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Contents 1. All in the Family
2. HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD reviewed.
3. Cool Career #105 – Wedding Planning for the Divorced
4. Election Protection and other Volunteer Opportunities
From the two Thomas J. Watsons, father and son dynamic duo who built IBM over 60 years, to Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and his father, William Gates, Sr., co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, more companies are family affairs than you might imagine. Nearly one-third of the Standard and Poors 500 companies are family-owned and operated, many with the original founders still aboard, and they do significantly better than non-family companies.
In this history of accomplishment, there is a smaller but growing phenomenon that is changing the face of family businesses: parents going to work for their children. Doug Harmon, for instance, a former computer and IT specialist, whose daughter, Laine Caspi, is his boss. Together they are building a startup called Parents of Invention, a baby equipment concern she founded. Also Marian and Ray Brovero, a former elementary school teacher and a plumber, respectively, who are pitching in for their son, Robert’s gourmet take-out, Good to Go, in Royal Palm Beach, Florida. As if upending convention weren’t enough, these relationships have blossomed as a result of employment (often on the basis of donated labor), in contrast to the succession and inheritance dramas that often plague mainstream family businesses regardless of size. Why? For one thing, thanks to the gifts of longevity, many of the old rules about pecking order no longer apply. Today, many of us find we can befriend our offspring, learn from them as well as pass along our accumulated experience and smarts. What keeps Harmon and Caspi on even keel? Respecting boundaries, not to overstep or “ask for too much,” says Caspi. “Being aware that working together has soured many a family relationship and being certain to err on the side of over-communication,” works for Harmon. These are by no means isolated examples (we know there are a lot more out there). That’s good news for all of us 50 and better, and not only because it adds to the opportunities for employment later in life. We need more models of the ability of mature people to adapt to opportunities that arise, to fearlessly break new ground. Stories like these, and a recent report in Entrepreneur magazine about the rise of business startup among the 50+ do a lot to offset the latest round of gloomy predictions about future generational warfare, e.g. The Coming Generational Storm by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns. Sure these doomsday scenarios sell as many books as political exposes in an election year. We love to be scared silly about future crises predicated on the retirement of 77 million baby boomers. Just know that is doesn’t have to be so, and the fix (and our fate) isn’t only in government policies. It’s in our own hands. See Doug Harmon’s full story at http://www.2young2retire.com/dougharmon.htm
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Harmon and Brovero in The New York Times: Need Help at Work? Mom and Dad are for Hire. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A10FE34590C728CDDA10894DC404482 Entrepreneur: http://www.entrepreneur.com/Magazines/Copy_of_MA_SegArticle/0,4453,316416,00.html Comeback Stories: Tried it, hated it, and escaped!
Our True Stories collection is filled with inspiration and information from over 100 ageless adventurers who transitioned from one stage of life to another as if the retirement deadline never existed. What about those who tried the rest and recreation model and decided they wanted to come back. Help us connect with anyone who fits this description. We want to know how they did it. Was it hard? What did they have to let go of to get more of what they wanted? What are they doing now? Please send your candidate(s) to marika@2young2retire.com. Thanks for enriching the content of our website. Your reward: an all-cotton 2young2retire t-shirt. Just send us your size (S, M, L, XL) and mailing address. Kudos to Chris Farrell, for his recent “The Not-So-High Cost of Aging” in Business Week. He writes: “ The fact that people are living longer is reason for celebration, not sorrow…researchers are finding that, on average, older people are less likely to be clinically depressed than younger people, including the middle-aged. Older people are more satisfied in their emotional relationships, too. And while younger workers are better at learning something new than the aged, other skills improve with the passage of time.” Farrell is contributing economics editor for BusinessWeek. His Sound Money radio commentaries are broadcast over Minnesota Public Radio on Saturdays in nearly 200 markets nationwide.
(http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jul2004/nf20040715_7326_db013.htm BOOK SITE HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD: SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS AND THE POWER OF NEW IDEAS (Oxford University Press, 2004), David Bornstein. Creativity. Entrepreneurial quality. Social impact of an idea. Ethical fiber. Identify these in a person and you have very likely discovered a new breed of social activist: the social entrepreneur. David Bornstein’s thoroughly-researched, beautifully written and passionate book charts the rise of people in the “citizen sector,” who are ‘possessed, really possessed, by an idea.” People like Fabio Rosa who brought affordable electricity to rural Brazil and gave small farmers a future on their land and Erzsebet Szekeres, who just wanted to create a life for her multi-disabled son and wound up changing the lives of thousands of disabled people throughout her native Hungary. Working quietly with the resources they had to overcome daunting obstacles, Rosa, Szekeres and others like them, have brought about enduring change where it was most needed. HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD traces the advent of the concept of social entrepreneurship in modern times to Bill Drayton, a former an assistant administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) credited with saving the agency. Drayton was fascinated by the ideas and actions of Gandhi and by the example of Ashoka, who ruled India from 269 to 232 BCE and is remembered for pacifying and unifying India and creating public welfare projects that exist to this day. Drayton went on to found the Ashoka Fellowships, an international network now in 46 countries, which seeks to identify and reward social entrepreneurs with money that enables them to continue their revolutionary work. This is not a quick, easy read. But along with the density of information and the intensity of Bornstein’s reportage, are stories as packed with unforgettable characters, plots and human drama as the best fiction. That they are true stories is cause for celebration and hope. A Resource Guide will give motivated readers a feeling for the vitality of social entrepreneurship and where to go to learn more. That alone makes the book priceless. POTPOURRI - Thanks to Maria Foscia of ATLAS for passing along this quote: Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting “Holy s--t, what a ride!” Sets the tone for the upcoming ATLAS-sponsored UnRetirement Expo, Saturday 23, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eton Chagrin. Howard and Marika Stone are keynote speakers at the event that will include local celebrities sharing their stories and more than 40 organizations & businesses whose goal is to make planning your UnRetirement fun, easy, and exciting! http://www.orangerec.com/atlas/home.html
- Presbyterian Homes of Evanston, Illinois wants you to take their "Retire Nothing" survey. Doing so makes you eligible to win a cruise to China or Scandinavia! All entrants will receive a Retire Nothing t-shirt. Go to www.retirenothing.com click on 'enter', then click on "Retire Nothing Survey".
- Collecting the next 101 cool careers has never more fun or easier. USAToday supplied this one: a wedding-planning firm that targets divorcees who are marrying again. Consider, if many marriages end in divorce, the reverse is also true. The average wedding cost $21,000 last year and it wasn’t all about the gown, the rings and the cake. Planners who can provide specialized expertise, e.g. references for prenuptial agreement lawyers, or the etiquette of second (or third, fourth) marriages, will be in demand.
- Whether you rank yourself in the Blue or Red column or haven’t made up your mind, campaign hype is campaign hype. Get the facts from an objective source: Fact Check, a project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. http://www.factcheck.org/. A great Internet tool that can make you a better-informed citizen and voter.
- Volunteer Opportunity. United Way of Passaic County in Paterson, New Jersey, is seeking volunteers their Literacy Connection, a program aimed at children grades K-3. Volunteers to tutor children grades K-3 throughout the 2004? school year in Paterson, N.J. in the classroom during the school day and after school in a community center. Contact: Jessica Wainschel, United Way of Passaic County, (973) 279-8900 Ext. 22 or jessicaw@unitedwaypassaic.org, and tell her we sent you.
- Nurses Needed. We are often asked about where the jobs will be for our age cohort. The simple answer is ‘Everywhere,’ because skilled workers will be in short supply as soon as 2010. But there are some categories where the need is already desperate. According to a 2002 federal report 30 states are estimated to have shortages of registered nurses. More than 1 million nurses will be needed by 2012.
- TEFL? It stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language and can be your ticket to teaching English abroad and turn your dream of seeing the world into reality. According to the International TEFL Corporation, there is a huge demand for English teachers in every country and your only requirement is fluency in English. Check it out for yourself: http://www.teflcorp.com/
- Wikipedia is an open-content free encyclopedia in many languages to which you can contribute articles. I found my way there researching job satisfaction, “a term to describe how content an individual is with their job. It is a relatively recent term since in previous centuries no one thought much of job satisifaction since jobs were often predetermined by their parent's occupation.” Got more than I expected, and you will too. Enjoy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Born in Tucson in 2003, FreeCycle (http://freecycle.org/) is a grassroots movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. Each local group is run by a local volunteer moderator. Membership is free. To sign up, find your city by clicking on the region on the right. It will generate a automatic e-mail which, when sent, will sign you up for your local group and send you an response with instructions on how it works.
- Last night, we got our training to be Election Protection Volunteers and are pumped about playing an important role on Election Day in our home state, one of the most hotly contested. More than 1,000 Americans have already joined the non-partisan effort and we urge you to do the same: Here’s more information: http://www.ElectionProtectionVolunteer.org.
Happy Mid-Summer! Stay well, make it new, make it better.
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