Feel the Force

Wake up baby boomers! You have become workplace yodas. That’s right – you are Jedi Grand Masters.

There’s a skills shortage of major proportion in every organization just as thousands of baby boomers ride off into the sunset (or into a cloudbank), taking their Jedi wisdom with them. A recent study from the University of California identified two distinct forms of intelligence: fluid intelligence, which is our ability to think logically and process information; and crystallized intelligence, which is gained through accumulated knowledge and experience. Increases in crystallized intelligence was considered to be twice as valuable as increases in fluid intelligence. Guess who has loads of crystallized intelligence?

“Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.” – Yoda

Some organizations are setting up alumni networks in order to retain the knowledge and experience of longtime employees. One such network is YourEncore, which was set up by Procter & Gamble and Eli Lilly to enable them to tap into the wisdom of older employees who still wanted to offer their experience without working full-time hours.

Baby boomers are being recruited more directly in some companies to act as teachers and mentors to the younger talent. Rather than being called interns, someone coined the term “mentern.” Travel industry veteran Chip Conley has described his experience at Airbnb in his latest book Wisdom at Work: How to Reinvent the Second Half of Your Career.

He identifies the following types of wisdom that corporate elders can contribute:

Good judgment – the experience of older employees can give perspective and help smooth out the inevitable bumps in the road

Unvarnished insight – a boomer’s experience can help cut through the clutter and there is less need to impress or prove themselves

Emotional intelligence – knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens, so the elders are capable of great self-awareness and empathy

Holistic thinking – the brain may lose some speed and memory as it ages, but is more able to see holistically, a valuable faculty where pattern recognition is key.

Stewardship – elders have experience as good corporate citizens, and that often translates into a desire to give rather than take.

“Remember, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” Yoda

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, Head Above Water which can be purchased on Amazon here. You can also visit his author page here.

That's Alright Mama

I bumped into Elvis the other day as he was coming out of the Double Dee Diner. He was loaded down with two big bags of carry-out. I don’t want to say he was looking stuffed but I’ve seen him looking better.

The King…great to see you. Everyone always jokes that you’ve left the building and here you are…leaving the building.

Treat Me Nice

Hey, I’m being nice. We just wonder if you will ever record again.

It’s Over

Too bad. Are you sure you won’t change your mind?

Cross My Heart, Hope to Die

There are so many rumors about you being sighted here or there and then there are the doubters who say you’re dead.

Suspicious Minds

That seems to be the price of celebrity nowdays. They say if you want a true friend get a…

Hound Dog

Right, man’s best friend. So where are you staying?

Heartbreak Hotel

Really? That seems a little low end for a big star like yourself.

Don’t Be Cruel

Sorry, but back in the day when you played the big venues you lived the good life.

Viva Las Vegas

When you listen to some of the popular singers and rappers today you must be just a little nostalgic for those days or no?

I’m All Shook Up

What do they have that you didn’t have?

Money Honey

What? You were, you ARE the King!

I Got Lucky

Come on. It was more than luck. They called you the King of rock and roll. What do you think was the secret to your success?

Can’t Help Falling in Love

You did sing a lot of love songs – you talked the talk.

A Little Less Conversation

Sorry. I didn’t mean to hold you up and now your food is getting cold. I guess you want to get back to the Heartbreak.

It’s Now or Never

Really good seeing you.

Love Me Tender

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, Head Above Water which can be purchased on Amazon here. You can also visit his author page here.

Recall

I had a dream recently in which I could not remember my street address. This was different from being unable to recall a person’s name or the name of a place while awake. That happens all the time, particularly to baby boomers. In the dream, I could not come up with my street address and naturally, I found this very frustrating.

The standard remedies for memory loss often include the following:

· Avoid prescription medications.

· Eat only organic, Paleo foods

· Eat fish

· Eat fat

· Use spices on your food

· Avoid grains

· Get adequate amounts of quality sleep every night

Seriously? Older people cannot really eliminate prescriptions and to suggest that we can somehow avoid them sounds like nonsense. The diet changes I can handle. Adequate, quality sleep? I wish. That’s another consequence of age and if you ask most 70 year-olds how they are sleeping, 7 our of 10 will tell you “not great.”

I don’t know what aging persons did before the advent of the internet and voice-assistants, but these advances have certainly been a boon to baby boomers. Thanks to OK Google and Alexa, we can get ourselves out of countless recall jams. “Alexa, what do you call those promotional freebies that are given away at trade shows?” ‘Those items are known as swag.’ By the way, the dictionary explains that swag most likely comes from the British slang term for loot, or stolen goods. And that’s way different from merch, which you have to buy.

There are whole theories concerning memory-retrieval issues.Experts say you need to register new information by encoding it with focus and attention. Then you need to store it properly by socking it away in short-term or long-term memory. Finally, you need to facilitate its retrieval by using the cues you established in the registration and storage phases. Sounds complicated, but it’s your brain after all and that’s a busy place. Stress, fatigue or anxiety during the retrieval step throws a monkey wrench into the entire process (let’s not get into where that name comes from or do get into it by Googling Charles Moncky).

It’s not too hard to imagine that soon we will be able to eliminate the Google or Alexa step and just pose our questions to the chip in our brain that has reorganized and alphabetized everything stored there and even some things that are not.

Oh boy!

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, Head Above Water which can be purchased on Amazon here. You can also visit his author page here.

Attention Shoppers

Shopping these days is certainly becoming a novel experience for baby boomers. We grew up with a whole host of brick and mortar stores, from Sears and J.C. Penney, to E.J. Korvette and Kaufmann’s. Shopping meant putting on decent clothes and getting in the car to go downtown. Ladies supposedly wore white gloves to have lunch in the tea room at Hutzler’s in Baltimore. Urban renewals across the country killed off a lot of downtown shopping but the stores just moved to the shopping centers and malls on the edge of town. New locale, same stores and brands.

Small independent stores used to make up the bulk of the retail landscape. Around sixty per cent in the 1960s with chains accounting for twenty-nine per cent. Now, independents barely account for seven per cent. Mergers of chain stores happened so fast that the change barely registered. But look around now. Sears is in bankruptcy, Macy’s is failing, and many other department stores are struggling to hang on in the face of online shopping.

Now we don’t have to get out of our pajamas to buy whatever we want from Amazon Prime and have it the next day, or soon in an hour via drone. Groceries can be ordered online and delivered to your door. We do our own product research via customer reviews and probably know more than the sales person on the store floor. Sixty-seven per cent of millennials prefer to shop online. Forty-one per cent of baby boomers do as well, while only 28 per cent of seniors prefer that method. Those seniors may not be able to fight the trend much longer.

One type of shopping that has prevailed is catalog sales. Around holiday time our mailboxes are filled with pages plastered with delights. Food, clothes, gear and toys are still be hawked the old fashioned way in a catalog. The ordering, payment and delivery options have all been updated with quick and easy online systems, but the wishful thinking still begins with a paper presentation. It’s amazing that consumers still enjoy shopping that way.

What’s next? Drone delivery has already been mentioned but trips to a live entertainment driven retail venue could also make a comeback. Going to the mall is still a form of entertainment, so perhaps creative retailers can draw us back to a physical marketplace. Some place where you can feel the cashmere, sit on the bicycle, taste the brie or try out the fishing rod. Just maybe.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, Head Above Water which can be purchased on Amazon here. You can also visit his author page here.

Hang in There

The workplace is still a gray place as baby boomers hang on to jobs and careers. How long can they hold out? That depends upon their ability to change and adapt.

Over 40% of baby boomers stayed with the same job for more than 20 years. And 18% stayed at least 39 years. And you thought the days of working for the same employer for your entire work life went out with your parents’ generation.

But now everything has changed. There is no loyalty to an employer. Millennials make up 35% of the workforce and they are mobile. Not only do they work from anywhere, they may well work for six or seven employers during their worklife. Five years might be considered a long stint with the same employer. They are less focused on making a product and more focused on being part of a team that solves problems. Bottom line: boomers are not in Kansas any more.

Many companies now consider age a disadvantage and an obstacle to rising talent. Ouch. What happened to the eminence gris thing? We were supposed to be the knowledge base that could be tapped when you needed that whole “experience thing.” Now days, not so much. It would appear that experience has lost its cache and maybe boomers were just kidding themselves when they thought that corporations really needed that understanding of solutions that used to work.

Boomers who are kicked to the curb have only a few choices if they want to keep working. Some are getting the training they lack to be competitive with younger workers, a reboot if you will. Many more boomers are going to work for themselves. About 16% of seniors are now self-employed. Not only they happier, they also say they have more job satisfaction than they did when the worked for “the man” in the corporate world.

As the title of this post says, our only option now is to hang in there. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer noted that “once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.” Of course that could mean we are moving faster toward our own demise, but I’ll take the more positive spin on this one.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, Head Above Water which can be purchased on Amazon here. You can also visit his author page here.

R-O-B-O-T-S

Any day now, if you are still working, there’s a good chance a robot will do your job. Really? – you’re saying to yourself. Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming and there’s not much we can do to stop it (maybe pulling the plug or removing the batteries?).

If your job involves making simple decisions and repetitive tasks, a robot may be doing it in two to three years. They (I’m using pronouns to talk about robots…what does that tell you) will do payroll, review contracts, copy data to storage and handle simple insurance claims. They are already building cars so what did you expect? You just have to hope motor vehicle departments are not staffed by robots. On second thought, robots don’t need coffee breaks and have no incentive to slow down in order to convince supervisors that the job cannot be done any faster. Bring on the bots!

The upside, if you want to look up, is that AI has the potential to greatly enhance the lives of those of us whose work involves a lot of human interaction and judgement. We can continue to interact with other humans while robots reduce the drudgery of repetitive tasks (now we’re back to payroll and basic computer tasks). Imagine how much more productive you could be if you didn’t have update software, organize files, and make breakfast. AI will in fact add new jobs as more people will need to get involved in programming the robots to add more capabilities. Lots of job openings for bot wranglers coming soon.

The other promising factor is that when push comes to shove, humans prefer humans. It’s very unlikely that any of us will want to meet with a robotic therapist, CPA or dentist. Deep down, we crave human interaction even though there are an awful lot of humans who are just plain awful. Most of us would still opt for the human interaction over the robotic one.

So what do you do if your job is threatened by AI? Start thinking about moving into careers that call for skills such as selling, negotiating, strategic thinking, and creative design. And soon. Those bots are persistent. They don’t know how to behave any other way.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, Head Above Water which can be purchased on Amazon here. You can also visit his author page here.

Vinci

I ran into Leonardo da Vinci the other day. He was coming out of Home Depot with a shopping cart filled with baling wire, plastic sheeting and what looked like copper flashing.

Leo, come stai? Have not seen you in ages. Are you working on a new painting or building some kind of new flying machine? Last time we met you were still not happy with the smile on that Lisa woman.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Well I know you’ll get it right, you always do. So what’s the latest on the flying machines?

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

You amaze me Leo. You’re always tinkering and experimenting.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Maybe so, but your curiosity is relentless. I don’t know how you do it.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Hey, don’t go all dark on me. You paint, you invent, you write, you’re into astronomy, botany and cartography. You’re a true Renaissance Man, don’t you think?

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

That’s very true but you seem to be a whirlwind when it comes to inventions and dreaming up new gadgets. I wish I had your inspiration and your diligence.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

And do you do. You never were one to rest on your laurels.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

Hey, are you still hanging with that art patron, Isabella d’Este? She’s a looker, maybe marriage material.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

Whoa! It’s not for you, I get it. I just hope you take some time out to enjoy yourself, some me time.

It’s easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

And that is why you’re the genius and I’m just another blogger. Good to see you Leo. Keep it real.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, Head Above Water which can be purchased on Amazon here. You can also visit his author page here.