Think again about Retirement

This week there are general strikes in France because the government wants to increase the retirement age from 60 years to 62 years. Just about the whole country is on strike over a mere two years!

What this indicates is not just how the population feels about two more years of work before retirement, but how much people in France look forward to a time of switching off and not having responsibilities.

How misguided they are!

Retirement which was conceived as a time of secure “winding down” and a reward for a long working life, has become, instead a time of worry and of concern. Savings are no longer safe in supposedly secure investment accounts, and health issues and their costs are major worries for many people considering retirement. Not only in France.

So retirees are increasingly looking to some form of continued work and additional income after retirement. The problem is that searching to find a “job” when retired is an uphill struggle. Many people cannot even find meaningful work while young and ambitious, let alone when they are no longer seen as energetic and able to contribute fully. Building a Portfolio of meaningful income streams well before retirement would seem to be a logical approach to managing these risks. Instead of pursuing a hard-to-find single job, looking for contract work or servicing clients with the skills you already have is more sensible. Take the leap of being self-employed, and building a client base is what many people will be doing in the future.

See “Even the Rich are Nervous about Retirement” on Newsweek here.

Corporate talent retention in an age of entrepreneurship

The game has changed for new MBA graduates.

In the past, the most desirable career objective for a new MBA graduate was to have a management career in one of the big corporate institutions. Companies like IBM or General Motors, or one of the big banks like Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch were considered to be the plumb jobs. But there has been a significant shift. These days, large numbers of new graduates are aiming to develop their own businesses and entrepreneurship is the name of the game. A corporate career is often seen as restricting and lacking flexibility. Many people just don’t trust the big international businesses any more. Business Schools have been responding to this development by crafting courses like an “MBA in Entrepreneurship” Even the venerable Harvard Business School has developed a customized course for “The Entrepreneurial Manager” in their MBA program.

The theory of Multiple Intelligences

For the longest time people have felt that the concept of IQ somehow is not the whole story.

And there are many famous people from Winston Churchill to Albert Einstein who did not initially fit into the high IQ mould.

In the mid eighties Dr Howard Gardner of Harvard University proposed that there are in fact eight separate Intelligences. The theory of Multiple Intelligence confirms what we have, instinctively, always felt. There is potential, and not to speak of ability and skill, beyond the straight up and down IQ. A few years ago Daniel Goleman described, to our relief, the fact that people also have an Emotional Intelligence, and that this can have a major impact on our lives. In fact without it many people with high IQs of the standard variety can fail in their careers, no matter how bright they are.

So now we know that there are several “intelligences” and while it may be difficult to use all the ones you might have in a single career, a portfolio life may enable you to be a CEO of a business and then use your Musical Intelligence in a separate parallel portfolio life. Or the Spatial intelligence of an architect may be complemented, if there is a high Literary Intelligence by writing part time or editing a magazine, or doing contract script writing. All in a portfolio Life.

More on the theory and the eight intelligences here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences