Paying their own way. Much is made of the growing pension crisis. As the Baby Boomer generation goes fishing, fewer workers will be left to pay higher taxes funding generous retirement benefits to more retirees living longer lives. A politically, socially, and economically explosive, and seemingly intractable, situation. What to do about it? Well, as is often said, unsustainable trends tend to not be sustained, and the fears about this one appear to be based on incomplete assumptions: It turns out that people are more concerned about continuing to live productive lives than about having a posh retirement income. Older workers are continuing to pay in to their own retirement funds, well beyond retirement age.
Intelligence and education. They are not the same. Intelligence exists in the absence of education, and education is not indicative of the presence of intelligence. The recent incident regarding the dean of admissions at MIT is evidence of this. Lacking the required post-graduate degrees, this woman performed her duties with evident brilliance (never mind the ethics; that bears no relationship to education, either). We all know highly educated people who leave us, not to put too fine a point on it, somewhat bemused at the thought of how they managed to obtain their degrees. Some seem to become stupider the more of those they collect. Of course, that’s just arrogance suppressing whatever intelligence they may have had to begin with. More commonly than that, unfortunately, higher levels of education may serve merely to lend an insidious shield of articulateness to some people’s prejudices and, even, obtuseness.
Organizational networking. We’re all familiar with the popularity of social networking sites, such as MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn. People use these for purposes ranging from making new friends to finding new work – some organizations even use them for marketing and market analysis. It’s all well and good to use these devices, which greatly expand our effective reach. But don’t forget what’s right under your nose. If you need new employees, how often does it occur to you to ask for referrals from your current ones? This approach is generally faster and cheaper, and brings on board better employees who more quickly and efficiently socialize to the work and the firm.
The cart and the horse. It seems we can never get this one right. A major consultancy is recommending that managers organize their strategy around the most recent, fadishly fascinating approaches to organizational design that build in methods of collaboration among knowledge workers. Don’t do this. Nothing wrong with opening up communication and collaboration, of course. But you design your organization around your strategy; you don’t invent a strategy to suit a shiny-new system of organizational design. If you attempt it, while you’re admiring the cart, and yourselves for your wit to do so, the horse will likely lose interest and wander off. Form that doesn’t flow from function serves no function.
Challenge assumptions, and question advice – not to be contrary, but to be sure useful value exists and then to make it your own and bendable to the needs of your organization. Don’t be dismissive of credentials, necessarily, but just remember that they don’t make worth, they just hopefully indicate its presence.
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