Just how much disruption is good for us?

By Neil Patrick

There's a lot of  fog in Uber world...

This year, Yassen Aslam and James Farrar, have been busy taking on the might of Uber in court. Their grievance was that as Uber drivers, they were denied basic workers’ rights: no minimum wage, no sick pay, no paid holiday. An employment tribunal judge, Anthony Snelson, heard the case over several days in July, where they argued that this classification was both wrong and unfair. And yesterday at the end of the hearing, the judge agreed.

There has ensued a great deal of jubilation from other Uber drivers, trade unions and the political left. Personally I am also pleased at this ruling. But not because I am opposed to disruptive businesses per se. We need innovation in business, but this needs to be balanced with legal and statutory interventions which curb the tendency of new business models to become exploitative long before regulation catches up with them.

Business do what businesses do. They seek profits and growth. If we seek to regulate them such that they cannot innovate, the result is inevitably a bureaucratic free enterprise devoid climate in which progress and growth are suffocated. Think USSR and all those grey apartments and Trabants.

Self-employment is the biggest jobs growth trend in recent years. And I have jokingly referred to it previously as ‘self-unemployment’. But in this case, we are not talking about a new breed of Bransons, Trumps and Zuckerbergs, we are talking about people at the lowest levels of pay who are being forced by the absence of better options to take whatever they can get.

Such people are not hot-shot entrepreneurs. They are just people trying to feed their families. This is the terrible reality of the current gig economy. Business models like Uber grow fast because they design out the costs from traditional business models, leveraging scale and IT investments to provide a product or service cheaper than the competition. And much of this cost is cunningly passed to their workers.

It’s not unlike the off-shoring revolutions of the last 25 years. At first everyone is enthusiastic because, it drives down prices. And Uber make much about giving people freedom, flexibility and choice. But the reality is this is all PR spin. If you are paid even the new higher minimum wage in the UK, you will earn just £288 for a 40 hour week. Yet Uber was not even paying minimum wage. And it passed much of its costs to its drivers.

Uber position themselves as a plucky underdog, providing jobs for people on their own terms. It’s nothing of the sort. First Uber has a market cap of $50bn making it more valuable than Tesco and Barclays combined. Second, Uber manage their drivers just like employees. They are interviewed, disciplined, and submit to Uber’s rules just like any employee.

As Aditya Chakrabortty wrote today in the Guardian (rarely my favourite source), “For some Britons, self-employment doubtless means freedom. But for others, it means the freedom to be exploited, deprived of rights – and to be underpaid. According to recent research from the Resolution Foundation, the typical self-employed Brit is now earning less than when John Major was prime minister.” (that was 1990-97, in case like me you can’t remember dates).

This isn’t really the future. It’s the past. A regression to a world where labour exploitation is revived, cloaked in a bit of high tech ‘innovation’ and pitched to the world as progress.

There’s a world of difference between a self-employed person who is truly independent and a self-employed person who is freelancing through a global mega-corporation. The former is free to truly work on terms that they decide. The latter has no such choice.

It’s time that disruptive businesses thought a lot more strategically about their impact on the people that they use. And this judgement is going to force them to do that. It’s a small but significant step in the right direction.

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:

The heresy of telling new entrepreneurs they are wrong

By Neil Patrick

I know a lot of people who are starting businesses these days. It’s partly because of what I do and partly because my networking means I inevitably meet a lot of them. And I enjoy it. I get genuinely excited hearing about people’s plans and ideas and I love helping them improve and refine them.

But there’s something which troubles me. It’s the idea that anyone can become an entrepreneur and anyone can make a fortune this way. Both these notions are wrong. Not wrong because people shouldn’t aspire, but wrong in terms of what people’s goals and expectations are.

The media focus on business success stories and the absolute armies of people selling stuff to ‘help’ businesses succeed, support and encourage these aspirations. Which is fine, except if a business is doomed to fail. Which sadly is the majority. Long before this happens, any wise and caring counselor would say to them, ‘No. You’re wrong. This will NOT work. Stop wasting your time, money and energy on this RIGHT NOW.”

But we live in a society where such counsel is chastised as negativity. As lack of belief. As discouragement. For people who need and deserve encouragement. Even governments and government agencies attempt in their own bureaucratic ways to support entrepreneurs.

And because setting up and growing a business is truly hard work, most successful entrepreneurs tell us that the unwavering belief of someone else meant everything when they were so worn down and frustrated that they just wanted to quit. That belief and support kept them going. And they went on to achieve great success in the end.

People lap this up. It’s become a business start-up archetype. A rags to riches fairy tale that is deeply seductive. Just keep going. Never quit. And eventually you will succeed. It’s a simple and powerful idea that permeates so much of what we are told about entrepreneurship.

Yes commitment, passion, belief and sheer hard work are all essential for successful entrepreneurs. But no amount of these things will make up for a business idea that is so full of holes and flaws that if it were a ship, it would sink in the harbour.

Most people that new entrepreneurs meet want to sell them something. Even if that something is dressed up as ‘help’. This vested interest means no-one is likely to tell them that their business plan sucks. That it has some terrible flaw that will kill it dead. On the contrary, they express entirely fake enthusiasm, either because they cannot see the problems, or if they can, they are sure as hell are not going to mention it for fear of losing a bit of earning potential before the whole thing collapses.

So why would anyone want to become an entrepreneur? Part of the answer these days lies in the difficulty of finding and retaining a relatively secure and well paid job. People lose their jobs and think, “do I really want to go back to anything like that again?” Often the answer is “No”. So that leads inevitably to the idea of self-employment. Which in turn leads people to start up companies.

But start-up businesses have a truly dreadful record of success. Depending on who you listen to, around 80% fail in their first three years. They fail for all sorts of reasons, but one is that people might be very experienced at what they do, but have absolutely no-experience of setting up a business, let alone growing one.

Another is that what they aspire to be and what they actually are, are so far removed from reality that they chase the wrong dream. They lack the self-awareness to determine where their true talents really lie. It’s much better (and more profitable) to be a great version of you, than a second rate impersonation of someone else.

But the greatest failing is our fantasy notion of what success looks like. Business success isn’t about fabulous riches, business empires or fame. Success is about figuring out a way that your work rewards you in a way that enables you to live the life you want on your terms. And the best way I know to do that is not to become a slave to some idealized fantasy of what an entrepreneur is but just to earn our living independently by being the absolute best version of ourselves that we possibly can.

And by making sure your advice comes from someone who knows and cares enough to tell you when you've got it wrong.

Jim Clifton, former CEO of Gallup and author of 'The Coming Jobs War' has one of the most insightful (and least viewed videos) on YouTube about the problems with entrepreneurship in the US today, and its consequences for jobs and society. Clearly there is no correlation between brilliant insight and social media popularity!

Ignore the mass media herd, this is the information that matters:

10 things you must know about how to become a consultant

By Neil Patrick

My mailbox is a constant source of inspiration for this blog. And this morning was no exception.

I received a LinkedIn invitation to connect with a chap I knew at university. I was delighted to reconnect after so long, accepted immediately and messaged him to ask what he was up to.

In his message back to me he told me that he would be leaving his employer in a few weeks’ time where he’s been the Managing Director and intended to become a self-employed consultant.

This isn’t an unusual aspiration for senior professionals. After all those years’ experience and rising through the ranks on merit, it’s tempting to think we are well equipped to take on such a career pivot.

I know. I have done it myself. And I learned the hard way that very little of the experience we acquire in a management career actually counts for much when we switch from being an employed executive to a self-employed gun for hire.

But this communication prompted me to think about the things I learned in the process. If you are or are considering becoming a freelance business consultant, these are the 10 things I think matter and which you must address in your plans:

No-one cares what we have achieved in the past. They only care about what we can achieve for them in the future.

Rebranding ourselves as a freelance version of what we were before is a non-starter. Clients don’t value us because of the breadth of our experience and previous seniority. They want one thing (at least initially) and they want an expert at it.

Simply changing our Linkedin profile to show us as a consultant will not get us any attention. We must have a personal media strategy which enables us to be found when people are looking for the skills we have.

What we did five or ten years ago is mostly irrelevant. If we’ve not done exactly what people need in the last few years, that experience is considered pretty much  redundant.

We may think we have transferable skills, but clients do not. Most clients or prospects I have encountered believe that relevant experience of their sector is vital. They may or may not be correct, but few will be persuaded otherwise and they call the shots. So sector specialism is a very wise choice.

We must specialise despite our wide experience. When we have wide business experience, it’s tempting to market ourselves as a jack of all trades. This is fatal – we will be perceived as master of none.

We must be able to solve a problem that is hurting our clients every day. Not a problem we think they have, or the type of work we most want to do; a problem that they know is stopping them achieve their aspirations.

A wide and appropriate network which has goodwill towards us is an essential prerequisite. Just having a website is not enough if no-one ever goes there. The explosion of online content in recent years means that we will never be found by search engines unless we have invested in online content and built social media networks which enable us to be found online. Moreover, the social web and its peer to peer nature means we are judged not so much by what we say about ourselves as by what others have to say about us.

The internet isn’t as clever as we might think. It’s a paradox for sure, but the internet is not yet very good at perceiving fine nuances about people. It’s powered by big data and algorithms. These are good at counting but not so good at interpreting subtle qualitative information. If you or I have 500 LinkedIn connections with really great people who have active goodwill (i.e. they will voluntarily help us) towards us, that’s powerful. If we have 5,000 who couldn’t care less, it’s actually a liability.

We need to have a funnel strategy. Actors and sales people know this well. They accept that one positive result is the normal outcome of perhaps 50 or even 100 auditions or sales calls.

So transitioning from senior executive to consultant is a conundrum. Such a pivot is possible, but it takes time and an effective strategy. Who we were previously and our experience is usually much less valuable than we’d like to think.

I know a ton of other consultants. Some are doing well usually because they have managed to transition from a ‘normal’ job to a freelance/contractor version of the same job. This is not real freelancing in my view – it’s actually a degraded job contract more than anything else.

This isn’t really what I am talking about here. I am talking about those of us who want to create our own true consulting businesses from scratch. Hunting and securing our clients and earning our living based on the success of our work for them.

The harsh reality is that most other consultants I know are finding it extremely difficult to secure good clients, good rates of pay and assignments which last more than a few weeks. The labour on demand model which is becoming the new normal, is making freelancing a very precarious career choice.

Success as a freelance consultant has very little in reality to do with our previous career experience. It has everything to do with our ability to network effectively, build awareness, acquire goodwill. And critically being able to solve a problem that our clients cannot solve themselves. Recognise this and develop a strategy that creates these things and we are half way there.

But half way will not pay the bills. And in my experience this transition takes years not weeks or months. Today I have long standing regular clients that I love working with. They are happy and I am happy. But in almost every case, the initial contact took 3-6 months to evolve into an arrangement whereby the commercials were finalised and the work was underway.

It’s a hard path to follow, but the satisfaction I get from seeing my clients succeed as a result of my involvement makes it more rewarding than anything I have done before.

Better still, because my clients are happy, they recommend me to others and so finding new assignments is never a problem for me.

And I indulge myself in a way I could never do when I had a normal job. Today if I don’t like a prospective client for any reason, I don’t work with them. Period. And that's a luxury of choice I never had before.

I just wish I had known what I know now when I started out.

P.S. Guardian Careers have published some further comments on the subject here. (Although I hope my views are a bit more actionable and insightful!)

Becoming self-employed? Here’s the #1 critical question you MUST be able to answer

By Neil Patrick

Whether you are setting up business as a sole trader or a company, there's one critical question you must be able to answer.

Last week, I was contacted by a former colleague from the financial sector. She had just lost her job in the latest corporate reorganization. Her reaction to job loss was positive. She was embracing it as an opportunity to convert all those years’ experience and acquisition of skills into a self-employed variant of her former job. I immediately agreed to help her anyway I could.

About the same time, I was sent a business plan for a start-up financial business. I was asked to provide my reactions and suggestions as to how the plan might be improved. The plan was ambitious and innovative. It embraced and aimed to capitalise on the financial, technology and media changes that are transforming the world.

At first, these two events might appear to have nothing in common. But as I examined both situations I realised that both were dependent upon getting to grips with exactly the same question.

It’s a very simple question to ask but a very hard one to answer perfectly. In a single sentence though, it frames the challenge for every new business venture. Being able to answer it clearly and precisely sets you up for success. Even if you cannot answer it precisely, trying to do so will instantly reveal the weaknesses in any business plan.

So what is the question?

It’s this:

“What problem do we solve for whom, and how?”

That’s it.

Time and time again when I see new business proposals, whether they are corporations or individuals, they fall apart when examined with this question.

Often it’s a variation of the age old business failure that arises because the business owner is looking to sell what they want to make or do, rather than making what people want to buy.

Today, attention spans are getting ever shorter. If you cannot articulate what problem you solve in a couple of sentences, you will struggle to get attention. And no attention means no sales. And no sales means your business is dead.

So not only must you be able to answer the question, you also have to be able to express it in a way which demands attention and interest from the people you seek as customers.

In a start-up, this can be the difference between getting investment and withering on the vine. In the case of sole traders, it’s the difference between having a queue of eager customers and an empty diary.

Why do so many people get this wrong? 

Employers don’t teach us how to be entrepreneurs

Experience of working for a large corporation provides plenty of experience and learning. But it’s not usually the sort of learning that equips you to be successful in your own business venture. Suddenly your specialist expertise itself is less important than your ability to get others to pay for it. 

When you are self-employed, before you can start work, you must obtain it

In a normal job, our employer provides a regular pay cheque. And depending on its size, we cut our cloth accordingly. When we have a job, the work is just there. We normally don’t have to actually create it. In a normal job, what’s critical is the quality of our work. When you work for yourself, how much you earn depends on how much work or business you attract. What’s critical is the quantity and frequency of our work. 

Problem solving for others is different to problem solving for an employer

In a normal job, we may very well require problem-solving skills. But these problems are internal to our employer. The problems are given to us to tackle. When we work for ourselves, the problems are not given to us. We have to identify them in other people’s lives. So these problems are external. And before we can solve them, we have to have a solution that our customers find more attractive than the alternatives.

Knowing the answer to the number one question helps us focus our actions on doing the right things to drive business success. It means you have a business proposition which people actually want and are willing to pay for.

Not being able to answer the question means your business isn’t going anywhere, until you can…

Why politicians won’t solve the jobs crisis

By Neil Patrick

Politicians simply don’t get the nature of work in the 21st century.

Let’s just dismiss the idea they just don’t care because they’re too busy looking out for themselves. The more worrying evidence suggests that they don’t understand the nature and pace of the evolution of technology. And how this is reshaping the world of work.

Today in the UK, self-employed people represent the fastest growing sector of employment. 

These people exist completely outside the politicians’ bubble. But politicians do little or nothing to support them. After all, very few will become big enough in the politicians’ term of office to make any impact on either employment levels or the treasury’s income.

The politicians therefore have little incentive to pay attention to this change. They see the future as a world which is somehow a newer, shinier version of the old one. A world which is big, bold and full of promise. It makes them feel like they are being visionary. The architects of a better future society.

So, they get busy implementing big, “important” projects . They like big things after all. But the 21st century world is a fragmented one. And it’s getting smaller not bigger. Microchips will soon be just one atom and ultimately subatomic. (Yes. Look it up). Big corporations are being nibbled away by much smaller faster moving competitors. And devolution is showing that people want smaller more local governments, not bigger more federal ones.

But the politicians carry on making uninformed and anachronistic decisions about the things that shape every aspect of our lives and how companies and individuals function. Don’t believe me? Here are just three examples.

There’s no recovery in jobs, at least not the type of jobs government understands.

In June, the Office for National Statistics released figures which show that flexible working is at a record high in the UK. The headline figure from the ONS is that 14% of the UK workforce is now either working full time from home or use home as a base. This represents a 1.3 million increase over the six years since the onset of the recession.

Total jobs growth in the same period was around 1.8 million. In other words, over two thirds of the UK jobs created since the recession began have been self-employed or based at home.

Note to government: This is NOT the future of work...
Source: Wikipedia.  Credit: Chris Brown http://500px.com/zoonabar

The Government is claiming this as a victory for its legislation. They want us to believe their foresight has enlightened bosses in helping employees find a better work life balance.

In an interview,  Co-Chair of the LibDem Parliamentary Party Committee on Work and Pensions and a Deputy Government Whip, Jenny Willott said that: "Current workplace arrangements are old fashioned and rigid. Extending the right to request flexible working to all employees will drive a cultural shift where flexible working becomes the norm and is not just for the benefit of parents and carers."

But government legislation isn’t what’s driving this change.

Clearly, this is spin. It's not government policy but in fact the explosion of homeworking that is driving Britain’s rapidly expanding army of freelancers and micro-businesses. The recent increase in employment levels is almost entirely down to a huge surge in the numbers of people who are self-employed.

In the last quarter of 2013 alone, the number of people identified as self-employed rose by a staggering 211,000 while the number of employees fell by 60,000. There are now around 4.5 million self-employed people in the UK. 

These people aren’t working from home as an alternative to going to work in an office for an employer. There is no office and no employer, so employment legislation is of no use or relevance to them. They are doing what they do in spite of what the government is doing with regard to flexible working, not because of it.

Technology is an enabler for small business but a nightmare for large organisations

Start-ups and small businesses reap huge rewards from the tech revolution. Digital media enables immediate and fast deployment of a whole range of powerful tools from video conferencing to online sales platforms.

But transitioning big bureaucracies from paper based systems to digital ones is very different. It’s a huge, complex and expensive task. As a result, we can be pretty confident that when a new government digital system actually goes live after running millions over budget and being delivered late, it still won’t work properly.

Recently, the think tank Policy Exchange reported that the UK public sector could save £24 billion a year by offering the UK population universal fast broadband and migrating all Government information and services to digital platforms.

One of a handful of politicians who do get tech, Nadhim Zahawi is quoted as responding to the report by saying: “The internet and technology is shaping the way everyone interacts, transacts and reacts and has been doing so for at least a decade… well, everyone, that is, except government.”

There is movement of course, but it is painfully slow because the Government knows just how complex, expensive and disaster prone these transitions actually are. And when reducing government debt is a priority, such initiatives have pretty low appeal.

But the good news for government is that if they shifted their attention to the small business sector, things are much less scary and there are lots of quick wins to be had. But this involves breaking the habit of thinking big and instead thinking small…

Like the relatively simple task of getting fast broadband available everywhere in the country. Not only would this transform Government services, universal fast broadband is simply the single most important piece of infrastructure the UK could introduce.

So if home working and digital technology is the future, why is the government looking to invest in 20th century infrastructures?

One of the most extreme examples of how governments make bad decisions around the future of work is the high speed rail network approved in 2012 connecting Manchester and Leeds with Birmingham and Birmingham with London. This is known as HS2.

This high speed rail network will enable people to save time moving across the UK. Some journey times such as Manchester to London are expected to be reduced by almost 50%. 

HS2 Railroutes
Source: Wikipedia   Credit: Cnbrb

But by 2033, when the project will allegedly complete, how many people are actually going to want or need to make such journeys at all? By then it seems a safe bet that current technology trends will likely have developed to a point where such journeys are too expensive, too slow and too prone to disruption if not on the train journey then in the travel to and from the stations?

June 2013 saw the original projected cost of HS2 rise by £10bn to £42.6bn and, less than a week later, it was revealed that the DfT had been using an outdated model to estimate the productivity increases associated with the railway, which meant the project's economic benefits were massively overstated.

Peter Mandelson, originally a major advocate of HS2 when the Labour Party was in government, declared shortly afterwards that HS2 would be an "expensive mistake" and also admitted that the inception of HS2 was "politically driven" to "paint an upbeat view of the future" following the financial crash. He further admitted that the original cost estimates were "almost entirely speculative" and that "Perhaps the most glaring gap in the analysis presented to us at the time were the alternative ways of spending £30bn."

Boris Johnson similarly warned that the costs of the scheme would be in excess of £70 billion. The Institute of Economic Affairs estimates that it will cost more than £80 billion. Incidentally, that figure is pretty much the same as the entire GDP of New Zealand…

But there are non-financial arguments too to conclude that HS2 is a really bad idea. HS2 is not designed for the world of 2033, when it will be complete. It’s designed for a world in which people travelled to meetings. A world in which businesses were big and business was managed via top down command and control hierarchies and nationally dispersed teams.

Thanks to the politician’s disconnect with the reality of 21st century work, the UK is now saddled with a hugely expensive white elephant that will almost certainly end up costing even more than the worst case projection so far of £80 billion. And deliver far fewer benefits than even the most cautious estimates.

It really is time for our leaders to ditch their big ideas and start thinking small.

Are you self-employed or self-unemployed?

By Neil Patrick

As the economy improves, so too are the prospects for self-employment

The government has been making bold announcements about the fall in unemployment lately.

On the surface, the latest UK figures are very good news. Employment is up, unemployment and youth joblessness is down.

Almost a quarter of a million jobs were created in the three months to February a rate of growth which is easily outpacing the US, still the world's biggest economy.

UK self-employment has risen by more than 600,000 since the 2008 crisis to 4.5m. Some argue that this is a sign of entrepreneurship. This may be true in some cases. But my experience suggests something else.

I call it ‘self-unemployment’

There’s a whole army of professionals in the UK, who for years enjoyed well-paid secure jobs. Their skills meant they could be confident about long and rewarding careers. Then, in 2008 the tsunami hit.

That was almost six years ago.

In the ensuing collapse, hundreds of thousands of established career professionals watched helplessly as not just their jobs, but often their employers and even whole industry sectors were swept away.

If you are one of these people and if you’ve been largely unemployed for that period, even if you’ve called yourself ‘self-employed’, your chances of getting hired into a new job again haven’t improved much.

For a start you are six years older. And six years is the total career history of many of your younger, more up to date competitors for jobs. Whilst they have been growing their skills and experience and keeping up to date, what have you been doing?

I know dozens of formerly employed people who have lost their often well paid jobs in the recession. They are nothing like the traditional long-term employed, low on education, skills and motivation. They are used to getting up and going to work. And they have valuable skills.

They don’t like the stigma of being labelled ‘unemployed’. But they haven’t been able to find jobs. So they have turned to self-employment, usually trying to apply and sell the skills they have acquired during their career.


The reality of self-employment

When they did this they experienced a rude awaking. They discovered that earning a living in this way is much harder than they ever thought possible.

There are many reasons for this. The fact is that being highly skilled in your profession as an employee, doesn’t automatically equip you with all the skills you’ll need to do a similar type of work as a self-employed person.

For a start, some jobs just do not lend themselves to self-employed variations of what you did when you were employed.

Secondly the work will not come to you. You have to hunt it down, grow your network and opportunities. This work which of course is always unpaid, consumes a large part of your available time.

Third, when you find an opportunity, you need a whole set of sales and marketing skills to turn that opportunity into an income stream.

And you need to keep the work coming month in month out, just like your bills.

Overcoming these obstacles is a skillset all on its own.

But things are set to improve

Right now, the economic recovery is still fragile and organisations are cautious about any expenditure, often preferring instead to try and solve problems with their existing resources. However, assuming the economy continues to improve, this caution will ease, particularly in the private sector, creating a greater willingness for businesses to spend again.

Hiring extra full-time staff can be a big step for firms. Plenty of skilled work needs to be done which may not warrant a full time position, but which can be ideally carried out by a part time contractor, who is flexible on the hours they work and carries no overhead or legal and contractual obligations for the client.

Second, as employment levels rise, the available pool of talent will shrink, forcing businesses to look around more widely for the skills they need.

My feeling is that in the UK, the prospects for the self-employed are likely to slowly but steadily improve over the coming months.

So if you are currently self-unemployed, my view is that you should stay the course. The jobs market may be improving, but you will not be at the front of the queue when the hiring decisions are being made.

Play to your strengths, recognise the economic environment is changing and set out to capitalise on it. You may have been self-unemployed, but right now the prospects for being self-employed are looking better than they have for years.

Recognise this is happening and prepare for it. Revisit your contact list and prospects. Review and update your marketing. Attend more networking events. Step up your social media activity.

You’ve got this far and the tide is turning.

If you recognise any of these things happening in your business, do please post your experience and observations below.

Is having a job really the best choice for you today?

By Neil Patrick

Last week I was sent the transcript of a soon to be published book about self- employment as a consultant and how to go about it successfully.

The author asked me if I’d be willing to review the book and provide my reaction to it in the form of an endorsement to be included in the final version when it goes to print.

I was surprised and flattered. Well I’m now reading the book and it’s great and after it’s published in a couple of weeks, I’ll be writing more about it here. But because the topic of the book was essentially self-employment for mature professionals, it got me thinking I really should revisit this topic on this blog.

I talk here a lot about jobs, and how to get them in these hyper-difficult economic conditions.

But there’s another option too of course - creating your own job.

Our generation has been taught to be a bit scared by this I think. We all know of someone who lost their entire life savings when their business went bust or failed to even get off the ground. And yes, the statistics for the failure of start-up businesses are still frightening.

But being self-employed doesn't automatically mean you must risk your savings and your financial future. Quite the opposite in fact.

Not if you choose to take the skills you have acquired over all those years of working and decide to sell them in small pieces to people that need them.

In fact if we accept that getting a job as an employee is now harder than ever, especially once you get past about 45, isn’t it more sensible to choose a life path where our age and experience is actually a benefit rather than a burden?

And here’s the truth: people want and need freelancers more than ever today.

The recession has made businesses really cautious about taking on extra employees. It’s obvious the reason this is happening - why take the commitment of having an extra head on the payroll, month in month out, at a time when costs need to be ruthlessly squashed, when you could get the job done by a contractor with absolutely no long-term obligations attached?

And people will pay top dollar for this too.

You see, the real question clients often face isn't can we afford to pay $500 or $1000 or $2000 a day for a contractor? The fact is that many, many businesses have now slashed their permanent full-time staff to the absolute bone. The moment anything happens (which of course it always does) which means they need some extra resource, they are stuck. Big time. They may also have hiring freezes which means they cannot hire any extra people.

So their problem cannot be solved by hiring new people. But it can be solved by finding skilled and reliable people outside the business to handle it for them. And suddenly if you are on their radar, and you have the skills and experience called for, you are in a strong position to negotiate a good rate. So let’s say they hire you for 6 weeks, 2 days a week, at $1,000 a day. Total cost $12,000 dollars. And their problem is gone.

And you are $12,000 better off in exchange for 12 days of your time. (Okay, I know that’s a gross simplification, but you’ll get the point I’m sure)

And your client’s headcount is still the same. You’re happy. They’re happy.

There’s another thing I like about this choice also. It’s kind of a philosophical point but it goes like this. Remember all those years of toil and torture to get things done for the people you worked for in the past? Sure you do. You’d just rather not think about them usually right?

But here’s the thing – all that sweat and tears taught us a lot. And that’s the point. We can view that as an investment in us. And whilst we may not have exactly enjoyed the process, it makes us what we are today. Which is mature, experienced people who have learned a great deal in our lives.

So what I like is the idea that indirectly, all that sweat and toil is now being rewarded back to us over and over again.

Somehow it feels like justice has been done!

Oh and if you still want to invest all your time in just hunting for a job, remember these realities:

For every great job out there, there are dozens of really soul-sucking, punishing and unrewarding jobs. Just remind yourself about:

1. The feelings of powerlessness experienced daily by millions of employees

2. The lack of job security that now exists for just about every employee

3. The frustrations of having to do what you are told, rather than what you are really best at

4. The requirement of every employer that you work to a rigid schedule like a machine

5. The crazy office politics that demotivate everyone

6. The lack of fulfillment you feel by doing things just because someone tells you you must

7. The increasingly rarity of pay rises when our costs of living continue to soar

8. The daily torture by bad bosses

9. The lack of appreciation shown for all your efforts

10. The fear of making a mistake which will lead to disciplinary action or possibly even being fired.

Let the young people who are less experienced than us have these jobs I say. They need work experience and they need to learn. We've already paid our dues.

Aren’t you infinitely smarter and more experienced and knowledgeable today than when you were 25 or 30? Of course you are. So why would you choose to even think about competing with those people?

Play to your strengths.

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.

Baby boomers reinvent their careers in the art world

inS By Jennifer Forker Associated Press One was a stockbroker, another a computer whiz. There's a therapist and a small-business owner. Each retired from a traditional career and launched into another in the arts.  "Do I still have nightmares about the other (job)? Yes," says Bill Sanders, a Steamboat Springs, Colo., ceramics artist who is retired from the lumber and wood flooring business he owned for 20 years. He says he still wakes up sometimes in a cold sweat worrying about whether some shipment is making it to a job site on time. Then he realizes he doesn't need to worry about that anymore.  These days, Sanders, 64, keeps to the outdoors - he skis during the winter and volunteers for the U.S. Forest Service during the summer - and creates his artwork, which includes dishware, decorative pots and sculptured horses.  He learned the basics of ceramics as a teenager living in Southeast Asia. He kept at it while growing his Honolulu lumber and flooring business to include eight employees and more than $1 million in inventory by the time he sold the company in 1997.  Then, he and his wife, Barbara, also an artist, moved to Colorado, and he turned to his lifelong love of ceramics more intentionally.  "Clay is kind of cool. It's just dirt," says Sanders. "If you don't like what you did, you just throw it back in the bucket and then you can make something else."  Jennifer O'Day, 61, of Austin, Texas, is a former stockbroker who says her mixed-media artwork nourishes all her senses.  "It really sharpens my ability to see visually and perceptively and I think tactilely," says O'Day. "It's not just about my mind and my hand accomplishing something. It engages that whole mind-body-soul thing."  She was born into a business-oriented family, so that was in her blood, she says. The art she nurtured.  "I wanted to do something that was closer to the bone and less about the money," O'Day says about the portraits she now assembles.  It's not just about my mind and my hand accomplishing something. It engages that whole mind-body-soul thing," she says.  There's one aspect of her old stockbroker life that she sometimes misses: engaging with clients.  Geri deGruy, 59, also enjoyed her previous career, as a therapist in private practice, although it was emotionally gruelling working with many of her clients, who were abused women. "Toward the end of my practice, there was a feeling sort of like PTSD," she recalls. She turned from being a therapist to the textile arts, which required that she slow down.  "I started seeing form differently. I started seeing repetitive patterns," says deGruy, who creates small art quilts and mixed-media collages. "My eye was developing, my seeing was changing."  She still works every day.  "Always our time is short - we never know," deGruy says. "I have that urgency every day. I don't want to waste this moment. I don't want to miss this opportunity to play with color."  Judy Hoch, 72, of Salida, Colo., finds parallels between her former career, as a computer engineer, and her current one as a jewellery maker.  "Jewellery making is just engineering on a very small scale," she says.  Hoch spent a dozen years at IBM, where she became a senior engineer and earned two patents, then moved into a computer software job, from which she was laid off in the early 1990s.  "I had to do something after that," she recalls. "Going back to work in high tech when you're 50-something, it wasn't a real good idea. It wasn't going to work."  She took jewellery and metals classes at a Denver-area community college and got hooked. She relies on her mechanical engineering training when fusing metals or cutting stones.  "It's a lot of fairly sophisticated measurements," Hoch says. "There are so many technical things . Engineering is a very useful skill to have."  While she describes her years in high-tech as fun - "like working with puzzles" - jewellery-making taps her creative energy.  "You spend a week away from it and you get terrible withdrawal," she says.

This post originally appeared here: 

http://www.mercurynews.com/real-estate/ci_23387850/start-new-career-an-artist-these-baby-boomers

Baby boomers start 'encore' careers

By Rodney Brooks


“Of 76 million people above 50 and nearing retirement, about half have interest in entrepreneurship,” said Jean Setzfand, vice president of financial security at AARP. “And many want to give back to their communities.”

Sitting at home through a 20- or 30-year retirement is no longer an option for an increasing number of baby boomers.

Some are looking to do something else because they have to for financial reasons. But, increasingly, boomers are embarking on entirely different “encore” careers after retirement.

“The reality is people are living longer, healthier lives, and when they get to the point when the need to make a change - they retire, are laid off or sell their business - they are 60 years old, and they say ‘I still have another 10, 15, or 20 or more years and I want to do something,’ ” said Nancy Collamer, author of “Second Act Careers: 50+ Ways to Profit From Your Passions During Semi-Retirement.”

“It’s out of financial necessity is some cases, but it’s lifestyle in other cases,” she said.

Take Linda Lombri, 65, and Virginia Cornue, 68, both of Montclair, N.J. In their post-retirement lives they have reinvented themselves as mystery writers, even though neither had written fiction before. They began an e-book series, the “Sandra Troux Mysteries,” which is sold on 10 websites, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple’s iTunes. The first in the series, “The Mystery of the Ming Connection,” was published last year under their pseudonym, Crystal Sharpe. Their second in the series will be out this spring; the third in the fall.

Both fans of the Nancy Drew series when they were young girls, they have re-imagined her into a trio of female baby boomer characters. “Not only are we reinventing ourselves, we have our characters reinventing themselves as well,” Cornue said.

Pushed out at 62

Lombri had careers as a home economist and a marketing executive. She was forced into retirement at 62 when her job was eliminated - when she had a daughter who was a high school sophomore. “I was ready for (retirement) emotionally, but not financially,” she said.

Cornue said she has already reinvented herself several times. She started out as an actor in New York City, became a director of nonprofit organizations and ended up a cultural anthropologist. She still teaches part time at a local college.

Then there’s David Roll, 72, who ended his career as a Washington, D.C., lawyer 10 years ago and embarked on a new one as an author, historian and founder of Lex Mundi, a nonprofit agency that finds pro bono lawyers for social entrepreneurs around the world.

But it’s the nonprofit legal agency, which has taken him around the world, that occupies most of his time: “I love it,” he said. “It has its frustrations, because you’ve got to raise money to keep it going. But to have created something that is having an impact. ... Not every social entrepreneur is changing the world, but they are some doing amazing things.”

Cookies!

Yuval Zaliouk, 74, is co-owner of YZ Enterprises in Toledo, Ohio. He retired from a career as conductor of the Toledo Symphony in 1989 and decided he didn’t want to move his family to take another conducting assignment.

The answer was his dream: to make and sell cookies based on his grandmother’s recipe, starting out in his kitchen. 

“I even won entrepreneur of the year award in 2003,” he said. “I never imagined that I could be a businessman.”

The Almondina cookies now sell 12,000 cases a day, ship to all 50 states and can be found in supermarket chains such as Trader Joe’s and Publix. Oh, by the way, the co-owner of the business is his wife, Susan, a former ballerina with the Royal Ballet Company in London, where they met.

“Only in America,” said Zaliouk, a native of Israel. “There is a lot of mobility in this country. It’s not like Europe, where if you are not fired, you stick with a job for life. Here you are free to start things. It’s a different atmosphere.”

Marc Freedman is founder and chief executive officer of Encore.org, a San Francisco-based organization that helps Boomers start that second career. Its focus is getting them involved in nonprofit agencies.

Freedman spent 15 years working with children in low-income neighborhoods. He has long had an interest in mentoring, so he made his second career into a job that helps baby boomers step into their second careers.

“The larger aspiration behind the organization is to tap the human capital and population moving into their 50s and 60s,” Freedman said.

Zaliouk has advice for budding boomer entrepreneurs: “In one word, courage.”

“It really is a question of courage, making up your mind to do something - courage, tenacity or stubbornness,” he said.



http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20130327/BIZ/303270026/Baby-boomers-start-encore-careers



HELP FOR ENTREPRENEURS

The U.S. Small Business Administration and AARP are involved in helping retirees into encore careers, as entrepreneurs. They are jointly promoting April as Encore Entrepreneurial Mentor Month, featuring one-on-one instruction, classes, mentoring programs and help writing business plans.

Spain: jobs crisis spawns entrepreneurs

Two years after being laid off from her job as a health and safety consultant, Ana Luis has found a new, quite different occupation. The blue-eyed, blonde-haired 46-year-old stands busy in the window of her very own dress shop in Valladolid, north-eastern Spain, deftly fixing clothes on a dummy.

For Ana, it was a childhood dream come true - one born of the nightmare of redundancy.

Left jobless like millions of others in Spain's recession, she did what many are also doing, for want of an alternative: launched her own business.

"I had a choice: stay sitting at home and do nothing, or throw myself into a project that I like," she says.

She opened the store less than four months ago using part of her redundancy pay and savings - a total investment of 30,000 euros ($40,000).

She is one of a wave of Spaniards trying to create jobs for themselves in the recession that has driven the unemployment rate above 26 percent.

The crisis sparked by the collapse of Spain's building boom had wiped out a lot of self-employed entrepreneurs: 625,000 between 2008 and 2011, says Lorenzo Amor, president of the small entrepreneurs' association ATA. But in 2012, as the unemployment rate climbed to record highs, their number grew for the first time in the five-year crisis, with 53,000 new registered self-employed, he says, citing government figures.

These entrepreneurs created 72,000 jobs, he added - just about the only sector to do generate any.

"For the next few months it is going to be easier to create your own job than to find one," Amor said.

"In Spain, every hour 67 people register as self-employed. Unfortunately, half of those don't manage to keep their business running for more than three years."

Despite everything, they are having a go.

In a trendy district of central Madrid, serving staff bustle at the coffee machine in "La Bicicleta", a novel bicycle-friendly cafe where cyclists can park their bikes. Its tables are crammed with customers even though the cafe only opened days ago, under the management of Tamara Marques, 29, and Quique Arias, 35.

"I had other job plans. I wanted to be an air traffic controller. But the labour market is nothing like it was," said Tamara.

"The way the economy is, I prefer to invest in something I really like and which will bear fruit, rather than wait for the government to do something for me."

She and Quique launched their plan in late 2011 and managed to open their cafe, with its rough industrial-style decor and deliberately shabby armchairs, more than a year later.

They raised the 100,000 euros they needed through a rare bank loan and help from their families -- no thanks, they say, to Spanish bureaucracy.

"We're not even talking about getting subsidies or making it easier to get a loan," says Quique. "We're talking about much simpler things, like just getting the paperwork done."

Among its various emergency reforms, the conservative government says it is working on a law to cut the red tape for people launching their own businesses.

Ana, Tamara and Quique say they are covering their costs but relying on their families to live.

Yet theirs are rare tales of hope in a crisis that aid groups has thrown millions into poverty.

"I think there is a growing dynamism. We are seeing just the tip of the iceberg," says Javier Sanz, director of an MBA programme at Madrid's Complutense University.

"In the next five years people are going to realise more and more that to find the perfect job they are going to have to make one up. For that you need to be an entrepreneur."

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130210/spain-jobs-crisis-spawns-entrepreneurs

Why you used to be a genius

By Neil Patrick

I have posted before about the struggles that governments are having dealing with the global economic jobs crisis.

This RSA Animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.

Here Ken explains how our education system has become disconnected from the needs of the modern global economy and hence how at an individual level, we are poorly equipped as individuals to deal with it when disaster strikes us. Whilst the topic of school education may not at first seem to be directly related to the jobs crisis, as mature professionals, we are a product of our education system. Intelligence and education are totally separate things and this film explains why regardless of our educational achievements, we all have a great deal more innate intelligence and ability than we may have been led to believe.

I am a firm advocate of the need for job hunters to think outside the box and much of what I post here is provided to help people do that. One positive message you can take from this film is that you have a very great deal more capacity to turn your situation around if you forget about what you were taught in school and university and instead engage your creative ability and harness all the learning that you have acquired through your life.

Oh and you’ll discover too why you used to be a genius!




The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to driving social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information about the RSA and its work, visit http://www.thersa.org.

Seven ways boomers are rewriting the rules of retirement

By Marc Miller

(Reuters) - The baby boom generation has broken the mold at every stage of life, and it looks like old age won't be any different.

Boomers aren't heading quietly into retirement. They're launching businesses, embracing digital technology and living abroad in greater numbers than ever before. But in other ways they are struggling more than the previous generation.

Here is a look at trends shaping the next wave of retirement.

THEY ARE LEAVING THE U.S.

More older Americans are packing it in for foreign countries, where they can save on living costs and enjoy warmer climates.

The number of retired workers, spouses and survivors getting Social Security benefits in a foreign land is rising almost twice as fast as the number of Social Security beneficiaries generally, according to Social Security Administration data.

And 21 percent of baby boomers say they are "interested or very interested" in retiring abroad, according to a survey by the Center for Medical Tourism Research at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas.

"If that were extended across all boomers, you'd have about 3 million people retiring abroad in the next couple decades," says David Vequist, the center's director.

THEY ARE STARTING COMPANIES

Almost a quarter - 21 percent - of new U.S. businesses started in 2011 were launched by entrepreneurs age 55 to 64, according to the Kauffman Foundation, up from 14 percent in 2007. Entrepreneurs age 45 to 54 accounted for an additional 28 percent of the 2011 startups. Taken together, that's 49 percent of all startup activity - far larger than the 20- to 34-year-old bracket, which accounted for 29 percent of new ventures.

In part, the surge can be attributed to the 2008 recession, which sent older workers into consulting gigs. However, there are a surprising number of complex, sophisticated and large businesses being created as well, according to Dane Stangler, director of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation. He also thinks many of these older business owners are "serial entrepreneurs."

"We're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs in fields like technology and engineering who are launching substantial businesses," he said. "They started companies in their thirties or forties, and now they're doing it again."

THEY ARE TECH SAVVY

Young people might be leading the digital revolution, but boomers - the generation born 1946 to 1964 - aren't far behind.

"Baby boomers got quite comfortable with the Internet and other digital technologies in the workplace," says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project. "They won't give that up as they age."

For example, 23 percent of older boomers and 27 percent of their younger siblings use tablet devices, compared with 30 percent of Gen Xers (born 1965 to the early 1980s), according to the Pew Internet Project. The gaps also are small when it comes to smartphones and social networking services.

"They're not going to be downloading every new app that catches the crowd," he says. "They're very utilitarian - show me how it will work for me, how it will improve my life." Expect retiring boomers to publish creative works online, connect with friends and children via social media and continue to job-hunt on sites such as LinkedIn.

THEY ARE BORROWING MORE

Older Americans are taking more debt into retirement than previous generations. Mortgage debt is the biggest factor: Forty percent of homeowners over age 65 had mortgage debt in 2010, compared with just 18 percent as recently as 1992, reports the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University (JCHS).

The culprit: the refinancing boom before the housing crash. In the years leading up to 2008, homeowners took advantage of low rates and deductibility of interest to refinance, says Lori Trawinski, senior strategic policy adviser at the AARP Public Policy Institute.

"(They) took out equity for things like education or a new car," says Trawinski. Boomers on the cusp of retirement are still refinancing, sometimes at the behest of their financial advisers, because of the appeal of today's near-record-low interest rates.

Higher debt levels will have a variety of effects. Some retirees will be stuck in homes with underwater mortgages or monthly mortgage payments that sap their spending power; others will use low-interest mortgage debt to keep more cash on hand or to keep other money invested longer.

THEY ARE OUTLIVING THEIR EXPECTATIONS

Life expectancy for men has jumped an average of almost two years in each of the last five decades, to 75.7 years in 2010, according to the Society of Actuaries. For women, life expectancy has risen by 1.5 years, on average, to 80.8 years.

Yet more than half of older Americans haven't gotten the memo. A Society of Actuaries survey of 1,600 adults age 45 to 80 found 40 percent underestimated their likely average longevity by five years or more; 20 percent were too pessimistic by two to four years.

"That means there's a 50 percent chance you'll live longer," says Cindy Levering, an actuary and co-author of the report. "If you make it to 90 and only planned and saved enough for 85, you may not have enough to live on."

The odds that will happen are pretty good. For a couple with above-average health, there's a 60 percent chance one of them will live to age 90, the Social Security Administration has reported.

THEY ARE PROVIDING FINANCIAL SUPPORT

Some 58 percent of boomers are providing financial assistance to aging parents, such as helping them purchase groceries or pay medical and utility bills, according to an Ameriprise Financial survey of just over 1,000 Americans conducted in late 2011.

When it comes to their kids, boomers are even more ready to help out. Almost all boomers surveyed - 93 percent - say they have given their children a hand. A majority have "boomerang kids" who have moved back home to live rent free (55 percent) or afford a car (53 percent).

But only one-third believed that supporting adult children was making it more difficult for them to reach their retirement goals.

"They're not connecting the dots," says Suzanna de Baca, vice president of wealth strategies at Ameriprise Financial. "They may not be taking money out of their retirement accounts to help their kids, but the assistance is coming out of funds that otherwise could be additional savings."

THEY AREN'T RUNNING TO FLORIDA

Boomers aren't embracing the Florida-Arizona axis of retirement to the extent their parents did. Counties known as retirement havens slowed their annual population growth to 1.7 percent from 2007 to 2009, compared with 3.1 percent between 2000 and 2007.

Instead, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) found that the metro areas with the fastest-growing population of 65-plus residents include locations in North Carolina, Texas and Nevada, as well as Colorado, Idaho and Georgia.

Boomers are attracted to communities with large universities and affordable housing, says John McIlwain, senior resident fellow for housing at ULI and author of the report.

The biggest draw affecting relocation? The kids.

"If you want to find out where a boomer couple will be moving to, find out where their oldest daughter lives. It's the pull of the grandkids."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/05/us-moneypack-retire-surprises-idUSBRE9140O720130205