Gen Plus

When the album, Thriller, came out, I was living in Toronto, paying $465/month rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in a triplex, with an older couple living downstairs. I lived there with my sister and we painted our walls charcoal with white trim, the fireplace grill and radiators gold, and added tons of plants. I thought it was heaven. We had a field mouse that would run down the hall, watch TV with us and scoot back out. It was the decade of the 20-minute workout, aerobics and Reebok hightops.

I had a Pioneer stereo and turntable with Sansui speakers and the vinyl always sounded incredible. When Thriller was released, we, all of us, ALL of us, were dumbfounded. My sister and I played the LP over and over again. It worked us up, the music was infectious. We danced in our living room, jumped our aerobic routines to every track on the album. Sadly, our downstairs neighbors disagreed strongly, and just as we’d get into the running in place part of the routine…BAM, BAM, BAM…they literally hit a broomstick into the ceiling, to signal us to turn down the music and stop jumping on their ceiling. So we’d turn down the volume, and dance standing in place because the music got into us and we had to listen to it and had to move.

Michael was just a few months older than me, so I always followed his career — the ups and the downs — and when he brought his Victory tour to Toronto in 1984, we got our tickets and watched the King of Pop in concert. He was a spectacular artist. He was a pop genius and he changed the face of the music of our time. I never expected he’d live a long life, but like so many others, I’m kind of shocked today, and saddened at his death. A bright, shining, lonely star, whose interpretation of the relationship of music and the audience reshaped an industry.

Consulting for small business is a treat.  Especially when I can help these small businesses create their online footprint.  Word of mouth is fantastic and still the number one way in which service industry business grows.  But, the internet has reshaped the way word-of-mouth can travel.  Take Kogi, for example.  If you haven’t heard of Kogi, then you are in for a surprise.  Kogi is a Los Angeles food truck, specializing in Korean BBQ.  There are two things that are exceptional about Kogi. 

1. The food. 
2. The Kogi truck sightings…via Twitter

That’s right — Kogi has become a physical example of the virtual power of  Twitter.  The folks at Kogi announce the truck route via their website and on Twitter.  People line up to catch Kogi BBQ, tweet on length of the line, or status of the wait.  It has become something of a phenomenon in Los Angeles and is a good demonstration to the uninitiated to the localized reach possibilities of Twitter.

So…tonight I was at a networking event, and bumped into Yvonee, the owner of Leopard Limo.  I posted on this super cool leopard upholstered limo last month.  I hadn’t met Yvonne personally when I had stumbled upon her limo  (If you click on the link you’ll get to see me in leopard heaven.)  I was blown away when I met Yvonne.  An amazing woman, she literally is the brand.  So, I’m thinkin’…why not Leopard Limo sightings?  Not that I’d necessarily run out of my way to see the limo in action, but let’s say I was driving on Sunset and found out it’d be on my route.  At least I could get in a good rubberneck and try to catch a glimpse of the leopard-covered TV, and the glam gals standing through the skylight munching on their Kogi Korean BBQ…no?

Life coach, John Agno, is this week’s host for the Blogging Boomers Carnival.  John always finds some jewel of info relevant to Boomers that you might not have known and passes them on.  This week he gathers many jewels, so head on over for postings from some of the most popular Boomer bloggers on the net.

My childhood memories of my dad center around his masculinity.  Dad puttering in the garden, building a stone BBQ, trimming a tree, building a swing set.  Dad renovating our home, rebuilding a kitchen, creating a patio, finishing the basement, building a mud room.  He wore Old Spice aftershave.  Always had his pocketknife ready to fix something quickly.  Held our hands in the ocean to ensure we weren’t knocked over by the waves or pulled in by the undertow.  Jumping into bed with him and Mum on weekend mornings — 4 little girls all vying for a place between my soft Mum and my hairy-chested Dad.

At 78, he is still very active, slowed down only by an ankle that has betrayed him for 10 years.  He still fixes, builds, putters, wears Old Spice, and the pocketknife still hangs from his belt.  I live in Los Angeles, California, as do three of my sisters and my Mum.  The fourth daughter lives in Vancouver.  He lives in Montreal.  And while he winters every year in LA, for about the past 5 years, he has spent Father’s Day without any of his kids near him.  I talk to my dad every day by phone and I’m heading to Montreal, with my daughter,  for a week at the end of the summer…but to be a Dad for 50 years…you’d think it would be easier for us all to be together.   So we send cards and call, but it isn’t the same as making him breakfast in bed.  Or getting HIM to get up and make his famous pancakes for US on his Father’s Day. 

He won’t be alone this year…he’ll have his new Great Dane puppy as his pancake companion.  And without a doubt, technology has helped ease the challenges of being with each other on special days.  If we can’t have an in person Father’s Day, we’ll have a virtual Father’s Day.  Connect on Skype, choose the video signal and it will ALMOST be a visit.  We’ll throw virtual kisses.  Not the same as being together, but only just a hug away.

To all my reader’s who are fathers, Happy Father’s Day.

Ann Harrison, at Contemporary Retirement was this week’s host of the Blogging Boomers Carnival.  Head on over for a taste of what our talented group of Boomer bloggers were talking about over the past few days!

It is amazing what one can do without.  After decades of conspicuous consumption, most of us are cutting back even further than we ever thought we’d have to.  When you are without a job, it isn’t a question of just becoming more budget-conscious, but in this economy, where every day even MORE jobs are being cut, it is about innovation and ingenuity.  You can pretend to go out for lunch by ordering a half-salad or soup.  You can get your sushi fix, by picking up the occasional tuna roll from a good quality supermarket.  You can go to the movies on your computer (I like Netflix), and you can extend your social life through attending networking meetings.

I’ve seen and heard of many creative ways to undertake job search, but the other day I saw something I’d never seen before.  Someone had created a small brochure out of their resume and was sticking it under the windshield wipers of an office building parking lot.  I’ve certainly seen car papering — for car detailing, local pizza joints, contractors (while I was in Home Depot), and other “car relevant” locations.  But I’d never seen someone using the locale of an office building combined with a personal resume brochure.  So highly creative.  Will it get that person a job?  I don’t know.  But the headline was “Detail-oriented”, and I thought that a hiring manager might take a second look at someone who went to the trouble to get their word out.

I’d love to hear of other innovative ways for getting your resume noticed in this new economy.

Some days I feel like I’m a character in a 1945 black and white depression story, where there are food bank lineups, girls with holes in their socks and boys with holes in the toes of their shoes.  Characters meet on the streets and rather than greeting each other with the typical LA style, “Hey, how ya doin’?” instead ask, “So, is your job safe?” or  “So…have you found work yet?” and even, “How are you holding on?”.  Almost all talk is about finding enough scratch to make the monthly mortgage, rent, medical, food payments. 

In the past week, a lawyer friend is still blowing through savings as his clients don’t have money to pay him for work done.  Another friend was laid off from a high level corporate position.  Another friend is worried that his company may merge in a bid for survival…and if it does, he won’t survive the merge.  His wife’s boss was laid off and she has no idea who she reports to now.  There is no one FOR her to report to.  And, the office administrator at my daughter’s school was pink-slipped and her potential transfer revoked.

I know that some people are feeling a surge.  Some houses that are REO (Real-Estate Owned) are getting bidding wars on offers.  But at a networking meeting earlier this week, a bank executive in charge of loan mitigation reminded me that the moratorium on foreclosures is lifted and the second tier of foreclosures is on us — those people who lost their jobs and are in hardship…who will literally not have the money to pay their monthly mortgage.  It is going to be a tough summer for many, many folks.  And a tough fall, a tough winter, and likely a tough spring. 

When construction companies telemarket to find out if there is a chance in heaven or hell that I might be planning a renovation this year (no…by the way), we actually end up having conversations, only to find out that the person calling is also on a last-ditch attempt to stave off their dire situation.  And finally, today, there is a real estate agent, who like clockwork, canvasses the ‘hood every few months, handing out memo pads.  Great guy, but I’m not selling and I can’t buy.  He sees the inventory on the market and has no buyers.  The trickle-down is devastating. 

That’s a snapshot of my little neck of the woods and a few of the people I know in Encino, California.  What I want to know, is if you are in Michigan, or New York, British Columbia, Ontario or Colorado…are your conversations in black-and-white or are you seeing glimmers of technicolor on the horizon?

A good friend of mine is about to head out to Newfoundland for a road trip of the province.  She and her husband always come up with incredibly adventurous and creative ways to experience their destination and her upcoming trip had me waxing nostaligic for the family cross-country trips we took.   One of those trips was to the East Coast of Canada — through the gorgeous Quebec coastline, called the Gaspe, through New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Anne of Green Gables’ Prince Edward Islands, and finally, across the ocean by ferry to Newfoundland.  I was very young…a tween…but there were so many things we saw and did that captured my imagination and impressed nature’s beauty upon me, that it influenced many of my choices later on in life.  Seeing my country by road trip, the love of travel that my parents instilled in me, and the value of taking the time to breathe in local flavor, shaped the way I travel and see the world today.  On that trip, there were two very bizarre episodes that have stayed with me for the last almost 40 years.

The first was driving up the Gaspe coast.  And it wasn’t the coastline.  It was the Phentex.  Back in the ’70’s, there was a knitting phenomenon in Quebec, due to the creation of a polyster yarn called Phentex.  It was a brightly colored, never-fade yarn that was all the rage.  Women (mostly) knitted scarves, hats, mittens and the ubiquitous Phentex “slipper”.   There were Phentex ponchos, covered hangers, pot holders, baby bibs.  If it could be knit, it was.  The other beauty of Phentex was that you could get multi-colored yarn, so that you’d have a color pattern in your knit, without having to cut and tie off from different balls of yarn.

And all up and down the coast, as far as the eye could see, in every town, Gaspe women were selling their Phentex crafts.  We knew that because the vendors put out signs that read “Phentex”, to ensure that tourists wouldn’t miss their wares.  I bought some Phentex yarn and knitting needles and knitted my way across the eastern coast of Canada. 

That winter, my aunt, my grandmother, and a family friend all gave me Phentex slippers. 

My grandmother gave me two pair.  One was blue and white, the other green and white.  I had them for 15 years.  Finally tossed them when I moved from Montreal to Toronto.   They were still in good shape and I’m sure still sitting intact in a landfill somewhere in Quebec, along with tons of other discarded Phentex slippers.  In fact, when Quebec is rediscovered in 1,000 years, archeologists will marvel at the sheer quantity of Phentex slippers in Quebec landfills.  I’m sure they will determine that some sort of religious ritual required the crafting and wearing of Phentex slippers!

The OTHER bizarre episode was during our visit to Newfoundland.  The Eastern coast of Canada boasts a very robust fishing industry, with extremely poor fisherman.  From Nova Scotia to Newfoundland, fishermen spend their summers catching fish and trapping lobster (kids at school knew you were poor if you showed up to school with a lobster sandwich for lunch) and winters on unemployment and restringing their lobster traps and fishing nets.  In Newfoundland, we saw so many lobster traps, with their ingenious entrance to the hold and we were captivated.  Eventually my dad bought a trap for one dollar, along with netting and colored glass floats.  We strapped the trap to the roof of the car , reboarded the ferry to the mainland, and drove back to our home in Montreal.  The lobster trap lived in our themed basement for many years.  Nets and glass floats hung from the ceiling and the lobster trap held a place of honor hung on the wall.    When I moved to Toronto in 1982, I took the lobster trap with me and it has lived with me ever since.  It probably cost $40 or $50 to pay for the moving of the trap from Eastern Canada to the Western United States, but I couldn’t leave it behind.

Right now it is holding a new place of honor next to my vegetable garden where it proudly holds my gardening tools.  Unlike the Phentex slippers, I’m allowing it to gracefully rejoin the earth and nature, but should it still be undisintegrated by 2020, when it will officially be considered and “antique”, I may consider selling it to the highest bidder.

Wesley Hein is not only the host of this week’s carnival, but he is also one of the founders of the BBC (that would be Blogging Boomers Carnival).  He and co-founder, Rhea Becker, have kept us motivated, encouraged, and baffled enough to keep on writing every week…for 118 weeks now!  Enjoy what our boomer writers bring to the table and take a look at the rest of his valued website…LifeTwo.

I subscribe to the newsletter put out by Weddle’s (a career consulting, research, and publishing firm), and today, a very good article caught my eye.  This one is all about micro-careers.  I’ve referred to the shiftin the past as “career-chunking”, but I like the term “micro-career” very much.  The concept is simple — we will have many careers over our employment lifespan, expanding upon our best skills and translating them to different fields, while continuing to accumulate knowledge and expertise.  The job market will not be the same one we grew up with — likely for the rest of our lives.  Give a read.  This article, by Peter Weddle,  is quite thoughtfully laid out:

Micro Careers

The common view has been that we have one career. Typically, it was defined by both our occupational field-we are an attorney, a salesperson or a logistics professional-and our employer-we work at IBM or at Coca- Cola. Although we were often told otherwise, many of us believed that we would spend our entire career working for that one or, at most, two or three different organizations. In other words, we were convinced our careers would be relatively stable and long lasting.

While that was probably not true in the past, it is definitely not true today. This Great Recession has changed the nature of our careers forever. I know you don’t want to hear that. It’s hard enough to find a job in the current economic environment without some putz telling you that the rules of the game have now changed. But they have. And sticking our heads in the sand won’t undo what has been done.

On the other hand, if we can learn the new rules quickly-if we can get our arms around them and figure out how to play by and win with them-we can turn today’s difficult situation into a much better one. We can capture the upside in a down economy. We can put these new rules to work for us so we can find the work we want and hang onto it.

So, what are these new rules? They are a response to the traumatic and wrenching devastation of business now underway in this country and around the world. From GM to Citigroup, from Hertz to Microsoft, employers are shedding jobs and the workers who held them. These are not, however, your father’s or mother’s layoffs. They are not reductions in force that will eventually be replaced by rehiring in force. They are, instead, reductions in structure. The American employer is becoming leaner and determined to stay that way.

This shift in organizational philosophy holds several implications for those of us in the workforce.

First, there will be far fewer permanent jobs available to us. Companies will shrink down to a relatively small number of core roles and hire very selectively to fill them. Gone are the days of offering a position to a qualified applicant. Today and for many tomorrows to come, only the best qualified candidate for each opening will get the nod.

Second, employers will increase their hiring for “defined outcome positions.” Unlike traditional contract or project work, these situations will have the look and feel of permanent jobs, but have a fixed duration determined by the accomplishment of a specific objective established by the employer. Defined outcome positions will have the same organizational prestige and seniority as core jobs, but without the commitment to long term employment.

Third, employers will attempt to be much more nimble and quick acting. The competitive dynamics of a highly integrated, global marketplace have shortened the life cycle of products and services, sales and marketing strategies, and the organizational staffing requirements that flow from them. The kinds of talent required to execute an organization’s business plan last year or the year before may be-indeed, often will be-entirely different than those it needs today or tomorrow.If those are the new rules, how do we play them?

The answer is as simple as it is challenging. We will have to shift our own employment philosophy. We must change the way we think about our careers. We have to accept that they are no longer relatively stable or long lasting. From now on, our careers will be episodic and short. They will be “micro careers.”

Micro careers are defined by two kinds of impermanence:

Instead of working for one or two employers over the course of a thirty year career, we will now be employed by 10-15 organizations over the course of a fifty year career. We are living longer even as the staffing needs of employers grow shorter and less enduring.

Instead of working in a single occupational field, you will work in 3-5 different professions. They may all draw on a common foundation of expertise, but each will require a specific and additional set of knowledge, skills and abilities.This continuous changing means that we can no longer aspire to be complete and fully formed workers. The old industrial era paradigm of moving from novice to journeyman to master is over. In today’s knowledge-based economy, only masters survive. So, our new strategy must be to act as “masters-in-progress.” We must never stop moving toward a better, more capable, more effective version of our best selves.

Now, I acknowledge that such incessant self renewal is a new and potentially uncomfortable way of working for some, maybe even many of us. We worked hard to get to a certain point in our careers, and now, we would like to coast. We would like to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor. And that’s no longer possible. In the 21st Century workplace, managing a successful career is like riding a bicycle. We can coast for a short period of time, but we’re going to have to peddle and sometimes peddle very hard if we want to keep from crashing.

While that may be difficult to accept, there are some advantages to this situation. It enables us to escape from the imprisonment of dull jobs and dead end employers. No employment situation is forever and as long as we keep preparing ourselves for what’s ahead, each new job is a chance to move on and up. We get to start fresh on a regular basis, so mistakes are less harmful to our progress and risk is less dangerous. We have, in short, more freedom and opportunity than we have ever had. That’s the key point we should remember. Because that’s the power and the promise of micro careers.