace.

What does this mean?

You WILL eventually have a Gen Y boss.”

Marc’s piece prompted me to think about the attitude differences between Gen Y and the baby boomers. How the economic environment that each group has experienced has shaped their attitudes and ideas. And how both groups need to learn some mutual appreciation.

The emergence of Gen Yers into positions of seniority and authority is inevitable, so Baby Boomers need to understand them much better and what shapes their attitudes.

We are all victims of the economic crisis

Baby Boomers and Generation X have both been affected by periods of economic downturn at critical attitude development ages (18-25). On the other hand, Generation Y grew up during a period of exceptionally low interest rates and inflation accompanied by significant asset inflation.

This created a level of comfort with debt which was unheard of amongst previous generations.

Unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen X, Generation Y is a group of young adults whose financial attitudes are forged out of cheap debt and easy credit. They also view debt from a perspective of historically low interest rates, and struggle to reconcile this with an economic environment that has now transformed from everything they have ever known.

The explosion in higher education, largely paid for by student loans, has also created an additional debt burden on Gen Yers which was largely absent amongst their predecessors.

Given this, it is not surprising that a recent building society survey* indicates the vast majority of Generation Y who have access to credit, are in significant personal debt. This attitude to debt undoubtedly helped fuel unsustainable increases in consumption when viewed against a harsher economic outlook.

Generation Y is ill-equipped to understand the extent of the current financial turmoil and its potential implications. This financial illiteracy, coupled with extensive borrowing, leaves Generation Y particularly exposed to a recession that it is unable to voice its views upon, as it does not yet occupy sufficiently senior roles in the public or private sectors.

For their part, the Baby Boomers have been left chronically exposed to the aftermath of the credit crunch. Dramatic falls in the stock market have eroded the value of savings and pensions held by Baby Boomers and for most, this has happened at a pivotal moment in which they would have been anticipating moving to a position of asset divestment.

Other assets held outside financial institutions, most notably property, have suffered a fall in value after years of high growth. Ironically, the previous inflation in property prices has been fuelled by Generation Y’s determination to own their first homes, financed through high borrowing ratios and parental subsidies.

In contrast to Generation Y’s position of weakness, their parents are perceived (often wrongly in my view) to enjoy a position of financial strength and even culpability for the present financial crisis. Consequently, I have witnessed an attitude amongst Gen Yers which places blame for their economic frustrations firmly in the hands of the Baby Boomers. An example of this blaming attitude was posted by Australian blogger Mark Fletcher which I posted on this blog here.

Just because something is fast and free doesn’t mean it’s automatically better

Gen Yers have grown up in an age where instant communications and gratification have always been available to them online. Thanks to Facebook and other online networking, they are conditioned into the idea that anything you want can be obtained more or less instantly and often for free.

It’s a far cry from a time when baby boomers like myself were quite happy to save our money for weeks just so we could buy the latest album by our favourite group pressed onto a piece of black vinyl. I also have distinct memories also of doing my homework by candlelight during the power cuts of the 1974-5 brought about by the industrial action of the coal miners. TV companies were obliged to shut down at 10.30pm to conserve energy.

In terms of attitudes to work, Gen Yers unlike baby boomers are less inclined to see their work as the way they define themselves. Boomers when meeting new people habitually open their conversations with something like, ‘And what do you do?’. Gen Yers are much more inclined to discuss the things they like to do outside work. To them work is often nothing more than what they do to pay for their leisure lives.

It’s time for some mutual appreciation guys, or ‘group hugs’ if you’re Gen Y

So how can Boomers and Gen Yers each obtain a better mutual understanding? For Gen Y, I believe they need to appreciate that Boomers have been just as hard hit by the economic crisis as they have. And that they have much less time available to them to try and recover. But having experienced financial hardships before, Boomers are much more financially savvy and resilient than they are. Boomers may not be as comfortable with digital media, but they have an attitude to work which places quality over quantity and speed.

For Boomers to engage successfully with Gen Y, they need to improve their comfort and familiarity with digital media and communications and understand that the Gen Y attitude to their employers as more or less disposable is much more in tune with today’s fluid employment situation.

You also need to really get really comfortable with being a team player. Gen Yers have been conditioned by social media to communicate freely and laterally. That’s the nature of social networks which are digital. It’s not the rigid hierarchy that boomers grew up with.

So Boomers, if you do wind up with a Gen Y boss, you can fully expect them to be texting you with questions or demands at midnight…frequently.


*A report by the Skipton Building Society found that 73% of people under the age of 35 in Yorkshire have some form of debt, with the average person owing £8,477. Their biggest monthly expense on average, other than rent or mortgage payments, was servicing debt. 

How to use LinkedIn to power up your job search – and it’s not the way you think

By Neil Patrick

I have read a great deal recently about why some people think Linkedin is a bad place to find your next job.

And I think there’s some truth in these criticisms. Why do I say this?

• Jobs on LinkedIn are advertised because it’s a really low cost way for recruiters and hiring companies to reach a lot of people. Advertising on LinkedIn starts at $2 a click. So getting your job in front of 500 targeted candidates costs from $1000. That’s cheap in advertising terms.

• This is good news for recruiters but bad news for candidates. For candidates, the old problem of being a small fish in a big pond hasn’t gone away. In June 2013, LinkedIn reported it had 259 million registered users worldwide… 

• LinkedIn’s revenues depend heavily on recruitment advertising. In 2012 this was $84.9m. I don’t yet have the 2013 figures, but growth forecasts are in the 25% - 45% range. The point is that LinkedIn will for sure be focussing hard on further growth in this sector and we’ll see more initiatives in this area of activity by LinkedIn. 

• Many jobs I have seen advertised on LinkedIn have a list of required qualities and experience that are so great, you’d need to have at least 50 years of experience to get close to what is being asked for. And typically the salary range is rarely shown… 

So, just like jobs boards and all online recruitment, you are forced to play a numbers game, and the odds are stacked against you right from the start.


LinkedIn is facing some business challenges

In essence, LinkedIn is a highly attractive medium for recruiters, but overcomes few of the hurdles faced by jobseekers. Result - more and more jobs are being posted on LinkedIn. And growth of the LinkedIn user base means competition for jobs advertised there must grow too. This isn’t good news if you are job hunting.

But there’re some headwinds for LinkedIn as a business too. Many analysts on Wall Street believe that we are witnessing the development of a social media bubble, citing for example the near doubling of Twitter’s equity value on the first day following its IPO.

Linkedin has a key weakness too in its user base. It isn’t getting much use by the real captains of industry. In fact there’s an argument that the more senior you are, the less you will use Linkedin. Like all social media, Linkedin also faces a challenge to grow its revenues. As it progressively introduces more and more initiatives that help achieve this, the positive user experience is difficult to maintain.


But it’s still really valuable for job hunting

Having said all of that, I still think LinkedIn is a key tool for job hunting and this goes back to two things which were part of its founding principles:

1. The fostering of networking between professionals across the globe. 
2. It’s ability to facilitate the sharing of information between people who would probably never meet in the real world. 

Baby Boomers need to understand a whole new world

Baby boomers grew up and built their careers in a time where there was no social media. The whole world operated on hierarchical structures – from heads of state to voters, from media owners to readers, from archbishops to congregations.

And of course in the business world from CEOs to workers and consumers.

Power and influence was exercised generally in a top down fashion with just the occasional acquiescence to taking up ideas and wishes from the bottom up.

The world of digital media has demolished this model. Social media scales laterally. Influence spreads from peer to peer. It fosters collaboration.

It’s a genuine social revolution. Just look at how the Arab Spring gained momentum – people in repressive dictatorships found that they could spread their influence to their peers rapidly and almost for free. And critically they could do this with absolutely no approval from their hierarchical superiors.

This characteristic of the social web is difficult to come to terms with for a generation that has grown up in a hierarchical world. I think many baby boomers like the communication tools of the social web. They see it as convenient and cheap, but they haven’t really grasped that its biggest change isn’t a technological one, it’s a societal one.

For Gen Y who have grown up with social media and digital technologies, this isn’t a change at all. For them, it’s always been this way. And for Gen X, it’s a change that they’ve been part of during most of their adult lives.

So baby boomers have a double disadvantage, the most obvious is of course that they are not as savvy with the technology as younger generations. But this can be overcome with a bit of application and persistence. The bigger problem in my view is that it requires a whole different world view. The shift from a hierarchical frame of reference to a lateral and peer to peer one requires a 90 degree rotation of your perspective.


Understand the power of networks and you’re halfway there

So to get back to the title of this post, the power of Linkedin for job search isn’t that it’s a new medium for finding job adverts. As I outlined at the start, this is really an illusion anyway and it helps recruiters and hiring organisations much more than it helps applicants.

No the real power of Linkedin is how it allows us to build powerful personal networks.

Network theorists identified the power of networks as early as the 1970s. Mark Granovetter and his paper “The Strength of Weak Ties,” and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi were pioneers in the understanding of network theory. Long before Linkedin was even set up, they identified why social networks have such tremendous reach and power.

Granovetter showed that people were more likely to get jobs from friends of friends, rather than immediate friends. The logic is that we know the same people our friends know and therefore if they know about a career opportunity, we probably already know about it, too. But your friend’s friends are more likely to know people you don’t know who know about career opportunities you haven’t heard about.

Let’s say you have ten close friends. That’s not much of a network, but if we also assume that each of your ten friends also has ten friends, your accessible network is now 100 people. If each of those ‘second degree’ friends also knows ten people, your reach is now 1,000…

But critically LinkedIn can multiply this reach many times over. If you have say 600 LinkedIn connections and these people all know a little about who you are and what you do, suddenly your reach is at least 6,000 people and probably much more.

The open sharing of information about ourselves, peer endorsement and shared community of online networks builds a sense of camaraderie and trust between members. Because LinkedIn focuses on people, it not only expands the scope of your search, it creates a network with trust created between members. Someone who is referred by someone you know (or someone who knows someone you know) is much more likely to be a helpful and valuable connection. This creates a connection that is psychologically more conducive to positive interaction.

Why it pays to be a ‘weak’ link

Most of us are or can easily become members of several different networks. The people who connect the unconnected are called “weak links.” This isn’t the same thing as “The Weakest Link” on TV. The weak link in network theory is where you start to get really powerful information flows because weak links connect previously unconnected people. LinkedIn has an extraordinary ability to enable you to be your own weak link, connecting you to people and potential career opportunities beyond your immediate network.

Looked at in this way, it’s an extraordinarily effective resource for career change, industry information, and employment opportunities.

So the real power of Linkedin for your job search isn’t the job ads it carries. It’s its extraordinary ability to empower you to build your network faster and more easily than ever before. Across countries. Across continents.

Once we start to think about our personal networks as being lateral not hierarchical and scaling them laterally, suddenly the way we think about and carry out our career development activities is transformed.

It’s a genuinely new age…thankfully without the need to buy crystals.

Why contractors are the future and the downsides of hiring a mercenary workforce

By David Hunt, PE

A friend of mine from when I worked at Ford Motor Company in Sandusky, Ohio and I talk about once a week. He, I, and a few others from the circle of friends I developed there stay in touch. A while ago, he and I simultaneously had an epiphany while chatting: this was the last place where we developed real friendships at work.

Do I stay in touch with a few people from subsequent employers? Yes, but they are few and far between, and – with one notable exception of a vendor representative – they are nowhere as close as these friendships.

I am reminded of my own youth, where my parents would often host dinner parties whose attendees were – almost exclusively – colleagues from my father’s or mother’s place of employment. People who attended celebrations were mostly people whom my parents or I had come to know through their workplaces. Their children were my friends. Looking back, I’d have to opine that the overwhelming majority of persons in my parents’ social circle were people from work.

In the last couple of decades, the workplace has become increasingly mercenary and the average tenure in a company has been shrinking (the average now, IIRC, is three years). In a recent article by Gary Swart on LinkedIn, The Future of Work and the follow-up piece The Future of Work Part II: 10 Tips For Professionals, he addresses the increased churn rate of the workplace today. Citing the fact that most people are now shifting jobs every few years, he claims this is driven by employees wanting to be freer and more mobile, among other reasons. Another essay, Half Of Us May Soon Be Freelancers: 6 Compelling Reasons Why, discusses the benefits of this trend, as does Why Everybody’s Going Freelance.

I would argue that this is reversing cause and effect. Since the 1980’s, companies have become freer and freer to downsize, fire, and otherwise shuffle people around. Driven in part by increased globalization, but also the spate of MBAs pursuing an extra fraction-of-a-percent profit margin, the idea of the old employment contract has been undermined, with employers – not employees – being the driving force. The disposable nature of people these days is forcing people to take a contractor’s mentality. More than a few networking contacts of mine foresaw this and became contractors ahead of the curve!

While I might be projecting here, my understanding of the ultimate end state of this trend is of a company with a skeletal core of people, reaching out to freelancers and contractors to form teams that swirl around a project or two like piranhas swarming a piece of juicy prey, then dispersing to the next location (i.e., company) where more prey is available.

The benefits, I do agree, are obvious. Lower head count, less benefits to fund, having specialists on board when a company needs them and not when they are not needed. But there is a price to such ephemeral groups…

Back at Ford Motor Company, one of the first projects I worked on was the launch of the 1996 Ford/Taurus headlight assembly line. Of the several projects I did on this line, one was looking at the allowable leak rate specification which was forcing the rejection of a substantial number of headlights. Where did this specification come from? Nobody at the plant knew. It was what it was, handed down from the hazy mists of long ago.

I quizzed our design group. The same story: nobody knew. Finally I found a grizzled veteran of the lighting design group. The leak rate specification was from sealed beam headlights from decades ago, passed down from lighting generation to lighting generation.

But our lights weren’t sealed anymore. Instead, they incorporated a filtered vent to allow the light to breathe – a totally different design philosophy. Given this insight we designed a series of experiments and widened the allowable leak rate substantially, reducing reject and scrap rates substantially without compromising field performance. If I had not had this insight of the origin of the specification, arguing for the testing I did would have been much more difficult. More importantly, without this insight and the subsequent testing, a step-change improvement in first-time-through and reduced scrap would not have been achieved.

Another project, while in climate control, involved cost-reducing a heat shield. Again, I had to dig and dig and dig to find out why the heat shield was there (beyond the obvious, first-order answer of protecting the plastic case underneath). And again, it was only a chance conversation with a longtime veteran in the design group that I found out why the heat shield was used: this heavy formed-fiberglass piece served solely as a carrier for the aluminum foil to reflect away the engine heat.

Armed with the actual function of the piece, I developed and successfully tested a concept that – had I not been laid off with almost 2,000 other people – I would have pushed through with the potential to save an estimated $750K per year.

What did these two things have in common? The value and knowledge of how things were developed, as contained in the memories of people who had longevity at the company – the company’s “tribal knowledge”.

More recently at Cabot Corporation, we had a retiree come in and work a couple of days a week. He had extensive and invaluable experience in the WHY of our systems. Often understanding why things are the way they are – something only truly available by having access to someone whose long-duration tenure gives them that knowledge – is critical before one starts making changes in more than a trial-and-error mode.

Sell-swords have their uses; many are indeed experts in their area of expertise and can be useful when a company is faced with a specific and extremely thorny problem. But a company consisting mostly of as-needed mercenaries is continually doing two things:

• Employing people who, while working, are worrying about where they’re going next when this gig ends – and having to spend time and mental energy searching for it instead of spending that mental energy on the project (or on other “trivial” things like their families). 
• Scrambling to find pieces of that “tribal knowledge” – the knowledge that vanished when the company dispersed their full-time staff slavering at the cost savings – and having to duplicate effort and rediscover all that information time and again. 

There is, possibly, a better term for this than sell-swords: pirates. Pirate crews swarmed to the leader who promised the most booty. Ultimately loyal only to themselves, they would often disperse the moment things got difficult; if they didn’t it was more from fear or inability to leave than any loyalty or inspiration.

When faced with official navies, usually pirates came out on the worse end. Why? Because formal militaries were organized, learned from experience, and had people who were dedicated and loyal to something more than the promise of, arrrr, treasure.

As companies descend into free-wheeling teams of self-focused, short-timer buccaneers, signing on for quick booty, what will they do when they face organized companies with long-term, loyal, committed employees inspired by something greater than their next paycheck or a fat bonus?

© 2013, David Hunt, PE

David Hunt is a Mechanical Design Engineer in southern New Hampshire looking for his "next opportunity" that allows him to design new products and shepherd them to stable production. His LinkedIn profile is: www.linkedin.com/in/davidhuntmecheng/; he blogs at davidhuntpe.wordpress.com and tweets at @davidhuntpe.

Baby boomers – here’s why (some of) our kids hate us

By Neil Patrick

If you want to know how some of the gen Yers see us, then this piece by Australian blogger Mark Fletcher is an example. If you’re a baby boomer, it’s tempting to simply go into denial and rebuttal when you read his fiery rhetoric, but I think if you can see past the rage, he makes some valid points about for example the failures of government institutions to lead effectively.

But overall, I think his arguments are naïve and driven more by anger than understanding. You cannot hold a whole generation corporately responsible for anything. We didn’t hold the whole of Germany accountable for the crimes of the Nazi regime; if we accept Mark’s reasoning, it would follow that we should have done…and presumably murdered every surviving German person in 1945. It’s ironic therefore that one of his ‘recommendations’ is the removal of voting rights from everyone over 40 years old. Isn’t that a bit erm..fascist Mark?

It also conveniently fails to mention what the gen Yers have done which is really any different from what the boomers have done. They have just whinged a bit more and are seeking out culprits for their angst. If you want culprits Mark, I think you are looking in the wrong place.

Perhaps though this inter-generational blaming attitude highlights one really important point. If we have failed as a generation, we have failed because we put our trust in the wrong leaders and the wrong economic policies. And because of that error, we have failed to win the trust and respect of (some of) our own children.

What do you think? I'd welcome your thoughts in the comments section below.

Here’s Mark’s post:



The Baby Boomers had their chance to create the society into which they wanted to retire and they dropped the ball. They don't deserve our help, writes Mark Fletcher.

By Mark Fletcher
Back when I was a kid, old people had fought in a war. They could tell you stories about growing up in the Great Depression, about the spread of mass manufactured cars, and about personally trying to shoot Hitler. When they retired, they looked back on a long life of hard work, of securing our freedoms, and of not understanding how to programme the VCR.

Today, old (sic) people are rubbish. They’ve never done anything worthwhile. They happily took handouts from several economic booms and completely failed to invest in infrastructure like their parents’ generation had done for them.

In Australia, they crafted a completely nuts housing market where housing prices head steadily upwards (which will be paid for by their children’s generation); meanwhile, they enjoyed free education (again, paid for by their parents’ generation) which they subsequently denied to their children. The media companies they own write article after article about how ‘Gen Y’ has a bad attitude and feels entitled to jobs and conditions of employment. Now they have the freaking audacity to claim that they want to retire and have my generation pay for it.

Sod ‘em, the lazy swine. If you didn’t fight a Nazi, you don’t get to retire. You certainly don’t get to retire on my dime.

Boomers only ever cared about themselves?
Credit:  Alfabille (Own work) CC-BY-SA-3.0

The problem with my ‘Let them become Soylent Green cake’ attitude is that, one day, I shall be old and I will want to retire. With a bunch of old people currently hogging all the political power making the sort of short-sighted decisions that you’d expect from people who won’t survive to see the consequences, the future doesn’t look bright and rosy for my retirement (which apparently will be in the year 2105).

The Per Capita think tank released an awkwardly phrased report last week called Still Kicking:

The ageing of the population will see the number of people aged 65 to 84 years more than double, and the number of people aged 85 and over more than quadruple. As a result, the proportion of people who are of working age will decline as a proportion of the whole population.

Clearly this conclusion doesn’t follow. The sentence ‘The number of people who are of working age is not expected to increase by as much’ is missing, which is weird given that the rest of the report is dedicated to increasing the number of people who are of working age.

Per Capita gives us the usual handwaves typical of Australia’s think tanks. We could change the working age to include more people and ‘reconceptualise’ retirement. We could tinker with superannuation. We can gear our health system towards making sure that people are economic cogs for longer. And so on and so forth. All the low-hanging fruit was dutifully picked.

Not to be outdone, the number-crunchers at the Grattan Institute got out their sliderules and abaci to put together a chapter in their Balancing Budgets report about retirement:

Increasing to 70 the age of access to the Age Pension and superannuation (the ‘retirement age’) is one of the most economically attractive choices to improve budgets in the medium term. It could ultimately improve the budget bottom line by $12 billion a year in today’s terms, while producing a lift in economic activity of up to 2 per cent of GDP.

What both Per Capita and the Grattan Institute are saying is that previous generations have screwed up the general revenue base so heinously that everybody needs to work more to pay for the retirees.

Further, both organisations are setting the policy gears to resolve the problems of today’s old fogey. They let the health system deteriorate and now health care is expensive. Shock. They let the infrastructure deteriorate and now they don’t have the labour mobility that they need to get a job. Horror. They let the education system collapse and now they can’t reskill into new industries. Surprise. They let general revenue get whittled away on pork barreling and now there’s no money left.

As a result, intergenerational policy is being colonised and dominated by economic, labour, and health policies. How can we afford to keep old people? How can we unlock the potential labour of old people and translate it into GDP? How can we manage the health needs of the elderly?

It is an approach that conceptualises homo senilis as if they had sprung out of the earth and suddenly (like mushrooms) come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other.

There was society and it was functioning and then - completely by surprise - there were all these old people who had special needs and who needed things.

A better, more sophisticated, approach is to work out what sort of society we (that is, people under the age of 35) want for our retirement and then set the policy gears now to achieve it. Do we want a society of lifelong learning? Then we need an education policy to gut the current education system which considers education over by age 25 and de-link technical education from the research sector. Do we want a society of non-manual labour? Then we need an industry policy to let the manufacturing sectors crash, a research policy to invest in better industries, and a legislative policy to improve protections for intellectual property. Do we want to enjoy a retirement like our great grandparents had? Then we need a fiscal policy to diversify the revenue streams of the Government so it relies less on income taxes. And so on and so forth.

The easiest way for us to achieve this utopian future is to rescind the voting rights of any person over the age of 40. The Baby Boomers have made it clear that we’ll have to take the reins of government from their cold, dead hands, but they’ve demonstrated that they can’t be trusted to manage themselves. They’ll live longer and they’ll vote longer; and they’ll vote for parties that promise to stamp out ‘Aged Discrimination’ (which is code for forcing the rest of us to pay their indulged way).

They had their chance to create the society into which they wanted to retire and they dropped the ball. Our policymakers shouldn’t be putting out the fires of yesterday, and we definitely shouldn’t develop policies which exonerate their hideous mistakes.

Mark Fletcher is a Canberra-based blogger and policy wonk who writes about conservatism, atheism, and popular culture. He blogs at OnlyTheSangfroid. This article was originally published onAusOpinion.com.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/11/29/comment-will-you-still-employ-me-when-i-m-64

What can a transvestite teach the rest of us about careers?

By Neil Patrick

Quite a lot actually as it turns out. And here’s why.

Sometimes, when we are trying to solve a problem, it’s really helpful to take some inspiration from something which is far removed from the immediate context of our own experience and our own world.

Like for example, art.

I think the career world of the artist is relevant to the rest of us. Yesterday I talked about the ‘P’ word - passion. And why you could never have a truly great career without it.

We all know that typically, artists have lots of passion. They eat it for breakfast. They also mostly have no money…unless they get real lucky, a cynic will say.

Do not be fooled though into thinking that therefore P=PP i.e. Passion = Professional Poverty.

Artists provide several valuable reference points for the rest of us. But the one that is relevant to what we talk about here, is that many of them quite literally starve in order to pursue their passion. That’s dedication.

And it’s also relevant because their single-minded pursuit of their passion is how they channel their need for self-expression and self-realization.

So a couple of weeks ago, when I was listening to the Reith Lecture by Grayson Perry, I wasn’t particularly surprised to discover he spent the first twenty years of his adult life virtually penniless.

In case you are not familiar with his career, here’s a brief synopsis.

Born in 1960, as a child, he suffered from an abusive stepfather, which led to his attempts to escape this abuse by assuming the alter ego of a little girl. In his teens, he realized that he was a transvestite.

As a young man, he spent several years living in squats and survived (just) by working as a sandwich maker.

Perry had his first pottery lessons in 1983. For a while he made only glazed plates with text because he could not make anything else. No-one wanted to buy his work, which many viewed as crude, lewd and unsophisticated. But he persisted. For years.

Grayson Perry

Finally, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam mounted a solo exhibition of his work in 2002. It was partly for this work that he was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, the first time it was given to a ceramic artist. He attended the award ceremony dressed as a girl, his alter-ego Claire, wearing a little girl party frock. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to contemporary art.

Today, his pots fetch between about $30,000 and $80,000 each at auction.

And he still wears frocks.

But Grayson Perry isn’t successful because he’s the most famous transvestite in the world of ceramics. Or because he chose to create work which some viewed as shocking. Grayson Perry is successful because he developed his own unique commentary with all its peculiarities. He did the things he could, the things he felt he must and the things he chose. Not the things that other people said he should do.

I don’t think he would ever say he has a job. But he sure has a career.

Our retirement plans are ruined…and why this may be good news

By Neil Patrick

We all know the way our careers were supposed to go. Roughly speaking.

We’d get a bunch of qualifications, start work, change employers maybe four or five times, work hard, get promoted and then at around 50 or so have a comfortable cruise towards our retirement at 65. Then we’d be able to relax and enjoy the next 20 or so years.

We’ll that’s all gone now for most of us.

I’m sorry to say that it doesn't make much difference what your employer or financial advisor recommends. If you are a baby boomer in the US, UK and much of the EU, unless you’ve been so successful (or lucky) in your career that you are sitting on a very large pension fund, this version of our life story is a fairy tale.

You probably know this.

In the US, some 82 percent of workers aged 50 and older say it is at least “somewhat likely” they will work for pay in retirement, according to a poll released in October by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago. Almost half of boomers polled now expect to retire later than they previously thought - on average nearly three years later than what they thought at age 40.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. People have a habit of being unduly optimistic when thinking about their financial position if it’s much beyond the next year or so. It’s a combination of hope and difficulty in facing up to harsh realities.

Some of the other statistics emerging in the US are really horrific.

One in 6 reported having less than $1,000 in retirement savings and 1 in 4 working respondents aren’t saving for retirement outside of Social Security. Some 12 percent of non-retired people reported borrowing from a 401(k) or other retirement plan in the past year. Though 29 percent reported at least $100,000 in savings, some find even that’s not enough.

“All too often, people have a lump-sum illusion. They think, ‘I have $100,000 in my 401(k),’ and they think, ‘I’m rich,’” “said Olivia Mitchell, a retirement specialist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.“But it doesn’t add up to much. It certainly is not going to keep them in champagne and truffles.”

Make no mistake this isn’t a blip, or a phase. It’s a demolition of the life expectations of a generation. 

You can go searching for people to blame if you like. There are plenty who must carry at least a portion of the guilt. Personally, I think it’s more important to invest our energies in something more productive and positive.

Like working out what to do about this.

The good news is that humans are much more resilient and adaptable than we sometimes give ourselves credit for.

And when we are confronted with difficulties, we often respond in much more creative ways than we expect.

I have a friend who is 60. Two or three years ago he was on the face of it, doing well in his career in sales. He was the Sales Director for a booming manufacturing business. And much of that success was down to his drive and natural flair at finding clients and keeping them coming back for more. He’d be in his office every morning from about 7am, then from about 10am would be hunting down new clients and working on developing relationships with the current clients.

He was very, very good at his job. And the business was growing largely due to his abilities to win new orders and contracts. But I knew a different side. I knew that he was locked in a war with his boss. There was a huge power and personality fight going on. And this was steadily sapping my friend’s motivation and strength.

His stress levels were through the roof.

In the end he became ill. Very ill. He developed diabetes. He lost weight. He looked like a shadow of the man he used to be.

But he did the most sensible thing he could. He quit his job.

For a while he looked around for other jobs. But at 60, you guessed it, there was no-one interested in hiring him into the sort of job he just left. Especially since he’d quit at it.

Fast forward to today. I had a beer with my friend a couple of weeks ago. He looked strong and fit. He had recovered the twinkle in his eye and the infectious grin that he always used to have. He was happy and healthy again.

He hadn’t been hired into a new job. He’d created his own.

He was always great at DIY. And he loves doing it. He’s simply taken his hobby and turned it into his job. And by doing great work and looking after his customers better than almost any tradesman I ever met, he has far more work stacked up than he can actually do.

He's happier than he’s been for years. He has a job he loves and the customers are queuing up round the block.

Is he worried about his pension and retirement?

I doubt it, I really do.

Why it’s never too late to embark on your true calling

By Neil Patrick

It’s a strange thing. As we age, we often see our opportunities narrowing not widening.

I say strange because as we go through life, we acquire more and more experience and skills, and logically therefore should see our options expanding not shrinking.

But so many of us are conditioned into thinking ourselves into a box. And if the box you are in just really isn't YOUR box, it gets kind of uncomfortable. And if you’re uncomfortable, you’ll never be capable of achieving your best work.

Here are some examples of well-known people who rejected those ideas and instead went after their true calling.

Some had found their path but hadn't attained any success... some were in a completely different career... some were on the verge of giving up or had given up. But as they matured, they found their true calling and never looked back.

Sylvester Stallone, deli counter attendant. After getting no career traction as an actor in his 20s, Stallone attacked his 30s like any 5'3 man should: He wrote a movie where he was an all-American hero who triumphed over every obstacle.

That movie was "Rocky"... he banged out the "Rocky" screenplay in three days, in between working at a deli counter and as a movie theater usher... and it launched his career with an Academy Award for Best Picture. 

Andrea Bocelli, lawyer. He'd loved music and singing his whole life... but didn't really see it as a career possibility. So, after school, he got a law degree at the University of Pisa. At age 30 he was working as a lawyer and moonlighting in a piano bar for fun and extra cash. He didn't catch a break as a singer until 1992, at age 34. 

Martha Stewart, stockbroker. When she was 30,Martha Stewart was a stockbroker, no doubt learning all about finance and the ‘ethics’ involved therein. Two years later she and her husband purchased a beat-down farmhouse in Connecticut... she led the restoration... transitioned into a domestic lifestyle... and grew that most innocent of things into her evil, evil career. 

Mao Tse-Tung, elementary school principal. In his 30’s, Mao was already involved in communism... he was a young star of the Chinese Communist Party... but didn't realize it could be a career. (Probably didn't see communism as being very lucrative...?)

Instead, he was working as the principal of an elementary school. Where, no doubt, hall passes were decadent. Four years later he started a communist group that eventually became the Red Army and put him in power.

JK Rowling, unemployed single mum. Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew". Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life”.

During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide. Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being "as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless" 

Barack Obama, university lecturer. Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, as a Lecturer for four years (1992–1996), and as a Senior Lecturer for eight years (1996–2004).In 2004, he was 43 years old. I’m not entirely sure what happened after that.

James Joyce, alcoholic. By 30, Joyce was writing... just not getting published. So to make ends meet he reviewed books, taught and, weirdly, made a lot of money thanks to his gorgeous tenor singing voice. He was also a raging alcoholic, which isn't financially lucrative until you become an author and can parlay those drunken antics into stories. Just ask Hemingway. Or James Frey.

Joyce finally got his first book, "Dubliners", published at age 32, which launched his career as, arguably, one of the most successful authors of all time. 

 
Colonel Sanders, tons of blue collar jobs. Well into his 40’s Harland Sanders was still switching from one random career choice to another: Steamboat pilot, insurance salesman, farmer, railroad fireman. He didn’t start cooking chicken until he was 40 and didn't start franchising until he was 65. 

Rodney Dangerfield, aluminium siding salesman. He started doing stand-up at age 19... then gave up on it in his mid-20s.. He started working as an acrobatic diver ... and then as an aluminium siding salesman. He didn't start getting back into comedy until he was 40. 

Harrison Ford, carpenter. When Ford was 30, he starred in "American Graffiti"... which was a huge hit. But he got paid a pittance for acting in it, decided he was never going to make it as an actor, and quit the business to get back into the more financially dependable world of construction.

Four years later, he met up with George Lucas again (Lucas had directed "Graffiti") and Lucas cast him as Han Solo in a movie called Star Wars.

So there you have it. A more or less random list of people who have shown us that by refusing to be kept in your box and allowing your innermost talents to come to the fore, that it’s never too late to start on your own path to greatness.

I guess the message for us all is, never let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do. Especially yourself.

How to never lose your job (a reprise)

By Neil Patrick

In January 2009, Grant Cardone put up an article in the Huffington Post with this title.

To put that date in perspective, this was about one year after the start of the global financial crisis and 8 months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

I agree with some of his observations, but we now have the benefit of hindsight on events which have seen the unfolding of the worst financial and economic crisis since the 1930’s.

And this has shown that Grant’s viewpoint fell way short of the mark. Even in 2009, it should have been apparent that we were dealing with something other than a cyclical recession. We were (and are still) dealing with a systemic collapse.

So let’s take a look at what he proposed. He said:

There are two groups of people that will never be without work;

1) those working for companies and in industries that are selling enough product to keep them profitable.

2) Those people within those companies that contribute to the selling, yes the selling, of the products and services of that company.

Those that are able to drive revenue through the selling of the products and services of the company are the most needed and valuable people in that company. Warning: Assist the company you work for in bringing in revenue (selling products and services) or you are at risk of losing your job!

Fair enough, but to say such people will never be without a job is a massive over-generalization. And he hinted at this when he continued:

The question is, who will lose their jobs and who will not? If you notice the people that are losing their jobs today are attached to companies that are failing! Note - if the company doesn't do well, make profits, jobs are lost! (my emphasis). The next level will not be from failing companies but from those companies that don't want to fail! (sorry Grant, but I never came across any company that wanted to fail).

What he missed was the fact that (and I don’t care about the labels that economists apply here) we are not dealing with a recession, when everything gets tough for a while and then bounces back. In a recession, companies make less profit and have to scale back some of their expenditure, whilst trying to lift revenue.

Today is different. We are dealing with a systemic collapse. And in a systemic collapse, companies don’t just struggle, they die. In large numbers. And people's jobs die with them.

And whilst companies are failing every day, that’s a symptom not the cause of the problem. The root of the problem is massive over borrowing by western governments. Plus endless QE programmes by central banks that continue to deflate the value of our wealth and earnings. Plus much needed, but unaffordable healthcare programmes. Plus an ageing population. Plus soaring food and utility costs. Plus rising house prices at least in some regions thanks to misguided government interventions (yes, that’s you David Cameron).

Compared to this, the problems faced by businesses are miniscule.

The massive and naive gamble of western governments is that while contracting government spending, they can simultaneously boost the growth of private sector businesses. And it’s just not happening. Because governments are useless at this. They launch expensive initiative after expensive initiative. Every one sounds great with all the spin at launch. And then a year or two later they are quietly shelved when surprise, surprise they didn’t work.

So we are trapped in a Catch 22.

Western governments cannot spend their way out of recession. Their currencies are losing value and their assets are dwindling whilst expenditures continue to soar. Government bonds (misleadingly also called gilts) are showing diminishing yields as investors place less and less faith in the security of such instruments.

You only have to look at the situation faced by Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain to see what happens when a government’s borrowing options dry up.

But back to Grant:

Those that will never lose their jobs are those that go beyond the normal expected responsibilities and the duties of their post. Those that creatively extend themselves and take responsibility for assisting the company in revenue creation will never be let go. The job of selling the products and services of the company you work, will no longer be left to the sales force but become the responsibility of everyone that desires to continue to work for that company.

Sorry Grant, this may be true in a recession, but it’s just wishful thinking in a systemic collapse. It is of course also completely irrelevant if you work in the public sector where revenue generation is completely disconnected from the success or otherwise of your employer.

What happened to all those top selling people at Lehmans, at Bear Sterns, at MF Global, at Northern Rock? That’s right they lost their jobs with everyone else. And the subsequent devastation of the whole financial sector meant that only a minority could expect to find another similar job with another employer. And if you think that banking is not typical of the world of real jobs, what about all those folk employed by Detroit City who lost their jobs and/or pension rights? What about all those staff at Woolworths, Borders, Aquascutum, Comet and countless other retailers that have gone bankrupt?

So if no-one’s employment can be assured anymore, what are we to do?

The first fact to get a grip on is that there is no such thing as a secure job anymore. It makes not a bit of difference how good you are or how hard you work, your future is never assured. So despite Grant’s opinion, my belief is that not even the best sales people in the world can count on anything anymore.

Second, if you accept this first fact, you need to be preparing right now for the day when you lose your job. That means getting your borrowings down as much as you can and building enough reserves to ensure you can survive for at least 6-12 months with no income. At least then you are giving yourself enough time to hopefully find another job somehow.

But what is a job? Essentially it’s the means by which you earn the money to live and hopefully enjoy your life. And being employed by an organisation is only one of the ways you can do this. The numbers of entrepreneurs in their middle and later years are soaring right now. And whilst many report that they don’t earn as much as they used to, almost all report that they are happier and more fulfilled than when they had a ‘normal’ job.

All this means preparing yourself for the possibility especially if you are over 50 years old that you may never get another job again. But that’s not necessarily as catastrophic as it sounds. It might just be the greatest opportunity of your life. And this is how you can make sure you never lose your job, because you will own your job and your vision for your life goals. Not someone else’s. But you should be thinking about it right now and doing what you can to start developing your ideas and plans, because when the hammer falls, your clock will be ticking…

Baby boomers fueling wave of entrepreneurship

By Matt Sedensky

In a mix of boomer individualism and economic necessity, older Americans have fueled a wave of entrepreneurship. The result is a slew of enterprises such as Crash Boom Bam, the vintage drum company that 64-year-old Glay began running from a spare bedroom in his apartment in 2009.

The business hasn’t made him rich, but Glay credits it with keeping him afloat when no one would hire him.

"You would send out a stack of 50 resumes and not hear anything," said Glay, who had been laid off from a sales job. "This has saved me."

The annual entrepreneurial activity report published in April by the Kansas City, Mo.-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found the share of new entrepreneurs ages 55 to 64 grew from 14.3 percent in 1996 to 23.4 percent last year. Entrepreneurship among 45- to 54-year-olds saw a slight bump, while activity among younger age groups fell.

The foundation doesn’t track start-ups by those 65 and older, but Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that group has a higher rate of self-employment than any other age group.

Part of the growth is the result of the overall aging of America. But experts say older people are flocking to self-employment both because of a frustrating job market and the growing ease and falling cost of starting a business.

"It’s become easier technologically and geographically to do this at older ages," said Dane Stangler, the research and policy director at Kauffman. "We’ll see continued higher rates of entrepreneurship because of these demographic trends."

Paul Giannone’s later-life move to start a business was fuelled not by losing a job, but by a desire for change.

After nearly 35 years in information technology, he embraced his love of pizza and opened a Brooklyn, N.Y., restaurant, Paulie Gee’s, in 2010. Giannone, 60, had to take a second mortgage on his home, but he said the risk was worth it: The restaurant is thriving and a second location is in the works.

"I wanted to do something that I could be proud of," he said. "I am the only one who makes decisions and I love that. I haven’t worked in 3 ½ years, that’s how it feels."

Some opt for a more gradual transition.

Al Wilson, 58, of Manassas, Va., has kept his day job as a program analyst at the National Science Foundation while he tries to attract business for Rowdock, the snug calf protector he created to ward off injuries rowers call "track bites."

Though orders come in weekly from around the world, they’re not enough yet for Wilson to quit his job.

"At this stage in my life, when I’m looking at in the near future retiring, to step out and take a risk and start a business, there was some apprehension," Wilson said. "But it’s kind of rejuvenated me."

Mary Furlong, who teaches entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University and holds business startup seminars for boomers, says older adults are uniquely positioned for the move because they are often natural risk-takers who are passionate about challenges and driven by creativity.

There can be hurdles.

Though most older entrepreneurs opt to create at-home businesses where they are the only employee, even startup costs of a couple thousand dollars can be prohibitive for some. Also, generating business in an online economy is tougher if the person has fewer technological skills.

Furlong said many who start businesses later in life do so as a follow-up to a successful career from which they fear a layoff or have endured one.

"The boomers are looking to entrepreneurship as a Plan B," she said."

Antoinette Little would agree.

She spent 20 years at a law firm, starting as a legal secretary and working her way up to manage the entire office. The stress of working 80 hours or 90 hours a week and always being on call started taking a toll.

After being diagnosed with an enlarged heart, she said, "The doctor told me either quit or you’re going to die."

Little took a series of culinary classes and found a new passion, opening Antoinette Chocolatier in Phillipsburg, N.J. She misses her previous career and, though the store is now in the black, the profits aren’t robust. Still, she says she is having fun making chocolate, particularly when children press their noses against the glass doors to the store’s kitchen.

"I’m my own boss and you get to eat your mistakes," she said. "How bad could it be?"

Most boomer businesses are not brick-and-mortar establishments like those of Little and Giannone.

Jeff Williams, who runs BizStarters, which has helped Glay and thousands of other boomers start businesses, says most older entrepreneurs want to make a minimal investment, typically less than $10,000, to get off the ground.

He classifies about 40 percent of his clientele as "reluctant entrepreneurs" who are turning to their own business because they can’t find any other work.

Williams said owning a business also gives older adults the flexibility they desire and a sense of control while remaining active.

"To suddenly leave the corporate world and to be sitting around the house all day long? This is an alien concept to boomers," he said.

Glay says he needed the paycheck, but starting his business was also about keeping his mind engaged. He had worked for the same record company for 23 years when he was told to meet his boss at an airport hotel, where the bad news was delivered.

Though Crash Boom Bam hasn’t come close to replacing an annual income that crept into six figures, Glay says he’s busier than ever now, between the business, regular drumming gigs, and part-time work at a bookstore and a wine-tasting event company. Sitting among shelves full of drums and their shimmering chrome, he is reflective thinking about what his business means.

"The satisfaction of doing what I’m doing now is much greater, but the money is less," he said. "Even if it’s not making me a millionaire, I know what it’s doing for my head. There’s no price you could put on that."

Matt Sedensky, an AP writer on leave, is studying aging and workforce issues as part of a one-year fellowship at the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which joins NORC’s independent research and AP journalism. The fellowship is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and supported by APME, an association of AP member newspapers and broadcast stations.

This post originally appeared here:

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/57010864-79/business-older-glay-job.html.csp?page=2

The good news is we’re living longer. The bad news is we can’t afford it.

Here's a recent article from the Kansas City Star. It describes perfectly why I set up this blog. Baby boomers are facing the toughest test of their lives. And because all our hopes and expectations were set in an era when our futures looked entirely different, our education, aspirations and attitudes were founded on a whole set of assumptions which have failed to materialize. 

My question is what are we going to do about it? I sure as hell won't put my faith in the idea that anyone in government will come up with effective solutions, so we have to look after ourselves.
What do you think?

By Scott Canon and Steve Kraske


From the age of 23, when she was the first female steelworker at Butler Manufacturing, Diana Arends labored to carve out a solid middle-class existence.

Elbow grease and grit moved her steadily up a union hierarchy until, as a tool-and-die maker at age 59, she sat atop the union pay scale at Ball Corp.’s beverage-can plant in Kansas City.

Then came the crash of ’08, the closing of the plant and the start of hard times that look to define the remaining decades of her life - and tens of millions of baby boomers like her.

She’s worked just one year of the five since trouble gut-punched a generation just as a decent retirement seemed within reach. Her 401(k), the tax-sheltered account she’d been stocking all those years, was suddenly cut in half by the stock market dive and it hasn’t rebounded to where it should. By age 62, she was forced to tap into Social Security early. That meant that forevermore, her monthly check would be $600 lighter.

Now 64, she still looks for work that puts her skills to use and strikes out, concluding that bosses have little interest in a leftover from a manufacturing age. She lives with her daughter and granddaughter in a Lee’s Summit home that no longer has cable TV or a landline phone, that chills in the winter and toasts in August. The three will mine this newspaper heavily for coupons.

“I expected to be able to retire, take a camping trip now and then,” Arends said. “I didn’t expect to still be job hunting to supplement my income.”

A generation once warned not to trust anyone over 30, and that now has kids with kids, wonders if it can believe in its own old age. An implied bargain that promised security after decades in the workaday world looks, if not busted, mighty rickety.

Look now, five years after the fall, and the landscape looks uneasy and unfamiliar.

“There’s a whole new world out there,” said Ralph Monaco, a Kansas Citian and baby boomer.

Too many nest eggs got dashed in the 2008 cratering of stocks and home equity. Sure, things have bounced back … slowly. But half a decade of what should have marked prime, late-career earning years - from both investments and wages - all but evaporated.

Baby boomers were more likely to hang onto their jobs through the Great Recession than younger workers. Still, for those older workers who got laid off, the pink slips were especially devastating - forcing early and painful dips into retirement funds.

The still-employed also got whacked. Many saw company contributions to pensions, or matches to retirement accounts, evaporate. Wages stagnated or shrunk - at just the time in their careers that folks might expect to finally make top dollar.

And the lousy job market for young workers meant Junior’s inability to rise above barista extended his reliance on Mom and Dad deeper into his 20s - and their dotage.

“If you look at people 46 to 64, it used to be that that was the prime of your life, not only in terms of contentment and satisfaction, but also in income,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research.

But not this generation.

“The boomers,” she said, “will be the first generation to do worse in their old age than their parents or grandparents.”

Shaky footing

Even before the crash, signs crept up that retirement years might not be so golden, or even reachable. Pensions increasingly lacked the full funding needed to guarantee the promised monthly checks. Although the federal government promises to backstop many of those pension funds, you didn’t need to be Chicken Little to imagine more collapsing accounts than Uncle Sam could field.

Meanwhile, fewer employers felt a need to tempt workers with the promise of a pension. And the Pepsi Generation that never tasted the bitterness of the Great Depression did relatively little to save for the rainy days of retirement.

In the still go-go days of 2007, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College calculated that 44 percent of Americans nearing retirement were at risk of falling significantly short of their current lifestyles if they tried retiring at age 65.

Then in 2008, ordinary Americans began hearing about mortgage derivatives and other financial gymnastics. Suddenly, their home equity morphed into mortgage debt, their boss stopped pension contributions and 401(k) matches, or maybe their services weren’t even needed anymore.

In an eye blink, a generation’s retirement prospects turned from sketchy to crummy. By 2010, the number at risk of being unable to retire at age 65 had jerked up to 53 percent.

“The boomers are going into retirement in terrible shape,” said David Cay Johnston, author of “The Fine Print: How Big Companies use ‘Plain English’ to Rob You Blind.”

He’s studied pensions and America’s retirement systems for decades and concluded the Great Recession not only buckled boomers’ knees, it widened the chasm between the country’s haves and have-nots.

The laid-off and desperate found themselves forced to dip into stock-based savings when their values were particularly low. They were forced to cash out at the worst possible time. Those buying up those bargains — the wealthy — were the only people who had cash to spare. And it’s the rich who’ve profited from the subsequent rebound.

More work, if any

Meanwhile, a transforming economy of mergers and new-found efficiencies meant more workers got tossed to the side. That can prove daunting enough at any point in a career, but it’s especially tough for older workers.

“At this point in your life, you’re beyond the mountain climbing, beyond the time to make a name for yourself,” said Janice Lambert of Overland Park.

She’s 59 and laid off. Her employer merged with another company, was sold again and sold a third time - at which point it no longer had room for her.

She talks about feeling like a puppet, with distant financial forces tugging the strings that toss her future this way and that. To her, it feels like the puppet masters responsible for the 2008 financial crisis only got richer.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she said.

If she finds a decent job, she’ll likely stay in the workforce untold extra years to make up for lost time.

Baby boomers - a diverse demographic of nearly 80 million born between roughly 1946 and 1962 - peer into a time after work and see, well, more work. Assuming the workplace has room for folks who once thought of technology as a slide rule (look it up, kids).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that between 2008 and 2018, the number of middle-aged folks in the American workforce will jump by 33 percent. The number of workers 65 and older is expected to grow by almost 80 percent.

Little in reserve

Making it all sting a little more is that, as a generation, it’s not been a particularly frugal bunch.

Relative to their salaries and their lives filled with SUVs, 200-channel TV, beach vacations, boats and Botox, they’ve saved very little. On average, baby boomers waited until they reached age 35 before they even started setting aside money for retirement. By one estimate, even if they transform all their savings into annuities and max out reverse home mortgages, half the generation will see a marked drop in standard of living during retirement.

“We’ve lived beyond our means. We’ve used the equity in our homes for the last decade as cash machines,” said Daryl Eckman, a 59-year-old certified financial planner in Prairie Village. “We feel we have to live a certain way. … We feel we have to drive a certain car, put up appearances.”

If a friend his age has money, chances are Eckman is managing it. Their ledger, he said, usually reflects that even those with six-figure incomes live on the edge.

“The floor drops out on them very quickly,” he said. “They look to the government. They look to whatever the system will allow.”

Monaco is a 57-year-old Kansas City lawyer who feels he has little margin for error in his finances. He has diabetes and high blood pressure. He’s raised two daughters, and his retirement account won’t allow him to stop working anytime soon. He’ll keep working, he figures, as long as he’s able. If he’s able.

“I don’t see an opportunity for me to ever get out of the workforce,” Monaco said.

That necessity is, he said, partly the result of his own choices. He indulged his two daughters in childhood and insisted on paying for their educations to dodge student debt. He’s lived more comfortably, and less frugally, than his parents’ generation - a group sobered by the hard lessons of the Great Depression.

“I’ve got to pay for keeping up with the Joneses,” Monaco said. “We all seem to have to keep a profile, which is unnatural and unreasonable.”

If you’re not among the gilded 1 percent, it seems, there’s little reason to quit your job just because you’ve celebrated a 65th or 67th or 70th birthday.

Most Americans now calculate they’ll need a paycheck - either part-time or full-time - beyond the time when they can expect full Social Security retirement. (Depending on the year they were born, that falls between 65 and 10 months and 67.) A third will work to stay active. The rest will chase a buck out of necessity.

Longer lives, smaller funds

The good news is we’re living longer. The bad news is we can’t afford it.

This is where history reminds us that Social Security’s original retirement age was set when barely half of those who reached adulthood could expect to live to 65. Now, more than three-fourths cross that line. In 1950, a working man lived an average of seven years after retiring. A half-century later, a similar guy could expect twice as many years of elderly leisure.

In 1995, the average expected retirement age was 60. By 2011, it had been pushed back to 67. But life expectancy isn’t growing that fast. The difference in life expectancy between 1995 and 2011 is less than three years, not the full seven years that retirement got put off.

A Senate study in 2012 identified a $6.6 trillion retirement deficit - the difference between what people should have saved to maintain their lifestyles and the far smaller amount they actually set aside.

The fault is not entirely their own. They've seen the stock market cave in with some regularity - 1987, 2001, 2008, each time more painfully close to baby boomer retirement with less time to make up the losses. And each time making work harder to come by for the gray-haired workers.

“Our parents had mostly paid off their homes, had some pension or defined benefit. And Medicare covered most of their health care costs. None of those are true today,” said Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“People still have pensions, but they’re fewer and dwindling rapidly,” he said. “Health care expenses … have exploded.”

His think-tank recently calculated the median wealth - savings, home equity, the works - of people between the ages of 55 and 64 at $170,000. That was about the same as the median home value.

“They literally have nothing left beyond the value of their homes. That means the only thing they have to support them is Social Security,” Baker said. “You’d like to think that people who spent their lives working would have some comfort in retirement.

“That’s going to be a questionable proposition.”

In that way, the Great Recession undercut so many boomers’ sense that they’d be rewarded for long years of work with a decade or more of secure retirement.

“A lot of baby boomers like me thought ... if we worked hard, got our homes paid off, have a little nest egg, we’d probably be doing more travel and enjoying it and spending more time doing community service,” said Tim Pickell, a 60-year-old attorney in Prairie Village.

Like a lot of people, he thought wrong. Much of a family inheritance was wiped out - the stock market tumble took a chunk, so did a need to make up for a slowed-down income stream from his law practice. That set off serious recalculations.

“The reality is,” Pickell said, “I have a lot of hard work to do.”

Arends, the once-successful steelworker, dreads as much as anything the anxiety of endlessly pinching pennies.

Her pension and badly depleted retirement savings must keep a household of three afloat. Indefinitely. She’d like to go to the movies, but rents videos from Redbox instead. She’d like to eat out, but scours a discount grocery for sales. She’d like to spoil her granddaughter, but rarely can.

“I worked hard. I’d like to work more,” she said. “But this is where I am.”


Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/09/28/4516374/great-recession-pummeled-baby.html#storylink=cpy