Getting Older?--this page is a follow-up to my talk, or a preview, or it can be sampled on its own. "We are at times so eager to get practical right away that we set limits on ourselves." Peter Block, The Answer to How is Yes, 2002, p. 5 <<Importantly, Marion Diamond and Arthur Scheibel are convinced that what's true for rats is true for humans. The key to good cognitive function, at any age, they believe, is novelty.-- newness, unusualness is the key here... It stimulates not only brain activity but brain growth. Fred Warshofsky says other scientists who have tried to discover what successful agers have in common, echo the points made by Diamond and Scheibel. "Intellectual enrichment is good for the brain." People who continue learning throughout life --like Marion Diamond's enriched rats--generally age well. People who have a sense of control--those who believe that their brain can change positively with aging--tend to do better. Dr. Sapolsky calls this a sense of "self efficacy." That doesn't mean that they feel invulnerable, however. "They're not trying to control the impossible stuff," says Sapolsky. "They are accommodating to the inevitabilities of aging. But in the realms in which there is still something they can do, they go at it with a fighting spirit.">>— Clarence Bass web site http://www.cbass.com/Mind.htm Defying the Crowd: cultivating creativity in a culture of conformity, by Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart, 1995 Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, by Ray Kurzweil, 2004 Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death, 1963 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969 The first University of the Third Age was established at the University of Toulouse in France in 1972.
Passages by Gail Sheehy, 1976, with its subtitle "the predictable crises of adult life." The Three Boxes of Life by Richard Bolles, 1978 By 2030, 26.5% of people in Maine will be over 65, second to Florida's 27.1%, according to Census estimates. Kirkegaard—"Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward." Marion Diamond…"The single most dazzling advance has been the discovery that the brain can generate new cells." Parade Magazine, November 21, 1999 Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce by David DeLong, 2004
Courage to Change, 1980, by Edrita Fried (there are several other books with the same name; I mean this one) Claiming Your Place at the Fire: Living the Second Half of Your Life on Purpose, by Richard Leider and David Shapiro, 2005 (Leider has other books as well) Competence, Courage, and Change, by Waters and Lawrence, 1993 Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, by James Hollis, Gotham Books, 2005 Zalman Schachter, spiritual eldering, 1989, From Ageing to Sageing , 1995 Age Power: How the 21st Century Will Be Ruled by the New Old, by Ken Dychtwald, 2000 The New Workforce: Five Sweeping Trends That Will Shape Your Company's Future, by Harriet Henkin, 2004 "Live Long and Prosper" series on CNBC, 2004, shown around the world --
The Empty Cradle, Phillip Longman, 2004-- Global Action on Aging Purpose in your life Alliance for Aging Research 2005 report on 2000 census: people living alone without children represent 31.6% of households in U.S. Older Women's League—since 1980
AARP
Civic Ventures
Elderhostel
Experience Corps
Senior Net
Service Corps of Retired Executives - SCORE
I guess you could call me an Unretirement Coach.... To summarize: What you can do-- ************** THIS IS AN ARTICLE I WROTE IN SEPTEMBER 2005--- Getting Older Again by Harris Sussman I think we can agree that time is relative, and being younger or older are relative measures. So it was not that long ago when I brought demographic analysis to corporate personnel at Digital Equipment Corporation. It was not quite the same as Prometheus bringing fire but people did find it intriguing. I became the most-requested speaker in the world in the company, speaking to 88 groups in 1988. The next year, they eliminated my position and soon after, Digital imploded. But demographics keeps rolling along. I hardly know where to pick up the story, there are so many threads and subplots that tempt me, but since the most universal experience is being born and dying, right in there somewhere is getting older. The aging workforce, like aging, is a truism and a cliché. I'm afraid it has become background noise for many people in Human Resources. I'd like to bring it into the foreground. I was talking about the aging workforce years ago but it looked like a speck on the horizon so I got called a futurist: it wasn't necessarily a compliment. I think we project our own life perspectives onto the work we do. That is especially true in HR, so the older we get, the more we take an aging workforce seriously; surprise, surprise. The personal is professional, as we keep being reminded. In the 1980s, groups were entertained by talk about the bulge of the Baby Boom, the pig in the python, and even "workforce 2000." Such presentations were sometimes turned into programs to address employee life/work issues as HR tried to show we keep up with trends. It was harder to talk about longer-term projections and forecasts to people who literally and figuratively lived and died by quarterly performance. Twenty years ago, I cited studies that said that many men died 14-18 months after retiring. Now, I'd point out that many women live 20-25 years after retiring. And people retire more than once. As I write this in September 2005 I'd say that people over 60 is the coming big thing. Of course I point this out as a HR catalyst, not just because I myself have turned 60. "It's not personal , Sonny. It's strictly business ," is the line from "The Godfather." I'm ahead of the curve, just barely, as usual. It looks like I'm almost in the vanguard of the fastest growing group in the world for the next fifty years, according to most estimates. Are we now ready to talk about the HR ramifications of getting older—since it's happening to everybody? We need to catch up with the facts before they zoom past us. Maybe it's better to sneak up on this by looking at the big picture. I know about living locally, but the big picture is our home away from home, though we lose sight of that too often. Here are some factoids to ponder: --This is the year when more than half of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) will become older than 50. --According to the World Health Organization, more than 1 billion people will be over 60 by 2025, more than 2 billion by 2050. The proportion of world population over 60 will double from 10% in 2000 to 21% in 2050. -- In Japan and Italy, 20% of the population will be over 65 in the next year. (There are more than 1 million people over 90 in Japan now.) In the U.S., that threshold is not due to happen until 2036 so it still seems far away, a problem for another generation. (Until then the U.S. will likely be preoccupied by the fact that by 2020 less than half of babies will have two white parents.) --Two-thirds of all the people who have lived over the age of 65 are alive today. --In 2050 every 3rd person in Germany will be 60 or older. --300 of current GM pensioners are over 100 years old. --The United Nations estimates that in 2000, there were 180,000 centenarians throughout the world. By 2050, this is projected to number 3.2 million, an increase of about eighteen times, 68% in the developed world -- In July, 2005, the first of the baby boomers turned 59 ½, the age at which Americans are allowed by the IRS to withdraw from their tax-deferred retirement savings accounts without penalty. -- In the 2004 CIA World Factbook, the United States ranks 46 th in life expectancy (39 th for women, 49 th for men). --In Russia , the retirement age for men is 60. Unfortunately, men's life expectancy is 59. I've noticed that people have difficulty with big numbers and with things that never happened before. This is the worst case, a combination of the two. (You may think I'm exaggerating, but I keep hearing people who should know better say that the population of the U.S. is 250 million when this year it will pass 300 million. Either they don't think 50 million people makes a difference or they don't respect the implications of any facts.) This kind of information is sometimes called environmental scanning. I don't think HR does enough of it, or pays enough attention. And when the subject of the numbers has emotional impact, then our personal denial becomes professional neglect and malpractice. I have watched this happen with so-called diversity programs. I don't want to see it spread to aging, but there's a lot of emotional turmoil about aging in some parts of our society. After a certain point, and in some cultures more than others, getting older is something we joke about, avoid, ignore, deny, and suppress. But now it is creating a tidal wave of impacts, public and private. HR work concerns itself mainly with the daily affairs of the present workforce, not the tsunamis to come. Perhaps if we go through some exercises about people who are or who will soon be 60 we'll be on solid ground. This is where HR planning meets HR development meets HR leadership. In fact, it's my opinion that factoring in people over 60 changes or challenges everything in HR's portfolio. You can see where this is going. Or it might depend on how old you are or what people you're in contact with in your personal life. I often ask people in groups I speak to whether they have family reunions and if so, how many generations are present. It's common for people to say four generations, some people have said five, and two people have said six. Of course, although life expectancy is rising throughout much of the world, this surge in older people is not occurring uniformly everywhere. The great disparity in the world is life itself. For some women, life expectancy is 85 years and for others it is 35 years. In some countries, the median age is 41 and in others it is 15. In the United States , it is 36, the oldest it's ever been, but some cultural subgroups are older than others. Generally speaking, life expectancy is higher for higher-income people around the world. Those seem to be also groups in which education for females matches education for males. And then there's quality and equality of health. The United States ranked 28 th in infant mortality in 1998, according to the CDC. Aging, whatever arbitrary number you put on it, is where these issues come together, systemically, holistically, because if they don't, people never get to be that old. We see that all around us. The question is whether we carry over what we know about life into our work. This is where I would like to focus on the issues ahead of us. This subject of age and aging challenges our conception of what human resources are, of what work is, and of our job. Every country is scrambling to redefine its labor pool, its workforce, its human capital and assets. I would think every employer and enterprise is doing likewise. Just when people hit the peak of their knowledge and mastery, it has been the recent habit of certain workplaces to make them surplus, expendable, redundant, to make room for younger better-educated workers. But as the variables in the equation have changed, those habits need to change. This focus on getting older gives us a chance to see if we're living up to our rhetoric. How can we jettison, exile, discard the people with the most experience and perspective? How can we claim we're interested in knowledge work or a learning organization and practice such blatant contradictions? How can we talk about building up a collaborative network or team or community or "family," and then cut ourselves off from the people who make such constructs possible? How do myths, prejudices or preconceptions about age get expressed in your organization's policies and institutionalized behaviors? It's time to take another look. I suggest that HR professionals look first at themselves. There have been a number of movements to recognize and value elders in our society for a long time, and they are growing along with people's lifespan and interest in longevity. Such efforts should be part of common, natural worklife experience. HR has had mentoring programs for decades, though not necessarily intergenerational mentoring. If you don't have a situation in which you are regularly and consciously working with elders, you can start. Find a way to have interactions with people older than yourself. September 15 is Day of Respect for the Aged in Japan . I think this should be a more frequent occurrence than once a year. On many weekends, I play pingpong with an 87-year-old man who wins almost all of our games. Make sure that people have regular exposure at work to the widest range of people they are exposed to outside of work or through the media. This makes work more normative for everyone. Otherwise, as we saw with diversity in the last 30 years, work becomes an exception to people's life experience, a strange social side track. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protects individuals As HR digests some of the information from many disciplines and cultural movements, as it goes about doing its work, we need to take account of the new realties of people's lives. More people are working in new and interesting ways, whether it's "in retirement" or not. What are we doing with all this additional life? What has aging become if it is a major period of our active/working life, not just a coda, endgame, receding edge? What if its intensity and creativity is as great as any other period? What if the work we do after we retire is more meaningful than the work we did before? A lot of good questions await us. <><><><><><><> brain drain-- Let's clarify our terms: are we losing our minds? is it real/are you over-reacting?
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