Brains, Brawn and Bravado: Employing Your Endurance and Experience to Overcome Ageism

by Gerard Francis ...

If you are a seasoned executive in today’s job queue, you are no doubt being sensitized to the quandary of age discrimination. From the lunch lady in Springfield, Illinois to the CEO of a men’s haberdashery, companies are betting on youth to preserve their vitality and inject new blood to ramp up their corporate circulation. A recent Google web search on “Age Discrimination” yielded 15.5 million results while the news category alone showed 753,000 hits. I suspect that the topic will continue to be one of great concern and importance as Baby Boomers, (those born between 1945 and 1964) and Gen X’ers (born between 1960 and 1980,) come face to face with their mortality and the trend to jettison old cargo.
Quoting a New York Times article on the topic, “At a time when digital skills are prized and businesses place a premium on youth, some employers subtly seek to push out older workers. They deny them raises once awarded routinely, reduce their responsibilities or give evaluations that are cold and complain of waning productivity.” And despite the fact that some firms are stepping out to retain older workers, the issue remains a thorn in the sides of those waiting in unemployment lines.

The fact is that employers who take the stance that “older is obsolete,” are missing a grand opportunity to harness brains, brawn and bravado to grow their businesses with experienced, seasoned people who know and understand the pain points of the business and can contribute solutions to alleviate the suffering.

Despite the lack of action by the nation’s lawmakers, there seems to be agreement on the value of older workers. A survey of some 40 articles on reasons to hire people who have been around the horn a few times yielded some important insight. Herewith are ten tactics that can and should be employed when you are casting about for your next executive adventure.

1. “Bold and Beautiful.”  Don’t be shy about social platforms. Employ them all in showcasing your youth, experience, energy and endurance. And it’s not just about LinkedIn. Platforms like Facebook, Quora, About.me, VisualCV, Twitter and Pinterest, just to name a few, should be used to highlight who you are, what you have done and what you bring to the table. Their use also shows you are current with today’s trends and social skills.

2. “Locked and loaded.” Emphasize in your outreach materials, like your resume/CV, your ability to be a quick study and have a short learning curve. Chances are that companies are desperately seeking, in real time, a package of abilities that fit your requirements like a glove.

3. “Up and running.” Strongly convey how your track record closely aligns with the company’s position specifications, allowing the organization to implement solutions faster because of your experience and transferable accomplishments. In that vein, tailor every resume to the job spec. The trend to “one size fits all” has long passed.

4. “Coach and conquer.” Senior folks often make great coaches and mentors; and can help drive culture, camaraderie and consistency throughout the organization. Give active examples of how you have driven culture change, improved results to the bottom line and helped younger staff excel in their jobs.

5. “Patience is a virtue.” Because of your tenure in the workforce, you likely have more endurance and forbearance to withstand the highs and lows of successfully running a business and its components. Provide vivid examples of your patience, tenacity and endurance to bring to light how they can benefit a potential employer.

6. “Timely and temperate.” Experienced employees are prompt, courteous and even tempered. Experience has made you wiser and highly aware of deadlines and commitments. Let the record show your track record.

7. “Low maintenance.” By virtue of your tenure, experienced workers, particularly those in the unemployment queue, do not have unreasonable demands. They have seen the good, the bad and the ugly of working life, are more accommodating and have greater levels of fortitude. Should you make it to the offer stage, make your demands minimal and easy to accommodate.

8. “Loyal soldiers.” Experience often engenders great loyalty. And according to studies like MetLife’s research project in 2012, Boomers have higher levels of loyalty than other generations. Furthermore, Boomers grew up in a time where loyalty was both valued and rewarded and a team sport. In telling your story, weave in examples to demonstrate your legacy of loyalty and your adeptness at assembling teams able to scale tall buildings and walk through walls.


9. “Distracted driving.” Boomers have less diversions and disruptions than later generations. Chances are the kids are grown and the daily pressures of youth have abated and there is more time to devote to one’s profession and passions. Let your passion show through in interviews and how you respond to questions.

10. “Knowledge and network.” Networks are growing ever important to the sales process. It no longer is simple enough to run advertisements to sell a product. Influence and knowledge are growing as drivers of purchasing. Boomers are ready made for the task because of their experience, knowledge and tenure and they don’t require tons of training. Use your network liberally in spreading the word about your good work, passion and experience. Don’t be shy about asking for a helping hand.

About the author

BlueSteps Member Executive Guest Writer

Gerard F. Corbett, Chair and CEO, Redphlag LLC
Gerard F. Corbett is Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Redphlag LLC, a strategic public relations, marketing management and executive coaching consulting firm, a position he has held since January 2008. He also serves as Immediate Past Chair & CEO of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA,) the world’s largest member organization of public relations practitioners. He is accredited in public relations (APR) and a member of the PRSA College of Fellows.

Why Innovators Get Better With Age

By TOM AGAN

“WE need some gray hair” once referred to needing someone with more experience. But I haven’t heard that expression in a very long time.

In fact, many companies are intentionally reducing the average age of their work forces in an effort to save money. Younger employees are generally paid less and have lower health care expenses and retirement costs. As one executive remarked to me recently, “I don’t think anyone really likes this — we all know our own 50-year-old moment will be coming, too.” 

There is a surprising downside, however, to encouraging older workers to leave or, at some companies, pushing them out: Less gray hair sharply reduces an organization’s innovation potential, which over the long term can greatly outweigh short-term gains. 

The most common image of an innovator is that of a kid developing a great idea in a garage, a dorm room or a makeshift office. This is the story of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple. Last week, Yahoo announced that it had bought a news-reading app developed by Nick D’Aloisio, who is all of 17. 

In reality, though, these examples are the exception and not the rule. Consider this: The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s. And two of the biggest-selling authors of fiction for 2012 — Suzanne Collins and E. L. James — are around 50. 

According to research, the age of eventual Nobel Prize winners when making a discovery, and of inventors when making a significant breakthrough, averaged around 38 in 2000, an increase of about six years since 1900. 

But there is another reason to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves. 

For Nobel Prize winners, this process usually takes about 20 years — meaning that someone who is 38 at the time of discovery will most likely be nearly 60 when he or she receives the prize. For most eventual laureates, that interval is spent attending and making presentations at conferences, networking with colleagues, writing additional papers, editing academic journals and talking with the press. 

Let’s assume that with company resources, it will take a corporate innovator 10 years instead of 20 to educate others about the nature, implications and applications of a new idea. If that’s true, a reasonable target retention age for attaining an average level of innovation would be at least 50. 

YET despite the overall aging of the work force, many organizations are heading in the opposite direction. One executive at a major investment bank remarked with concern that the average age at his firm was 32. This phenomenon is not unique to corporations. Many medical institutions and universities  have also shifted to younger workforces. But according to research by Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University, a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old. 

If an organization wants innovation to flourish, the conversation needs to change from severance packages to retention bonuses. Instead of managing the average age downward, companies should be managing it upward. 

We can act within our own organizations to make a difference. For example, we can end policies that limit the time people are allowed to stay at a certain level in a given position. And we can stop rotating high-potential managers across different businesses. Instead, we need to encourage the best performers to stay put, giving them the years — perhaps even decades — to support and lead major innovations from inception to commercial launch. 

And to encourage innovation, we must provide economic incentives to C.E.O.’s, boards of directors and investors through changes in the tax code and elsewhere that favor long-term returns driven by innovation over shortsighted pressure to reduce costs.

The journalist A. J. Jacobs has perfectly described our current situation when it comes to the relationship between age and innovation. In his book “The Year of Living Biblically,” he writes: “I’m 38, which means I’m a few years from my first angioplasty, but — at least in the media business — I’m considered a doddering old man. I just hope the 26-year-old editors out there have mercy on me.” 

Relax, A. J., you still have a few more years to hit it out of the ballpark with a mega-best seller.

Tom Agan, 51, is a co-founder and the managing partner of Rivia, an innovation and brand consulting firm.

Why Innovators Get Better With Age

By TOM AGAN

“WE need some gray hair” once referred to needing someone with more experience. But I haven’t heard that expression in a very long time.

In fact, many companies are intentionally reducing the average age of their work forces in an effort to save money. Younger employees are generally paid less and have lower health care expenses and retirement costs. As one executive remarked to me recently, “I don’t think anyone really likes this — we all know our own 50-year-old moment will be coming, too.” 

There is a surprising downside, however, to encouraging older workers to leave or, at some companies, pushing them out: Less gray hair sharply reduces an organization’s innovation potential, which over the long term can greatly outweigh short-term gains. 

The most common image of an innovator is that of a kid developing a great idea in a garage, a dorm room or a makeshift office. This is the story of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple. Last week, Yahoo announced that it had bought a news-reading app developed by Nick D’Aloisio, who is all of 17. 

In reality, though, these examples are the exception and not the rule. Consider this: The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s. And two of the biggest-selling authors of fiction for 2012 — Suzanne Collins and E. L. James — are around 50. 

According to research, the age of eventual Nobel Prize winners when making a discovery, and of inventors when making a significant breakthrough, averaged around 38 in 2000, an increase of about six years since 1900. 

But there is another reason to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves. 

For Nobel Prize winners, this process usually takes about 20 years — meaning that someone who is 38 at the time of discovery will most likely be nearly 60 when he or she receives the prize. For most eventual laureates, that interval is spent attending and making presentations at conferences, networking with colleagues, writing additional papers, editing academic journals and talking with the press. 

Let’s assume that with company resources, it will take a corporate innovator 10 years instead of 20 to educate others about the nature, implications and applications of a new idea. If that’s true, a reasonable target retention age for attaining an average level of innovation would be at least 50. 

YET despite the overall aging of the work force, many organizations are heading in the opposite direction. One executive at a major investment bank remarked with concern that the average age at his firm was 32. This phenomenon is not unique to corporations. Many medical institutions and universities  have also shifted to younger workforces. But according to research by Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University, a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old. 

If an organization wants innovation to flourish, the conversation needs to change from severance packages to retention bonuses. Instead of managing the average age downward, companies should be managing it upward. 

We can act within our own organizations to make a difference. For example, we can end policies that limit the time people are allowed to stay at a certain level in a given position. And we can stop rotating high-potential managers across different businesses. Instead, we need to encourage the best performers to stay put, giving them the years — perhaps even decades — to support and lead major innovations from inception to commercial launch. 

And to encourage innovation, we must provide economic incentives to C.E.O.’s, boards of directors and investors through changes in the tax code and elsewhere that favor long-term returns driven by innovation over shortsighted pressure to reduce costs.

The journalist A. J. Jacobs has perfectly described our current situation when it comes to the relationship between age and innovation. In his book “The Year of Living Biblically,” he writes: “I’m 38, which means I’m a few years from my first angioplasty, but — at least in the media business — I’m considered a doddering old man. I just hope the 26-year-old editors out there have mercy on me.” 

Relax, A. J., you still have a few more years to hit it out of the ballpark with a mega-best seller.

Tom Agan, 51, is a co-founder and the managing partner of Rivia, an innovation and brand consulting firm.

From Newsweek

The Golden Age of Innovation

Aug 20, 2010 12:00 PM EDT 
 

Despite stereotypes of entrepreneurs as fresh-faced youngsters, new research has found that older workers are more likely to innovate than their under-35 counterparts.

Image Source-Getty Images

Peach-fuzzed entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, 19 when he founded Facebook, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both 23 when they developed Google, have created a collective image of the successful innovator as youthful, brash, and brilliant. In turn, we’ve been taught that with middle age come calcified habits, outdated skills, and an aversion to risk. Sounds bad, right? Hey, it gets even worse when you consider that, by 2030, the average age will rise from 37 to 39 in the United States, from 40 to 45 in the European Union, and from 45 to 49 in Japan. The implication is that such figures, plus the post–baby boomer decline in birthrates, could leave swaths of the world with a deficit in creative potential. The question then becomes whether these places can continue to compete, grow, and create wealth with an aging pool of prospective entrepreneurs and workers. According to several new studies, the surprising answer is yes.

Photos: Innovations that rocked the world

It turns out that many of the most common stereotypes about aging are dead wrong. Take the cliché of the youthful entrepreneur. As it turns out, the average founder of a high-tech startup isn’t a whiz-kid graduate, but a mature 40-year-old engineer or business type with a spouse and kids who simply got tired of working for others, says Duke University scholar Vivek Wadhwa, who studied 549 successful technology ventures. What’s more, older entrepreneurs have higher success rates when they start companies. That’s because they have accumulated expertise in their technological fields, have deep knowledge of their customers’ needs, and have years of developing a network of supporters (often including financial backers). “Older entrepreneurs are just able to build companies that are more advanced in their technology and more sophisticated in the way they deal with customers,” Wadhwa says.

And the age at which entrepreneurs are more innovative and willing to take risks seems to be going up. According to data from the Kauffman Foundation, the highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has shifted to the 55–64 age group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34. And while the entrepreneurship rate has gone up since 1996 in most other age brackets as well, it has actually declined among Americans under 35. That’s good news for one very simple reason: baby boomers are now in their prime, startup-founding years, which will unleash what Kauffman researcher Dane Stangler expects to be an entrepreneurship boom. Since new companies create the vast majority of jobs, the positive impact on a post-recession economy could be great.

Part of the reason that companies started by older workers don’t get much recognition is because they don’t generally produce hot Web apps or other easily understood products. Instead, they tend to involve more complex technologies like biotech, energy, or IT hardware. They also tend to sell products and services to other businesses, which consumers rarely see but which do most of the heavy lifting in powering innovation and economic growth. In fact, America’s fastest-growing tech startup, according to Forbes Magazine’s Fast Tech 500, is First Solar, founded by a 68-year-old serial inventor in 1984. The founders of No. 2 on the Forbes list, Riverbed Technology, were 51 and 33 when they started their networking company. Even the Internet is no longer just the province of young adults. Zynga, the company behind Farmville and other infectiously popular games, will likely pass a billion dollars in revenue next year. Its founder and CEO, Mark Pincus, is a stereotype-defying 44. In sectors such as biotech and energy, Wadhwa estimates the average entrepreneur to be even older.

So if entrepreneurs don’t necessarily fade out with age, what about regular workers? One of Germany’s largest companies had a researcher examine its system for continuous improvement, expecting the findings to back up its policy of pushing workers into early retirement. The numbers, however, showed that older workers not only had great ideas for making procedures and processes more efficient, but their innovations also produced significantly higher returns for the company than those of workers in younger age groups. Birgit Verwonk, a Dresden University of Applied Sciences economist and author of the study, says the findings were so surprising for the company (which wasn’t named in the study) that it is now phasing out its early retirement program.

Given these sorts of results, why is the notion that older people are less productive or innovative so entrenched? Part of it is because there are deep stereotypes and cultural narratives at play. In a series of landmark studies on creativity in the arts and sciences, David Galenson, a University of Chicago economist, identified two types of creativity. One was based on radical new concepts, at which young innovators excel (think Picasso or Einstein, who were both in their 20s when they revolutionized their fields), and the other built on probing experimentation that coalesces later in life (think Cézanne or Darwin). The second type of innovation is more hesitant, probing and often a work in progress, which Galenson argues leads to some of the conventional wisdom regarding older genius. That misconception has some ugly side effects, according to Wadhwa. It becomes the reason why some venture capitalists often don’t return calls from 40-plus entrepreneurs. “The VC people boast that they’re financing all the whiz kids,” says Wadhwa. But given the rates of entrepreneurial success for that group, “they should really be embarrassed.”
 

The way companies tend to be organized is also to blame. Companies often put new hires fresh out of college on their most innovative projects, while making older workers do routine jobs with existing systems, says Verwonk. Also, too few companies spend enough on continuous training to keep their employees’ expertise up to date. But workers themselves are at fault as well. Many older workers coast into premature obsolescence instead of keeping their skills current. In the European Union, for example, only 30 percent of employees over 55 participate in any kind of job-related training, compared to 50 percent of their younger colleagues.

One thing is clear: a change in the prevailing mindset about older entrepreneurs and workers won’t happen by itself. Mixed-age teams, such as the ones automaker BMW is using, are one possible approach and have the added benefit of minimizing the loss of knowledge that occurs when older workers retire. Siemens, the Munich-based technology conglomerate, has instituted a “cross-mentoring” system under which older employees show younger ones the ropes while getting an update on the latest skills from these new hires. These shifts are a start, but a lot still has to be done, says Verwonk. Demographic and economic pressures will soon force workers, businesses, and entire economies to rethink certain stereotypes; in a post-recession world, assuming that someone can be phased out due to age will be a luxury no one can afford.