So Baby Boomer: Life Tips

Boomer Change vs. Elder Experience

When Senator John McCain takes the stage at the Republican National Convention this week in Minneapolis, he will be become the oldest candidate ever to accept his party's nomination for a first-term president.  McCain, who will be 72 when he accepts the nod, has sought to turn his advanced years into an attribute and a counterpoint to the message being championed by his 47-year-old boomer rival, Senator Barack Obama.  This election, at least on one level, is a national referendum on change vs. experience. 

A similar dynamic is at work in business.

Older people have a historical perspective, as well as impressive contacts built up over a lifetime.  They can be adept at weighing risks and spotting opportunities.  These are useful attributes at a time of epic upheaval in industry after industry where rapid-fire change is putting executives to the test.  Many companies also find themselves lacking institutional knowledge, partly a result of the incessant job-hopping of today's generation of managers.

Older executives often evince a been-there-done-that serenity.  Most senior executives cite the value of such intangibles as gut, patience, and perspective.  They say younger executives often lack these; MBAs tend to be overly fixated on data and have had the creativity educated out of them.

Finally, age confers on its wearer a certain immunity to internal politics.  These folks can get away with saying things their younger colleagues would never dare.  "One colossal advantage of being in extra innings is you can tell it like it is, say what you think, and largely eschew political caution," says 76-year-old Robert Lutz, vice-chairman of General Motors.  Lutz has become a kind of Provocateur at GM.  He was the only executive willing to push for an electric car despite GM's debacle the first time around.  "I often ask, rhetorically, if they don't like it, what are they going to do?  Send me into early retirement?"

Source: BusinessWeek, September 8, 2008

Boomer Career Path Choices

Boomers define ourselves by what we do for a living.

Our career reflects innate abilities, goals, creativity, attitudes toward others and a host of other mysterious variables. In the skewed path to fulfillment, it's human nature to taste many jobs and experiment with new careers before we settle on something we are passionate about. The best we can strive for is finding something we love doing early on so we can devote the rest of our lives to excelling at it.

Job and career changes reflect not only the times but also, more importantly, a natural inclination to dabble and learn—so says career coach John Agno.  Looking back upon how his own life and career fell into place, Agno discovered this fact of life firsthand.  He changed jobs every seven years before settling into a career he was passionate about: coaching senior technology executives—CTOs, CIOs and CEOs.

Along with a growing number of workplace advisers, Agno concurs that there is no defined path to any professional career.

"More commonly, most people will travel several paths in the course of their lifetime," says Agno. "Typically, our early years are spent gravitating toward professions or vocations that are in tune with our personalities. Career adjustments, whether they happen early or in mid-career, are normal and natural.  Every accomplishment and failure prepares you for what's ahead."

While growing up, Agno was strongly influenced by his parents’ wishes.  Pressured to become an accountant, he pursued a degree in business. While in school, he discovered that accounting didn’t fire his imagination because it wasn’t challenging enough.  “I found that I would rather make things happen than account for them after they had happened,” he says. “So I continued studying business administration, but switched from accounting to marketing.  My new focus was driven by what I call my ’developer’ personality--a need to build concepts that achieved business and project goals.”

Agno discovered that once he developed something, it was time to move on to the next project that challenged him.  For that reason he wound up changing jobs every seven years.  As a coach, Agno observes that around age 40, many of his clients become discontented with their lives and look for new challenges. He understands why.

Management consultant, author and motivational speaker Tom Peters says, "There is no single path to success." 

And Buddha said: "Carpenters bend wood. Fletchers bend arrows. Wise men fashion themselves."  It sounds a little vague, but the message is on the money: There is no telling how your life will work itself out, because there are so many things that are beyond your control.

Sources: Bob Weinstein's Are Career Paths the Best for Professional Advancement? in CIO magazine, February 4, 2008 and Passion of a Career, July 23, 2007 at gantthead.com

Boomers' Future Sex Life

A satisfying sex life is possible as you age into your 70s and 80s, new research suggests.

Many older Americans are apparently taking advantage of that fact, because 68 percent of men between 57 and 85 reported having sex last year, as did 42 percent of women, according to the study's lead author, Edward Laumann, the George Herbert Mead Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. And, Laumann added, more older women might have wanted to have sex, but there just aren't as many available older men for them to partner with.

"Healthy people can have reasonably satisfying sexual health for most of their lives," said Laumann. "There are challenges that arise, but it's not aging, per se, that's the issue. A decline in sexuality may be the canary in the mineshaft. Sexual problems may manifest before diabetes and high blood pressure."

The study findings were published in the current issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

"It's definitely whether you're elderly or "wellderly" that makes a difference," said Dr. Virginia Sadock, director of the program of human sexuality at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City. "Illness and medications make a difference in sex lives."

Other factors that can get in the way of a satisfying sex life later in life include having had a sexually transmitted disease, and having physical problems, mental health issues or relationship difficulties, the study found.

The study included information from 1,550 women and 1,455 men between the ages of 57 and 85.  All participated in the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project.

Source: HealthDay News, August 13, 2008

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Boomer's Guide for Gen X & Y at Work

Technology:  Keep it up-to-date for Gen X to stay productive.  For Gen Y encourage suggestions and don't fear change.  Gen Y is more comfortable with technology than any other group.  Learn from them.

Compensation: Be willing to negotiate with Gen X and offering perks if you can't budge on compensation.  For Gen Y, highlight the importance of building their resume instead of their bank account.  An impressive work history can make all the difference in a slumping economy.

Attire: Give Gen X a heads-up if they should dress nicer for specific meetings or customer interactions.  Since Gen Y are new to the job market (and might be oblivious to your company's culture), let them know that dressing better will help defeat "slacker" misconceptions, build credibility with executives, and help their career over the long haul.

Work Ethic: Trust Gen X and understand that the flexibility to telecommute or work outside business hours will help you gain their trust.  Appeal to Gen Y's career goals.  Accept the inevitable that by the time this generation is fully in the workplace, the standard work week will likely be replaced by a new set of rules based on productivity...not hours at their desk.

Source: Business@Work, BusinessWeek, August 25, 2008

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Boomers & Tomorrow's Workforce

If, when you were a kid, you came home from school and....

• ran outside to play with your neighborhood friends, you're one of 78 million Baby Boomers
• put clothes in the dryer and the meatloaf in the oven, fed the cat and babysat your younger brother, you're one of 47 million generation Xers
• went to soccer practice, gymnastics, karate or dance class, reaching home by 7PM to finally do homework, you're one of 73.5 million generation Y or Millennials

All these youngsters in school from different eras, with different childhood experiences, have one thing in common today---they're in your workforce and they have disparate skill levels.

Alzheimer's Drugs

26 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's and 106 million could be afflicted by 2050.

Any treatment that alters the course of the disease would quickly become a multi-billion-dollar drug.  To date, most Alzheimer's researchers have pursued compounds that would clear out toxic clumps of a protein call amyloid that clog the brains of Alzheimer's victims.  One amyloid drug after another has failed in trials.

Dr. Claude Wischik, at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, rejects amyloid as a cause of Alzheimer's.  He has long studied another protein, Tau, which masses into tangles in diseased brains.  In 1988, he tried to dye these tangles in a test tube with an old malaria drug, methylene blue, to make them more visible.  Instead, the tangles dissolved.

Wischik spent the next two decades figuring out why that happened, and in 2002 he formed TauRx Therapeutics, a private company based in Singapore.  TauRx just reported that its drug "Rember" reduced mental decline by 81% over 12 months in a small phase II trial.  The results have yet to be published and need to be confirmed by a larger trial.  But so far, Rember has outperformed high-profile Alzheimer's drugs made by far larger companies.  And it works by going after a completely different target.

Source: BusinessWeek, August 18, 2008

Boomer Men Stop Aging at 31

A few days ago, I had a business lunch with a guy I thought was about 10 years older than I am.  I'm 46, and he looked to be 55 and resembled every English teacher you've ever had. At the end of lunch he said, "You know, I was born the same week as you..." and went on to discuss all the same music we listened to in high school.  Meanwhile, it was all I could do to compose myself while looking around for a reflective surface — a knife blade, the hologram on my Visa card — to convince myself I didn't look 55 like this guy did. I felt as if I had progeria, that disease in which you age half a century in five years. That's what growing older does to a guy.

We've all bumped into friends who look like hell.  Our first thought is always divorce, booze, or one of those other wicked speed bumps on the road of life. What's really happening, of course, is that your friend is in the middle of a progerial plunge.  Time passes, and more time passes, and then you see that friend in the checkout line of a Safeway one afternoon, and you realize he's not drinking or having troubles. He's just aging.  The kicker: So I must be too.  That's when you head to the produce department and check yourself out in the mirrors above the lettuce and celery.

I have this theory about men and aging. We have two ages: the age we really are, and the age we are in our heads. Most men are almost always about 31 or 32 in their heads — just ask them.  One of the most universal adult male experiences is of standing before a mirror and saying, "I'm sorry, but there's been a horrible mistake. You see, that's not really me in the mirror there.  The real me is tanned, throws Frisbees, and kayaks the Columbia River estuary without cracking a sweat."

Source: By Douglas Coupland, author of the 1991 novel "Generation X," who remains ageless living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

 Douglas Coupland: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Raise the Age for Retirement

Actuaries are urging policy maker to raise the retirement age as the first step to shoring up Social Security and keeping younger workers from bearing the brunt of painful tax increases.

The American Academy of Actuaries issued a policy statement recently suggesting that "holding the retirement age constant is a certain prescription for future financial problems."

The normal retirement age for Social Security was last raised in 1983, from 65 to 67 over a phased-in period.  All workers born in 1960 and after have to wait until age 67 to receive full benefits.  In order to avoid major disruptions to the Social Security system, officials should raise the retirement age now, the actuaries said.

The organization pointed to figures showing that, since 1940, the life expectancy of American men who reached age 65 had increased by nearly five years.  Women who reached 65 saw their life expectancy increase by nearly six years in the same period.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2008

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