by Jon Glesinger

I know that for many, this has been a year to forget and I for one, am  certainly looking forward to improvement in the economy in 2010. However, the state of the global economy caused us to take a long hard look at ourselves.

Certainly there have been way too few business transactions but that is not the measure of success we are using this year. Taking a leaf out of Churchill’s book, we looked for the opportunity in the difficulty. For us, it was to build a better business platform and model and importantly a truly world-class leadership team who are focussed on success for our members, customers and partners. More on the team in our next news letter, in the meantime, please have a look at the ‘About Us’ section of our website. www.expertalumni.com

As 2010 rolls out I am delighted to say that we are in great shape. May I sincerely wish you and your families the compliments of the season and a very happy, safe and successful New Year.

Not Taking ‘Not Hiring’ For An Answer

Baby boomers have lived during an era of unparalleled prosperity. So when this deep recession hit – at a time when boomers were advancing to middle – and late-middle age – much was written about them being too spoiled to cope.

Not so. A look at recent employment data indicates that boomers have persevered in these hard times, and are less likely to grow discouraged and quit the job hunt than younger workers are. Older adults are not giving up, despite the fact that the unemployment rate for baby boomers has doubled since the start of the recession, what the federal government calls their “labor participation rate” – the number of 45- to 64-year-olds working or actively seeking work – has remained unchanged. In contrast, every other age group has shown a decline.

Older workers don’t have the choice of withdrawing from the labor force, they have mortgages to pay, health issues and retirement to worry about, as well as children to put through college.

Tory Johnson, owner of Women for Hire, which for the last decade has run job fairs in America’s 10 largest cities, has been struck by the toughness of the boomer work force. “With the 20- and 30-somethings, the attitude is, ‘No one is hiring, what’s the point of going to a job fair?’ ” Ms. Johnson said. “With the boomers, it’s, ‘Even if there’s one job, I’ll try.’ ” At her 16 job fairs so far in 2009, she said, attendance is up 10 percent over all, and it’s because of boomers; every other age group has declined.

A big shift she’s seen is middle-aged workers turning to temporary employment to survive. “It may not be the ideal scenario,” she said. “But there’s a recognition you have to do what it takes, and it could lead to a full-time job.”
Indeed, a growth in temporary work is one of the very few hopeful employment signs at this moment. When Keith Hall, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, recently announced the 10.2 percent jobless rate for October, he noted only two sectors had shown growth: health care, with 29,000 new jobs, and temporary workers with 34,000.

Boomer-age workers are the only age group whose employment prospects have improved since last summer. For people over 45, joblessness was 6.8 percent in October, down from 7.3 percent in July (the highest for this age group since data was first collected 60 years ago). In contrast, for 25- to 34-year-olds, joblessness was 10.8 percent in October, up from 10 percent in July; for those 35 to 44, it was 8.5 percent in October, up from 7.9 in July.

Studies have shown that during a recession, the first harbinger of employment recovery is growth of temporary jobs. Typically, six months later you start to see improvement in general employment.

The hope is that employers make those temporary jobs permanent.  Hearing employers say, “I have a position to fill with potential to hire full time.”

Excerpt taken from The New York Times-2009.

Lon & Cheryl House  – Water & Energy Consulting

In 2007, we were contacted by a retired friend of ours who had gone to Thailand to help with the Tsunami recovery.  A refugee camp on the Thailand/Burma border originally set up for the Karen people (a predominantly Christian ethnic group that the Burmese military is trying to exterminate) for 400 people now had over 4,000 living in it, and one out of every four babies was dying before making it to two years old due to dirty water from the stream they use for drinking.  We found a hand well drilling system and hand pumps manufactured here in the U.S., took it over, and trained some Karen on how to drill a well, install the pumps, and provide clean water for their camp, and left them  with the equipment, supplies, and knowledge on how to do it themselves.

While we were there we ran into a group called the Free Burma Rangers (www.freeburmarangers.org) as they were coming out. They operate in the conflict area in Burma, helping out the local people in a multitude of ways, but primarily they are known as the “backpack medics’ – patching up the people after they have been attacked or stepped on land mines planted by the Burma army, and treating people when they become ill. They shared with us that one of their greatest needs was for electricity at their jungle hospital camps, so they could recharge their communications radios and so they could have lights to do surgeries. The problem was these locations are very remote (4-5 days trek through the jungle) and there wasn’t a generation option that worked (solar was too bulky and cumbersome to backpack in and only operated part of the time, regular generators were too heavy, required fuel, and were too noisy).

We found a manufacturer in Vietnam that makes small hydroelectric generators that are light enough to be backpacked in, ordered several of these units for delivery to Thailand, and in early August of this year we, along with our youngest daughter, went over to Thailand, went in with the Rangers to one of their jungle camps, and trained them on how to wire a hut and install and maintain the hydroelectric generators (see photos).

As alumni in America we are in a rather unique position. We have money (orders of magnitude more a lot of people in the world), time, and knowledge and access to resources that the rest of the world can really use. The events of this last year illustrate this. There was a problem on the Thailand/Burma border that they couldn’t solve. It took an American to find a technology that was manufactured right next door to them (Vietnam), who purchased several of the generators ($500 delivered to Thailand), and who came over and trained them to on how to install and maintain the generators. There are now 6 FBR hospital camps in the region that have power and lights.  And I have to say, it was the greatest adventure we have ever been on and one of the most rewarding things we have ever done. And we are looking forward to what 2010 brings.  For more information follow this link waterandenergyconsulting.

UNTIL the early 1990s nobody much thought about whole populations getting older. The UN had the foresight to convene a “world assembly on ageing” back in 1982, but that came and went. By 1994 the World Bank had noticed that something big was happening. In a report entitled “Averting the Old Age Crisis”, it argued that pension arrangements in most countries were unsustainable.

For the next ten years a succession of books, mainly by Americans, sounded the alarm. They had titles like “Young v Old”, “Gray Dawn” and “The Coming Generational Storm”, and their message was stark: health-care systems were heading for the rocks, pensioners were taking young people to the cleaners, and soon there would be intergenerational warfare.
Since then the debate has become less emotional, not least because a lot more is known about the subject. Books, conferences and research papers have proliferated. International organisations such as the OECD and the EU issue regular reports. Population ageing is on every agenda, from G8 economic conferences to NATO summits. The World Economic Forum plans to consider the future of pensions and health care at its prestigious Davos conference early next year. The media, including this newspaper, are giving the subject extensive coverage.

Whether all that attention has translated into sufficient action is another question. Governments in rich countries now accept that their pension and health-care promises will soon become unaffordable, and many of them have embarked on reforms, but so far only timidly. That is not surprising: politicians with an eye on the next election will hardly rush to introduce unpopular measures that may not bear fruit for years, perhaps decades.

The outline of the changes needed is clear. To avoid fiscal meltdown, public pensions and health-care provision will have to be reined back severely and taxes may have to go up. By far the most effective method to restrain pension spending is to give people the opportunity to work longer, because it increases tax revenues and reduces spending on pensions at the same time. It may even keep them alive longer. John Rother, the AARP’s head of policy and strategy, points to studies showing that other things being equal, people who remain at work have lower death rates than their retired peers.

Younger people today mostly accept that they will have to work for longer and that their pensions will be less generous. Employers still need to be persuaded that older workers are worth holding on to. That may be because they have had plenty of younger ones to choose from, partly thanks to the post-war baby-boom and partly because over the past few decades many more women have entered the labour force, increasing employers’ choice. But the reservoir of women able and willing to take up paid work is running low and the baby-boomers are going grey.

In many countries immigrants have been filling such gaps in the labour force as have already emerged (and remember that the real crunch is still around ten years off). Immigration in the developed world is the highest it has ever been, and it is making a useful difference. In still-fertile America it currently accounts for about 40% of total population growth, and in fast-ageing western Europe for about 90%.

On the face of it, it seems the perfect solution. Many developing countries have lots of young people in need of jobs; many rich countries need helping hands that will boost tax revenues and keep up economic growth. But over the next few decades labour forces in rich countries are set to shrink so much that inflows of immigrants would have to increase enormously to compensate: to at least twice their current size in western Europe’s most youthful countries, and three times in the older ones. Japan would need a large multiple of the few immigrants it has at present. Public opinion polls show that people in most rich countries already think that immigration is too high. Further big increases would be politically unfeasible.

To tackle the problem of ageing populations at its root, “old” countries would have to rejuvenate themselves by having more of their own children. A number of them have tried, some more successfully than others. But it is not a simple matter of offering financial incentives or providing more child care. Modern urban life in rich countries is not well adapted to large families. Women find it hard to combine family and career. They often compromise by having just one child.

And if fertility in ageing countries does not pick up? It will not be the end of the world, at least not for quite a while yet, but the world will slowly become a different place. Older societies may be less innovative and more risk-averse than younger ones. By 2025 at the latest, about half the voters in America and most of those in western European countries will be over 50-and older people turn out to vote in much greater number than younger ones. Academic studies have found no evidence so far that older voters have used their clout at the ballot box to push for policies that specifically benefit them, though if in future there are many more of them they might start doing so.

Nor is there any sign of the intergenerational warfare predicted in the 1990s. After all, older people themselves mostly have families. In a recent study of parents and grown-up children in 11 European countries, Karsten Hank of Mannheim University found that 85% of them lived within 25km of each other and the majority of them were in touch at least once a week.

Even so, the shift in the centre of gravity to older age groups is bound to have a profound effect on societies, not just economically and politically but in all sorts of other ways too. Richard Jackson and Neil Howe of America’s CSIS, in a thoughtful book called “The Graying of the Great Powers”, argue that, among other things, the ageing of the developed countries will have a number of serious security implications.

For example, the shortage of young adults is likely to make countries more reluctant to commit the few they have to military service. In the decades to 2050, America will find itself playing an ever-increasing role in the developed world’s defence effort. Because America’s population will still be growing when that of most other developed countries is shrinking, America will be the only developed country that still matters geopolitically.

There is little that can be done to stop population ageing, so the world will have to live with it. But some of the consequences can be ameliorated. Many experts now believe that given the right policies, the effects, though momentous, need not be catastrophic. Most countries have recognised the need to do something and are beginning to act.

But even then there is no guarantee that their efforts will work. What is happening now is historically unprecedented. Ronald Lee, director of the Centre on the Economics and Demography of Ageing at the University of California, Berkeley, puts it succinctly: “We don’t really know what population ageing will be like, because nobody has done it yet.”

Article taken from The Economist- Print Edition- June 2009

Disenchantment with work is growing. What can be done about it?

SUICIDE, proclaimed Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus”, is the only serious philosophical problem. In France at the moment it is also a serious management problem. A spate of attempted and successful suicides at France Telecom—many of them explicitly prompted by troubles at work—has sparked a national debate about life in the modern corporation. One man stabbed himself in the middle of a meeting (he survived). A woman leapt from a fourth-floor office window after sending a suicidal e-mail to her father: “I have decided to kill myself tonight…I can’t take the new reorganisation.” In all, 24 of the firm’s employees have taken their own lives since early 2008—and this grisly tally follows similar episodes at other pillars of French industry including Renault, Peugeot and EDF (see article).

There are some parochial reasons for this melancholy trend. France Telecom is making the difficult transition from state monopoly to multinational company. It has shed 22,000 jobs since 2006, but two-thirds of the remaining workers enjoy civil-service-like job-security. This is forcing it to pursue a toxic strategy: teaching old civil servants new tricks while at the same time putting new hires on short-term contracts. Yet the problem is not confined to France. America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics calculates that work-related suicides increased by 28% between 2007 and 2008, although the rate is lower than in Europe. And suicide is only the tip of an iceberg of work-related unhappiness.

A survey by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy, found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%. A more recent survey by DDI, another American consultancy, found that more than half of respondents described their job as “stagnant”, meaning that they had nothing interesting to do and little hope of promotion. Half of these “stagnators” planned to look for another job as soon as the economy improved. People are both clinging on to their current jobs, however much they dislike them, and dreaming of moving when the economy improves. This is taking a toll on both short-term productivity and long-term competitiveness: the people most likely to move when things look up are high-flyers who feel that their talents are being ignored.

The most obvious reason for the rise in unhappiness is the recession, which is destroying jobs at a startling rate and spreading anxiety throughout the workforce. But the recession is also highlighting longer-term problems. Unhappiness seems to be particularly common in car companies, which suffer from global overcapacity, and telecoms companies, which are being buffeted by a technological revolution. In a survey of its workers in 2008, France Telecom found that two-thirds of them reported being “stressed out” and a sixth reported being in “distress”.

A second source of misery is the drive to improve productivity, which is typically accompanied by an obsession with measuring performance. Giant retailers use “workforce management” software to monitor how many seconds it takes to scan the goods in a grocery cart, and then reward the most diligent workers with prime working hours. The public sector, particularly in Britain, is awash with inspectorates and performance targets. Taylorism, which Charlie Chaplin lampooned so memorably in “Modern Times”, has spread from the industrial to the post-industrial economy. In Japan some firms even monitor whether their employees smile frequently enough at customers.

A more subtle problem lies in the mixed messages that companies send about loyalty and commitment. Many firms—particularly successful ones—demand extraordinary dedication from their employees. (Microsoft, according to an old joke, offers flexitime: “You can work any 18-hour shift that you want.”) Some provide perks that are intended to make the office feel like a second home. But companies also reserve the right to trim their workforce at the first sign of trouble. Most employees understand that their firms do not feel much responsibility to protect jobs. But they nevertheless find it wrenching to leave a post that has consumed so much of their lives.

Engineering joy

Can anything be done about this epidemic of unhappiness? There are some people, particularly in Europe, who think that it strengthens the case for expanding workers’ rights. But doing so will not end the upheaval wrought by technological innovation in the telecoms sector or overcapacity in the car industry. And the situation in France Telecom was exacerbated by the fact that so many workers were unsackable. The solution to the problem, in so far as there is one, lies in the hands of managers and workers rather than governments.

Companies need to do more than pay lip service to the human side of management. They also need to learn from the well-documented mistakes of others (France Telecom has belatedly hired Technologia, a consultancy which helped Renault with its suicide problem). Bob Sutton of Stanford University argues that companies need to do as much as possible to come clean with workers, even if that means confirming bad news. He also warns that bosses need to be careful about the signals they send: in times of great stress ill thought-out turns of phrase can lead to a frenzy of anxiety and speculation.

As for the workers, the habit of battening down the hatches, which so irritates many companies, may be a sensible response to economic turmoil. In the longer term workers can take comfort from the fact that history may be on their side: in the rich world, low birth rates, an impending surge in retirements and caps on immigration could reduce the number of people of working age by 20-40%. Today’s unhappy workers may one day be able to exercise the ultimate revenge, by taking their services elsewhere.

This  article was taken from The Economist print edition, 8th October

Have you ever had the urge to write a book? Many people think about it, I know. Maybe they even start, but it’s something that gets so easily put back. I took early retirement as an opportunity to realise one of my unfulfilled life’s ambitions.

I left Shell in March 2007 after 26 years of doing the corporate thing. I am now living in Fortaleza, Brazil and loving it. My wife Ivone is Brazilian and we bought a beach place here in 2005. Although I have been in “semi-retirement” for the last year or so, I tried to start up an import export fashion business in the US from Brazil, during 2007. Sadly, it all went belly-up and I lost a small fortune. Nonetheless, I learnt an important lesson that it i s great to have a portfolio of interests, but professionally I believe you should not become over-extended … in other words I didn’t understand enough about women’s fashion!  Since then I have set up a firm based in Panama, with my business partner, looking at entrepreneurial deals mainly in the oil business and some freelance consultancy opportunities. This may not be that diverse, but it feels much more in line with my capabilities.

Meanwhile, as if to contradict the principle of-stick to what you know best-I found another way to harness my creative streak. I was able to keep myself occupied writing a spy novel-Most Wanted. It has already won the coveted Editors Choice award from the publisher-iUniverse-the on demand publishing arm of Barnes and Noble. What I lacked in professional writing skill, I was able to make up for by getting the right advice. I found the supported self-publishing process to be excellent for a first time author and in particular, it overcame the problem of multiple rejections from traditional publishing. It was a relatively inexpensive and practical solution that guided me every step of the way and avoided the usual traps set for amateur writers. I got to work with professional editors in the genre and leaned an incredible amount. If you would like to buy a copy it is available on amazon