Over-50

Baby Boomers: Imagine that you are the corner drugstore

Teach a man to fish and he eats forever.

Today for us Baby Boomers what we need to learn to keep eating is how to keep rebranding ourselves and reframing our professional identity.  That's how we differentiate ourselves from all the competition out there.

Yet, with the rules of business in flux, the only way we are going to do that is by experimenting.  Trial and error, with the underlay of uncertainty, can be brutal.  That's why we want to learn from the other guy's successes and failures.

For the financial information company Motley Fool I analyze the branding upheaval going on at Walgreen.  Once our trusty corner drugstore, it's now expanded into healthcare and being a leader in the convenience store industry.  Here you can read my deconstruction and pick and choose lessons for your own transformation.

 

Baby Boomer Intensity: Time to rethink that generational signature

It's the kiss of death in the professional marketplace to "act old."  But we Baby Boomers are also losing out on getting jobs and plum assignments and orders with customers and clients because we are too intense.  We have to rethink that in a world which is already overstimulated.

A client I coach is very successful.  But at age 60, he wants to shift gears from being so hands-on in his work to being more the elder statesmen who is quoted by the media, paid to deliver keynote speeches, author books which sell, and be a middleman who refers business to others.  What had been getting in the way is his intensity.  He's simply too hot.  Incidentally, Judy Garland's TV career went down the tubes because she was too hot for that particular small screen medium.

Like most important realizations I came to this one from my own pain.  C.S. Lewis observes that experience is a brutal teacher but we learn, by god, we learn.  My intensity stood between me and getting the assignment.  It was too much for the overwhelmed to absorb.  Also some perceived it as trying too hard and therefore annoying.  Worst of all, others perceived as my being desperate.  Years ago, I had flagged that as a problem in both my personal and professional life Download Geezerguts.

How to tone down the intensity? Simply slow down.  Slower transmits the aura of being a confident, successful authority.  Don't provide more value than you're getting paid for.  Less is always more.

Baby Boomers Who Cared Too Much: The zen of not caring at all

Not cool and conservative like our Eisenhower-generation parents, so many of us Baby Boomers became red hot with caring about just about everything.  Of course, when it came time to grow up and go to work, we cared way too much about that.  That probably gave rise to the booming career-advice industry.

Then, so many of us lost it all.  The good job or the thriving business, the nest egg, the irrational optimism about being way too smart and educated to fail.  Piece by piece we put together a new world view.

That took time, of course.  And pain.  Here's where I was circa 2003 Download Geezerguts.  Now I am a late bloomer who's in demand in fields of communications that I never anticipated being in.  Those include financial writing and copywriting.  How did I break free from caring?

In my 12-step group, across the table from me was a middle-aged American man who was canary-yellow.  I asked him if he was new "in the rooms."  He said yes and then asked me how I knew that he was new.  Just hadn't seen you around, I answered.  In telling his story at a speaker meeting he told us that the nurses at the hospital observed that all the attempted suicides they had treated he had made the most comprehensive attempt.  Somehow he got the epiphany not to care.  His recovery was so dramatic that he emerged as a leader in the 12-step program.

Now, I just don't care.  The biggest freedom is not giving a damn about my daily professional mistakes, big and not so big.   What a shock to realize that we can survive our own myopia and even wind up thriving.

 

Kurt Vonnegut: He got distracted

One-time influential novelist Kurt Vonnegut became tedious in the last years of his career.  When he gave lectures at colleges like Smith students were puzzled about how out of touch he was.  After those events journalists laid into him.  That's all there in "And So It Goes," a new biography by Charles J. Shields. 

In those 415 pages we get the pieces of man who suffered greatly in his youth.  He was an outcast in a family and culture which respected science.  His family lost their wealth during The Great Depression.  His mother couldn't adjust to being ordinary and killed herself on Mother's Day. He was a POW in World War II during the destruction of Dresden by the Allied Forces.  Yet, Vonnegut had the focus to leverage that pain into truly original fiction. 

So, why did he get distracted and became a caricature of the character he used to be?  And how can other aging giants like Clint Eastwood, Betty White, and Hillary Clinton keep their eye on the ball?

The answer might be in framing fan worship as a peril.  Vonnegut saw it as his due, almost his salvation.  It's been observed that after people develop brandnames it's likely they will get stuck.  That's because their attention is taken up with being out there, not being within themselves continuing to do well what differentiated them from the pack.  Examples range from Truman Capote to Joseph Heller.

Vonnegut could have stayed Vonnegut.

When Revolutions Happened in Person

During the Counterculture, we had to show up in person to be heard.  Now, we can become part of the bottom-up movement from our laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

The word is out that Citibank played cute with customers.  I took a look at that for financial information company Motley Fool.  Here you can read all about it.

SuperBowl XLVI: Not your father's commercials

For SuperBowl XLVI, those 30-second commercials costing an average of $3.5 million will just be the platform for much more extensive marketing and messaging.  Much of all the rest will happen through social media, online video, and smartphone apps.  This will not the viewing experience your father and you had years ago.

I deconstruct the new kind of commercial outreach for financial information powerhouse Motley Fool.  Here you can read all about it.

Bosses [Clients Too]: When they're not doing so hot

It happens - and is happening more often in this turbulent economy - that the boss or the client is in trouble.  The issue directly impacts us because our income is dependant, in whole or part, on that authority figure.  In BLOOMBERG BUSINESS WEEK, Liz Ryan covers that sensitive matter.

The focus here, unless we are a type of Mother Teresa, is how we are to navigate the situation, w/o harm to ourselves.  There's usually peril in attempting to "help" the boss or client with strategic or tactical guidance.  Sure there are times they request that, but, as most of us know from experience, anything we do or say can blow up in our face.  The best course of action is to recommend calling in a consultant.

For self-survival, we remain in public and private loyal.  No chatting up the situation with anyone in the loop.  We do what we are assigned to do.  We ask the boss or client if there is anything else we could be doing.  And we present ourselves in a positive light to those who could "save" us if the current regime falls and/or help open other opportunities for us.

Of course, we nose around for what's out there in terms of full-time, part-time, and/or consulting assignments.  If this is a client, you bet we scramble to replace that account.  In most cases, the business is a good-bye.  We the vendor are perceived as tainted goods and when the client is gone so are we.

This is not a time for compassion.  It's save-our-own source of income.

Donald Trump: Role model for over-50 risk-taking

The Donald is casting spells on the 2012 presidential race.  Before this, Donald Trump embedded his unique kind of voodoo on reality TV.  And before that, he had been an early game-changer in real estate.

What can we over-50 learn from this leader in so many fields?  Obviously, it's to never stop taking risks. 

There's an interesting dynamic which takes place as we age. One part of us - the social self - becomes more cautious.  We spend more time assessing who to allow into our lives.  In self-disclosure we become more circumspect.  When it comes time to make amends, we weigh how the confession of our sins against others might affect them.

On the other hand, having been through so many ups and downs in our career, we develop the inner confidence to continue to take risks.  If we screw up, it certainly won't be the first time. 

As this year fades out, my colleagues in communications are considering radical shifts.  One Baby Boomer, who has developed a brandname in social media, is toying with the strategy of making that a sideline and concentrating more on research.  After all, THE ECONOMIST predicts data is the sweet spot for this second decade of the 21st century.

Is this willingness to take the great leap forward what separates us from Generation Y?  Are their members, with the exception of outliers like Mark Zuckerberg,  not risk-takers?

Those Over-50 Learn to Love Failure

How we get "there," whatever that "there" is, now entails plenty of failure.  That's because the economy, technology, and we aging professionals keep changing. 

The challenge for the over-50 is to learn to love failure.  Here I address that in this opinion-editorial published on "All The Single Girlfriends," a site which is rebranding aging.

"Plan B" by David Murray: Why we Baby Boomers have to keep adjusting our tactics

Facebook has almost a billion followers.  MySpace sparked and fizzled.  Why the difference?

In his new book "Plan B," entrepreneur David Murray explains that Facebook's leadership, especially Mark Zuckerberg, keeps adjusting his tactics.  MySpace created a strategy and kept to it.   Not that strategy or developing a blockbuster business model is wrong.  It's just that players can't take that so seriously.  Survival+ counts on real-time moves, most of them unplanned.  When Plan A doesn't pan out, we have the confidence, courage, and drive to move onto Plan B, then Plan C, Plan D.

The journey in making a living has become long for us Baby Boomers.  Some predict we will be working up to at least 80 years old.  That gives us plenty of time to learn to become more alert and nimble when we spot obstacles and opportunities.  Google, for instance, tried Buzz.   That Plan A didn't pan out.  Plan B has been Google+, a social network which could take on Facebook.  Amazon's Plan A was online retail.  Its Plan B is online services+ hardware like Kindle Fire.  Amazon, because of its price point, could take on Apple.  Part of Plan B is to start a price war with Apple to gain market share.  That's also Plan B for Samsung.