Does retirement look a little further off now than it did just a few years ago? If you are over 62, odds are you’re putting off retirement at least two to three years, and you may even be planning on working beyond 70. If you’re over 50, and lost 40% or more of your nest egg, you are about twice as likely to delay retirement as those who lost less. According to the World Health Organization, men and women who are healthy at 60 will, on average, be physically capable of working until they are 74 and 77, respectively. Combine these statistics and the newest employees entering the workforce might not be joining their parents or grandparents, they might be joining their great-grandparents.

This translates into a social phenomenon not yet witnessed: five generations are about to be working side by side. They include:

• Traditionalists, born prior to 1946
• Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964
• Gen X, born between 1965 and 1976 M
• illennials, born between 1977 and 1997
• Gen 2020, born after 1997

The chart below shows that Baby Boomers will cede the majority of the workforce by 2015 to the Millennials. (Due to their smaller size, Gen X will never have the majority spot in the workplace — and so in essence, we will have skipped an entire generation by 2015.) When you consider the changes in the amount of knowledge available at our fingertips, the advent of social technologies, and the expansion of the global economy over those two generations, a workplace chasm could be emerging. What will this mean for how employers attract, develop and engage employees across multiple generations?

Consider how the way we work has changed in the last two decades. In 1986, when the youngest Baby Boomers entered the workforce, the percentage of knowledge necessary to retain in your mind to perform well on the job was about 75 percent (according to research by Robert Kelley). For the other 25 percent, you accessed documentation, usually by looking something up in a manual. In 2009, only about 10 percent of knowledge necessary to perform well on the job is retained — meaning a myriad of other sources must be relied upon. It’s no wonder that those who enter the workforce now have devised new tools and ways of working with each other to deal with the complexity, such as a query through Facebook to their trusted friends. (Even if it’s blocked on the company network, Millennials will connect via mobile devices when they are stuck on projects.)

For over thirty years, the sheer size of the Baby Boomer generation defined the organization’s social landscape, in a majority-rules cultural takeover. The new kids in town — what we call the hyper-connected — will overtake that majority. They are constantly connected to multiple devices in order to know what and whom they need to know. The next two generations entering the workforce may not be technologically smarter, but they are more comfortable with technology, and their culture will soon dominate organizations. Many of them will have never sent an email when they get to the workplace, because who needs e-mail when you can text, instant message, tweet, or Facebook? If ur/18 (text speak for “you are over 18″), and your diminishing nest egg mandates that you work a few more years, get ready for this coming cultural shift.

How will this change the world of work? Consider these four questions:

1. Does your company’s brand appeal not only externally (to your customers), but internally to each of the generations in your workforce?
2. Are you sourcing the next generation of talent where they live? Rather than career fairs and job boards, does your company have a social networking strategy for recruiting using Facebook, LinkedIn, and microblogging sites such as Twitter?
3. Are you leveraging innovative learning methodologies such as games, simulations, reverse mentoring, e-coaching, peer-to-peer learning, and informal learning, to accelerate learning across the enterprise?
4. Are you preparing your leaders for the next generation of employees? Do your leaders have the skills and tools needed to communicate with the hyper-connected, who are used to rating everything and everyone in their lives?

These are just a few of the many ways in which the world of work will change over the next five years. What are you doing to get ready?

Jeanne C Meister is an internationally recognized workplace-learning consultant dedicated to delivering competitive advantage, innovation and improved business results for organizations. Jeanne is the host of the blog, www.newlearningplaybook.com. Karie Willyerd is the Chief Learning Officer of Sun Microsystems and has been the Chief Talent Officer or head of executive development for three other Fortune 500 firms. At Sun Microsystems, she has led the organization to win over 20 awards for innovation excellence in learning. Jeanne and Karie are the authors of the book The 2020 Workplace (forthcoming in Spring 2010).

Serious Photography

Fraenkel Gallery is a fantastic serious photography gallery located in San Francisco. They launched their first iphone app today that allows users to browse photos from brilliant photographers like Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

You can download the app at the itunes store by searching for Fraenkel Gallery or simply clicking here.

I’ve worked with the Fraenkel Gallery as an advisor, coach, trainer and supporter for the past five years.

This post originally appeared on the Fast Company blogs here. I repost it because Donna is a dear friend, mentor and I happen to agree with her

For the Record, My Views on Coaching
BY Fast Company EXPERT BLOGGER DONNA KARLIN Wed Dec 9, 2009 at 12:41 PM
This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert’s views alone.

Executive, Political, Leadership, Business, Life Coaching are here to stay. Period. It’s not a fad, and Coaches are not here to fix people; Coaching is here to stay. ROI stats continue to rate high when it comes to growing people in their level of excellence and in turn positively impacting the organizations they work for. People such as Jack Welch, Bob Nardelli and Eric Schmidt of Google fame praise coaching to the skies and all say the best thing they ever did was get a coach so why the pushback?
What makes a corporate or government executive want to hide the fact that they’re even considering getting a coach? Coaches are main stream in sports and are revered by their clients. There is article after article written about those who have just flown because of working with a coach. Where does the perspective of “Coaches fix people or are brought in because you’re a problem” come from? Not a clue.

Paradigms are now shifting even in the political world. After all if you were considering who to vote for, wouldn’t you want someone who continually honed his/her skills, kept learning and evolving and contextualized change continuously to represent you? I know I would!

So to set the record straight…coaching works. If you want someone to pat you on the back and feel what you’re feeling and validate your emotions, then speak to a close friend or relative. If you want someone to evolve you beyond where you are, to help you learn better, work smarter, remove roadblocks that are standing in your way and help you fly, then get a coach. Pick one who you connect with, respect, trust, who stretches you beyond anything you imagined, one who recognizes you might be struggling and helps you use that emotion to get past it. That’s when you know you’ve found the coach that’s right for you.

If you want a coach to come in and fix a staffer who’s creating problems, then turn it around and be coached. Learn how to manage problematic situations rather than delegate your job to a coach. Remember the responsibility of choosing the right coach is yours. If it’s not a fit, find another coach. Make sure your coach is present and not ‘fitting you in’ when he or she can. Figure out what you want to achieve with your coach and continually reinvent. A great coach doesn’t write things in stone. The coach will partner with you to create something you may not have thought of.

Bottom line is, start celebrating the fact you have a non judgmental ‘partner in crime’ to support you and help you succeed. Use that relationship selfishly as it’s probably the most supportive relationship you will ever have. Do you want to be a great leader? Then look beyond what you know, figure out what you need to know that you don’t know and recognize that two minds are better than one.
For tips on how to choose a coach click here. The rest well, as I tell my clients, no ceiling…just sky!

by Donna Karlin A Better Perspective Executive, Political and Business Leadership Coaching

I picked up an interesting vibe at the Magazine Publishers Association Innovation Conference the other week. For the most part, the industry has had a tough year as it grapples with recession, changing consumer behavior, and a range of disruptive technologies. Yet signs of economic recovery and a sense that the magazine industry could learn from missteps from cousins in the music and newspaper business produced an unexpected sense of optimism.

One point I made in my remarks is that the forces at work in the magazine business — increased competition, rapidly shifting technologies, and emerging disruptive business models — are the forces that are reshaping many parts of the global economy. In other words, the challenges of the magazine industry are the challenges of industry, period.

What does it take to respond to these challenges? I jotted down three thoughts on the train ride back to Boston after the conference.

1. True transformation starts with a deep understanding of the severity of the problem.
There are still some executives who are waiting for things to return to “normal.” It’s not going to happen. Constant change is the new normal. I told the audience my belief is that the era of optimization, the era of disciplined expansion is dead. Success now requires not just doing it better, but mastering the ability to do it differently.

If you don’t recognize the severity of the problem, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you are making progress when you really aren’t, or to convince yourself that all you have to do is wait for the economy to bounce back and your company will bounce back as well.

I wasn’t the only one promoting this message. Reed Hastings, the founder and Chairman of Netflix, described how his company began the process of shifting its business model years ago by offering streaming content in addition to delivering DVDs by mail. “We’re working toward the day when streaming is dominant,” Hastings said.

Similarly, in a fascinating presentation, David Liu from theknot.com described how his business achieved dominance in the wedding space — and is now investing to completely redefine the business from a mass-market approach to a niche approach.

2. Transformation requires being outside-in, not inside-out.
Many companies pay lip service to being customer-focused, but when the chips are down, they look around at their capabilities and try to figure out how to fit them onto the market. I heard some warning signs of this during the MPA conference; people talking about next generation technologies without talking about why a customer, advertiser, or stakeholder would have any interest whatsoever in the technology.

Transformation requires a relentless outside-in focus. That focus should first be applied to identifying opportunities for growth. Then companies need to determine which of their capabilities they can borrow to seize that opportunity, which new capabilities they need to create, and which capabilities exist on the open market to be acquired or sourced through some kind of partnership.

In an interview with Innosight last year, Jeff Bezos from Amazon summed up this point nicely:
“It is much easier for us, and I suspect for many companies, to start with your skills and work outwards. But that doesn’t allow you to do certain kinds of things,” Bezos said. “If you want to really continually revitalize the service you provide the customer you can’t stop at what are we good at. You have to ask what do our customers need and want. And no matter how hard it is, you better get good at those things.”

3. Space is the only way to avoid the “sucking sound of the core.”
Every organization has unique DNA. Companies that are seeking to intentionally mutate that DNA need to provide space for new ventures, lest the “old” DNA infect the new venture so it begins to resemble what has been done in the past rather than what is required for the future.

There is significant debate in the academic community about what “space” actually looks like. Some academics suggest the need for something like Lockheed Martin’s famed “Skunk Works,” a physically separate location with almost no ties to the parent organization. Others suggest that new growth efforts need to be “distinct but linked.”

My field experience suggests that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. More space gives new ventures more freedom to move in new directions, but makes it harder to port learning back to the core organization.

As I’ve written before, there’s no challenge that taxes leadership more than driving true transformation. Three pithy bullet points clearly aren’t enough to crack the transformation code. But hopefully they help transformation-oriented executives — in and out of the magazine industry — to begin to move in the right direction.

We have an environmental crisis which is totally threatening our lives and the lives of nature that is much worse than people imagine. We have a crisis in all the major religions because they are retreating into fundamentalism at the very time when the world needs unity more than anything. We have a crisis totally dominated by the corporate mindset which is a bottom line mentality gone mad at the very moment when we need enlightened and unselfish ways of being and acting. And that corporate mindset dominates everything and buys governments and dictates how world trade is done and keeps 2 billion people living on less than a dollar a day in horrible poverty while the rest of the world is strip-mined for an increasingly unsustainable way of life. We have an institutionalized media, a media that’s brought up by the corporate mentality that is just pouring trash and violence and reality shows celebrating the very worst in ourselves and endless stupid celebrity trivia at the very moment when we need to be educated about these crises and inspired to become different kinds of beings to deal with them. We have a way of life that has become so multitasking and so distracted by distraction from distraction that it’s very hard for us to get into direct simple communion with our deepest selves through peace and leisure. The combination of all of those things is the perfect storm of crisis that threatens our health, our wealth, our well-being, our very human future on every level and of course threatens not only our well-being but as we can see the well-being of the creation, we are destroying the planet. So we have to go through transformation and the conditions of that transformation are about to appear in the very difficult and ferocious form because we will have to wake up and we will be woken up. So, what’s important is to prepare for this and to prepare for it from the deepest resources within and from the deepest and wisest reaction without.

I’ve been writing about eroding trust and what executives must do to rebuild it for the past two years. The article and survey below quantifies how employees and organizations feel about this issue. -coop

In order to lead their companies out of the recession, top-level executives will first need to rebuild trust with employees and customers, according to a survey of 148 businesses by Suzanne Bates, author of Motivate Like a CEO: Communicate Your Strategic Vision and Inspire People to Act!

“The recession has damaged trust between top-level executives and employees, and between company leaders and customers,” said Bates, president and CEO of Bates Communications.

“Massive layoffs and cutbacks have harmed relationships between employers and remaining employees. Bankruptcies, closures, and failed business strategies have hurt trust between executives and those they do business with. Senior-level executives must work toward rebuilding that trust,” Bates added.

The No. 1 way that executives will lead their organizations out of the recession is by meeting with customers and prospects to rebuild trust and win business, according to 77 percent of survey respondents.

Trust building was also selected as the ability that current executives most need to develop. Seventy-six percent of survey respondents ranked building trust among employees and customers as the aptitude executives most need to develop.

Furthermore, trustworthiness was rated second as the quality executives will need most to guide their companies post-recession, selected by 60 percent of survey respondents — behind only being visionary, which was chosen by 64 percent.

“Because organizations are leaner due to layoffs and hiring freezes, employees are being asked to work harder with fewer financial incentives. CEOs cannot afford to miss the issue of trust, or they risk damaging the motivation of the very people who are key to the recovery,” said Bates.

“Employees are losing steam as the recession drags on, and they continue to do more with less. Top talent is especially at risk. If leaders don’t keep building bridges to them, they will lose them when the economy improves,” Bates added.

The least-favored way for executives to move their organizations forward is by developing a higher media profile, which was chosen by only 27 percent of respondents.

Instead, company leaders should direct their efforts toward communicating with, inspiring, motivating and engaging employees, the survey found. After rebuilding trust, the skills that C-suite executives will need most in order to move their businesses forward are: communicating more effectively about priorities; inspiring people to brainstorm new ideas; serving as chief motivating officers; and engaging employees to take active roles in high-priority projects.

However, current business leaders also need to sharpen their motivational and inspirational skills inside their organizations, according to the survey. Behind mending trust, they should perfect aligning their organizations toward a common purpose or vision; articulating a strategic direction; and speaking in a powerful way to motivate and inspire people to act.

“This latest research confirms that CEOs need to engage their teams and win their trust. CEOs must provide straight talk about their plans for innovating and building a company that will thrive when the recession is over,” said Bates.

“All senior-level leaders must learn to clearly communicate mission and purpose, and do it with passion, so that people are inspired. Leaders who serve as chief motivating officers connect people with the company, the message and the strategy, and find it far simpler to accomplish their goals. They have an entire organization of people who are working to achieve their own potential and feel energized by their common purpose. These leaders harness energy and talent and drive their organizations forward,” said Bates.”

Survey Results

The skills that C-suite executives need most in order to lead their organizations out of the recession are:
Meet with customers and prospects to build trust and win business (77%)
Communicate more effectively with their teams about priorities (75%)
Inspire people to brainstorm new ideas (74%)
Act as chief motivating officers by communicating with passion (72%)
Engage people to take on a more active role in high-priority projects (70%)
Motivate employees and boost morale after layoffs/reorganizations (52%)
Develop a higher profile as thought leaders in the media (27%)

The skills that current executives most need to develop are:
Build trust among employees and customers (76%)
Align the organization toward a common purpose or vision (70%)
Articulate a strategic direction for the organization (68%)
Speak in a powerful way to motivate and inspire people to act (60%)
Develop and present fresh, bold ideas that establish their thought leadership (47%)
Persuade people inside and outside their sphere of influence (43%)
Motivate and engage employees through productive one-on-one conversations (34%)

The qualities that leaders need right now to move their organizations forward are:
Visionary (64%)
Trustworthy (60%)
Focused (59%)
Inspiring (50%)
Decisive (49%)
Confident (43%)
Motivating (35%)
Purposeful (33%)
Passionate (31%)
Influential (24%)
Empathetic (17%)
Tenacious (15%)
Bold (10%)

For more info: http://www.bates-communications.com

Nearly everyday, blogs and newspapers and news anchors exclaim that the rules have changed, yet they rarely indicate which rules and how they have changed. This second shift that executives must make is probably one of the easiest because it’s happening everywhere right now. With the advent of Tivo and the constant noise and barrage of advertising, traditional marketing simply doesn’t have the payoffs or the brandbuilding power that it used to. And people who simply try to slap a marketing message onto social media sites are seeing poor if no returns – and occasionally outright distrust from their coveted audience. That’s because people want to have a conversation with you about your product or service – and often long before they ever buy from you.

The conversations are happening everywhere, and usually not on your company’s property, such as its website or blogs. There are blogs and sites to complain about your company, product or service (some examples include ripoffreport.com, pissedconsumer.com and complaintsboard.com). There are fan sites devoted specifically for particular companies, employees, products and services.

The recent Pepsi iPhone app is a great example of marketing gone wrong and a conversation taking over that may damage the company’s reputation. What if Pepsi engaged its audience before releasing the app? Or while building the app?

These conversations cannot be owned and they are very difficult to manage. As a company or executive, you must engage and participate. If you must, trying to shape or influence the conversation requires respect and patience.

I’m not recommending that you stop marketing – it is still an essential tool for getting visibility and building brands, but marketing has been surpassed by engaging in a conversation with your current, prospective and past customers. Marketing is now simply a part of the conversation.

If you don’t engage in the conversation, it will simply happen without you – and while that may work for some companies, and scare the hell out of most executives (we all know that you like control – that’s why you have your jobs after all!) – it’s simply part of the new reality that you must wrap your mind around. And participate in. Take a deep breath and jump into the conversation. Are you marketing or engaging in conversations?

The first shift every executive must make is from Legal to Ethical. For years, people have hidden behind the law while committing socially disrespectful acts in the executive suite. In the post-recession reality, this will not only be tolerated, but it will be watched, reported and acted on by shareholders, customers and the community at large. Why? There are two main reasons: transparency and trust.

In today’s uber-connected society, nearly everything can be shared. Transparency is critical to a society in crisis where our trust has been betrayed by politicians, businesspeople and corporations. And transparency will only become more expected and widespread as we move forward.

Trust has been eroding in our institutions, including government and big businesses over the past decade. With trust in question, it’s even more important to adopt a stronger ethical framework than the law provides, not only to protect yourself, but also to do what’s right for the people you work with and work for. If you need an ironclad reason to adopt a strong ethical framework, read this short article about the financial implications of eroding trust during the recent recession.

1. From Legal to Ethical
2. From Marketing to Conversations
3. From Competition to Cooperation
4. From Hierarchy to Collaboration
5. From Corporation to Community
6. From Greed to Generosity
7. From Business to Socially Sustainable Systems

These shifts change businesses into Socially Sustainable Systems – a requirement in the new economy today. In the next few posts I will detail each mindshift and welcome your comments and suggestions. Would you add any mindshifts to this list?