Category Archives: Baby Boomer

Future Shock Top 10 Backwards Look

Baby Boomer, Reflections, Technology, Web/Tech, , ,

Telephone Circa 1970Ah yes, the good old days. How quickly time passes. And I can’t help occasionally browsing through technology looking back. My youngest daughter is in her late twenties now. She can barely remember life before cellphones, and can’t remember life before personal computers or VCRs, because both of those were born before she was. I was talking a grandkid the other day, and she couldn’t conceive of a world before amazon.com.

Every so often I get reminded how far we’ve come. When I graduated from college in 1970:

  1. The university had a computer in a basement that took up the space of an SUV and had way less power than an iPhone does now. Computer science students programmed it with perforated cards.
  2. The dorms had one phone per floor. Long distance calling costs were significant. I was in the Midwest, so I’d call my parents in California once every couple of months.
  3. We wrote letters. We read letters.
  4. We used typewriters for every college essay, paper, and assignment. We’d often retype an entire page to correct an error. Sometimes we’d reword things to make the pages end or begin with the correct word so we could insert an additional page.
  5. Four-function calculators existed, but nobody we knew had one. You could have bought a new low-end car for the price of two four-function calculators.
  6. I did my sophomore year abroad, and the university sent us from New York to Europe on an ocean liner. That was cheaper than flying.
  7. We wrote checks when we had to, used cash most of the time, and we got the cash from the bank teller window, not an ATM.
  8. Credit cards were rare. Our parents had them.
  9. Television was broadcast over the air. We watched in real time or not at all. We had 5 or 10 channels to choose from.
  10. When we were driving we listened to the hits on AM radio mostly, or cassette tapes when we could.

And that’s just technology, or a smattering of technology.  When I think of social evolution, and environmental deterioration, the end of the cold war, the rise of terrorism, polar ice caps … like we used to say: “far out, man.”

Baby Boomer Entrepreneurs: Trick or Trend

Baby Boomer, Current Affairs, Starting a Business, ,

 

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s 8 Monday Morning Must Reads I discovered USA Today’s Older entrepreneurs find new niche in startups. This doesn’t surprise me at all, but it was good to see it in print. The quick summary:

Over the past decade, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to the 55 to 64 age group, according to a study by the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo.-based entrepreneurship institute. The 20 to 34 age bracket has the lowest rate. Kauffman’s latest study shows that about 23% of new entrepreneurs in 2010 were in the 55 to 64 age group, compared with 15% in 1996.

Much as I like these numbers, there’s a bit of a statistical ruse here. Basic demographics. there’s The trend may not be anything more than the influence of sheer numbers. Take a look at this chart:

US Birthrate

The line there is births per year, and the pop up in the line, the blue portion, is the baby boom years. The so-called baby boomers — me included — were born from 1946 to 1958. They are the blue portion of that birth rate line above. So in 1996 we were 50 to 38, and therefore not included in the 55-64 stats. In 2010, however, we were 64 to 52, right in the sweet spot of the statistics. So it might easily be that the pop in the stats isn’t a change in trends, but a reflection of higher numbers of people in the 55-64 age group.

On the other hand, I hope it’s not just statistical distortion. I’d like to think it’s a reflection of increasing longevity and a decline in the strength of the myth or retirement. I think retirement is a social tradition developed in the past for very old people; to a lot of the baby boomers, me included, it’s a nightmare. But careers change and life changes around the ages 55-65, as kids grow up and careers stagnate. And a 60-year-old competent person has another 20, 30 or more years of life expectancy. That’s a long time to sit in a rocking chair. For my part, I posted here just last week about me getting involved in new startups. And I’ve posted here before on how much I don’t want to retire, ever.

Furthermore, there’s a bit of a push and shove in these statistics. Try leaving a job and getting another when you’re 55 to 64. Good luck with that. So you build your own job. And more power to you.

 

(image: wikipedia)

Heartfelt Advice for Young Fathers

Advice, Baby Boomer, Reflections, Work Life Balance, , , ,

My five kids are all grown up now, doing well thanks, and as I look back on things related to parenting I think I’ve discovered something worth sharing. It’s about dad time with young kids.

Our oldest was born in 1972 and our youngest in 1987, and in our case, during those 15 years a lot of things changed.

With the younger ones I was a lot more involved in the gritty details, like giving them bottles in the middle of the night, and changing diapers.

With the older ones, in contrast, I just wasn’t there that much. We lived in Mexico City, I worked much longer hours, there were no computers for productivity, and I’d leave home at 7 a.m. and get back at 8 p.m. My wife had more help too, because her family is from Mexico City.

We moved back to the United States from Mexico in 1979. I discovered computers and modems and worked much more at home. And my wife needed a lot more help because she was alone with multiple children. So I discovered babies and toddlers and diapers and all that from a radically different point of view.

What happened was that those kid chores, diapers and bottles and all, that nobody thinks they want to do? Dads who do that win big. My older adult children and I get along fine, thanks, so that’s not the real difference. What I regret, simply put, is what I lost out on by not spending more time with my older ones too, when they were babies and toddlers.

Social norms have changed, I’m happy to see, so the involved dads are much more common now than they were 40 years ago. My own son and my son-in-law are both very involved fathers giving a lot of quantity time. So maybe this is just old news. But I’m saying that I learned the hard way that you dads who don’t do this are missing out. You’re not winning your way out of chores; you’re losing their way out of a really great part of your own life.

(Image: Reggie Fun/FlickrCC)

Leadership and the Man Killed 47 Years Ago Today

Baby Boomer, Leadership, , ,

It’s November 22. Today 47 years ago I was sitting on the gym floor in high school physical education when a kid who’d been to the office told us President Kennedy had been shot and killed.

How important was this? How much did it change our history? I don’t know and people debate that still. But anybody American who was even partially grown up on that day can tell you exactly how and where they heard the news. The world changed on that day more than on most.

I’ve seen two different President Kennedy moments used as excellent examples of leadership that changed the world.

First, when in 1962 he challenged a nation to put a man on the moon before 1970. Speaking at Rice University, he said:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win . . .

Of course you know they did go to the moon in that decade. And Kennedy’s leadership is used as an example of setting ambitious goals and getting people to achieve them.

A prof I had in grad school used The book Thirteen Days, A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis to teach leadership. That was an excellent course, and it’s a fascinating book. It’s full of real leadership.

In the old days, leaders stood up against the wind and took on popular opinion and stood for what they believed. And, on the other hand, they weren’t subjected to public scrutiny of every aspect of their personal and private lives (the media chose not to write about Kennedy’s less-than-faithful marriage behavior). I like to think that there are still leaders around, but we don’t see them, or their leadership, because we don’t give them a break. Or we don’t believe them. Or we’re too damn polarized.

Final note: I was working on a different blog post for today but when I went to post it I discovered the date. Is there anybody American in my generation who doesn’t attach special meaning to November 22? Even 47 years later?

What You Don’t Know About Second Life Can Hurt You

Advice, Baby Boomer, Reflections, , , ,

Recently I heard this called “the second life.” You might have heard the phrase “midlife crisis.” And you’re probably aware of baby boomers turning 60, and boomer entrepreneurship. Retirement? Golden years? Hooey.

Amazing fact: Humans have existed for a few million years, but it’s only in the last century or so that we have this second life. In 1900 the average life expectancy was 47 years, and only 1 in 25 people reached 60.

Think about it: most of us spend our first adulthood marking a living, pairing up, building careers, raising children, and having not a spare moment to think about anything but work, kids, problems, and getting by. We hope we’re developing and growing, but we don’t have a lot of time to reflect.

Then, in what seems afterwards to have been in a blink of an eye, you’re 50 something, and wondering what’s next. Maybe you buy into retirement, and the lure of the golden years, and maybe not. But when you reach 60 you still have a life expectancy of another 25 years or so. And that’s a lifetime. A second lifetime.

I don’t buy the golden years idea, sitting around, beaches and rocking chairs … normal people need something to do. And it has to be something they believe matters.

A couple of Saturdays ago I attended a seminar given by James Hollis, author and psychologist, during which he brought up his version of the second life. It was an interesting day. Hollis has done a lot of writing, analysis, speaking, and teaching about how we deal with the second life. This seminar was built around his latest book, what matters most.

I think I’ve been lucky. What I do now — this blog, twitter, several books, speaking, and teaching — seems as important to me as what I used to do. And I really like it. I posted earlier here Why I’ll Never Retire, and I’m sticking to it.

But what about you? What are you going to do with your second life?

The Best Business Email Might Be a Phone Call

Baby Boomer, Back to Fundamentals, Personal Productivity, Plan-as-you-go Planning,

This morning I picked up Finding the Right Words for Business Emails, a recent post by Bradford Shimp on his Allbusiness Answers blog. Bradford’s a smart person, and he has good advice here. Use language you’d use for a friend. Be careful with the subject line. Avoid phrases that sound like spam. And this, my favorite:

You can’t control how a reader will interpret your email, but you can work hard to find the right words to communicate your message clearly. Avoid murky language. Instead, go for crisp, clear sentences. If you want to make a point, repeat it a couple of times in the email. One thing to avoid in email is sarcasm. It just doesn’t translate. Satire may be pretty hard to pull off as well.

Even so, Brad’s good advice about email notwithstanding, the post reminds me how I’ve come full circle on email in 25 years. I used to love email, but these days I say dial the phone.

In the beginning of email (I was on Applelink, CompuServe and the Source in the middle 1980s) it was a fabulous productivity booster. My favorite business relationships were the people I could reach in email.

Lately, however, every day I see more of the occasions when email is a weak second-best alternative to dialing the damn phone and talking to somebody. Talk, and more important, listen. Have a conversation. You have the benefit of two-way conversation, tones of voice, inflection, and so forth. Email gets lost, quarantined as spam, misunderstood, and misinterpreted. It’s dangerous. Once you send something in email, that person has control of it, forever. It gets forwarded without context to the wrong people.You can’t get it back. And if it’s misunderstood, you might never get to explain it.

I find email seems like an easy way out sometimes, because I’m too lazy to talk to an actual live human being. When it matters at all, use the phone, talk, and listen.

Why I’ll Never Retire

Baby Boomer, True Stories, Work Life Balance, , ,

Ugh, baby boomers, retirement, selling the business … ouch. Strikes me like “lions, tigers, and bears,” in the Wizard of Oz. Scary.

I’m 61. It was my choice to change my job more than two years ago, so that now instead of managing my company with 45 employees I’m writing, speaking, blogging, and teaching. And I thank God that I had that choice. The company’s better off with a new management team, and I’m better off with a new job. But I worry about the rest of us. Retirement scares the hell out of me.

One of my closest friends retired two years ago. Now he’s bored out of his mind, looking for things to do, and not happy about it.

I’ve seen some successful retirements: it seems to work when they jump from one thing to another, something they like, something they’ve always wanted to do. Golf and fishing, or the equivalent, are rarely enough.

One variable that I’m sure matters is liking what you do. As my good friend now retired used to talk about it with relish, just 3-4 years ago, it always sounded great to him, but horrible to me. And, no surprise, he was tired of his work, but had nowhere else obvious to go. I was getting tired of the managing, but I did have somewhere I wanted, badly to go: the writing, speaking, etc. I still love the company I started, just not the day-to-day management of it. I liken my new job here to the concept of a safe harbor. It’s different, it’s easily separable from what I did for years, but it’s still the same company, same industry. And it also keeps me away from meddling with the new management, which (I’m pretty sure) is a relief to them.

Apparently I’m not the only one. I just read Steve King’s Greying of the Workforce post on Small Business Labs. Lots of grey-haired folks are staying on longer. And that’s because they want to, not because they have to.

And then there’s this, which turned up last week in Why Retirement is Bad For You, on Forbes.com

Studies show that men who retired from corporate jobs, donned their gold watches and lazed about at a resort lived measurably shorter lives than those who sought productive work (e.g., volunteering for organizations like SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives). In fact, plenty of retirees who traded productive work for sunshine and early-bird dinners dropped dead surprisingly soon after making the transition.

That seems like a variation on the same theme. Those older people in the work force are probably way better off for it, at least if they figure out how to be in jobs they like. Maybe that’s the best answer to an aging population?

For Late Bloomers Everywhere … Hope, Optimism.

Baby Boomer, Current Affairs, , , , ,

I didn’t want to add another Ted Kennedy tribute to the world today, but Dan Levine (schoolmarketer in twitter) tipped me off to Ted Kennedy, Low Potential Leader by Sarah Green on a Harvard Business School blog; and I couldn’t resist passing it on. Especially this last paragraph:

So for me, today, Ted Kennedy’s life is a reminder that much can be achieved by late bloomers; that you don’t have to have your career all figured out by the time you’re 25, 35, or even 45. It’s a reminder to look beyond your little cadre of overachieving stars for the person who doesn’t have it all together. Don’t count him or her out. There’s always time.

Here’s more from that post, good background. I shouldn’t have needed reminding, because I’m old enough to have lived through all this, but still …

He’d taken six years to graduate from college (getting banished for two after he tried to cheat on a test) and been strongly discouraged by his family to run for the Senate in 1962. They didn’t think their black sheep could win. In 1969, he left a party with Mary Jo Kopechne and drove into a lake, an accident that resulted in her death. In 1979 while running for the Presidential nomination, he couldn’t answer a softball question about why he wanted to be president. He didn’t even make it out of the primaries. His youth — and I use that term elastically — was marred by drinking and womanizing. In 1981 he and his first wife announced their divorce.

And yet, ultimately, Edward M. Kennedy did become a leader. As a strategist and negotiator, he was the Senate’s “happy warrior.” In a body notorious for gridlock, he got things done. As a mentor, he was generous with his time and influence; and the more generous he was, the more that influence grew. Historians will argue about whether he was one of the most powerful senators of all time — or the most powerful senator of all time.

(Image by marysuephotoeth via Flickr)

Future Shock Top 10 Backwards Look

Baby Boomer, Reflections, Technology, Web/Tech, , ,

Ah yes, the good old days. How quickly time passes. My youngest graduated from college last weekend. She can barely remember life before cellphones, and can’t remember life before personal computers or VCRs, because both of those were born before she was.

A graduation is a milestone event, and milestone events generate this kind of thinking. How much the world has changed, and how quickly. When I graduated from college in 1970:

  1. The university had a computer in a basement that took up the space of an SUV and had way less power than an iPhone does now. Computer science students programmed it with perforated cards.
  2. The dorms had one phone per floor. Long distance calling costs were significant. I was in the Midwest, so I’d call my parents in California once every couple of months.
  3. We wrote letters. We read letters.
  4. We used typewriters for every college essay, paper, and assignment. We’d often retype an entire page to correct an error. Sometimes we’d reword things to make the pages end or begin with the correct word so we could insert an additional page.
  5. Four-function calculators existed, but nobody we knew had one. You could have bought a new low-end car for the price of two four-function calculators.
  6. I did my sophomore year abroad, and the university sent us from New York to Europe on an ocean liner. That was cheaper than flying.
  7. We wrote checks when we had to, used cash most of the time, and we got the cash from the bank teller window, not an ATM.
  8. Credit cards were rare. Our parents had them.
  9. Television was broadcast over the air. We watched in real time or not at all. We had 5 or 10 channels to choose from.
  10. When we were driving we listened to the radio, or cassette tapes.

And that’s just technology, or a smattering of technology.  When I think of social evolution, and environmental deterioration, the end of the cold war, the rise of terrorism, polar ice caps … like we used to say: “far out, man.”

Boomer Business Blogger Part 4: You Have to Like Writing

Baby Boomer, Blogs and blogging, Journalism, Social media, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing, , , ,

True confession: I love writing. I love short sentences, strong words, making myself understood.

I think most, if not all, good bloggers like writing. Video people do vlogs and YouTube, poets go to Twitter (say, what?), but bloggers are writers. Almost all of my favorite blogs — I’ve got the blogroll on this blog, rightmost column, near the bottom — are written by people who care about writing. Not that they don’t care just as much about business, their main content area; but they’re writers.

Yes, I’ve done all the startups in my bio; yes, I have the MBA degree; and yes, I built Palo Alto Software. But if I could have made a decent living just writing, I would have.

Flashback: 1970, I was 22, wanted to write, studied literature. I was in a PhD program in comparative literature, briefly; ended up with MA in Journalism. UPI, McGraw-Hill, Mexico City, and whoosh, the 1970s all gone.

Flashback: 1979, journalist, bored filling space between ads, enrolled in Stanford University business school. Then I fell in love with business planning, helped to start Borland International, founded Palo Alto Software, founded bplans.com. And grew it, slowly for years, no outside investment. Tough times, good times.

And suddenly it was 2007, 40+ employees and a great management team, me struggling with changed technology, and I changed jobs. And started blogging. That change was Part 1 of this series.

So what helps me a lot is that I like writing. As a journalist I wrote a lot for many different publications. I also wrote published fiction (not very good, by the way, not worth citing, but they paid me) (and I’m not including market research that was wrong, either) and a full-length novel that got some second looks, but never got published.

So now, you can see how much blogging I do by looking at the sidebar here on the right. You can’t see that I’m also writing a lot on a family site, a personal site, and even an anonymous pure writing site.

If you’re going to be blogging a lot, you have to like writing.