Alec Hogg’s Boardroom Talk
Tuesday, 17th October 2023 | |
Dear <<First Name>>
Apple founder Steve Jobs, who spent just six months at university, attributed his edge to a focus on intersections between disciplines. His particular interest was where design and tech overlapped - an obsession still evident a dozen years after his death in the beautiful products created by the company he founded.
The weekend’s Springbok victory over France was a reminder. As any student of the Rassie/Nienaber/Kolisi era well knows, two concepts dominate their thinking - every one of those 33 players in the squad works as part of a team, and the entire group believes in the merit of chasing “lost causes.”
Using Jobs’ ‘intersections’ philosophy, there appears to be an obvious merit in applying both of these Springbok core principles more broadly.
In business, teamwork really does deliver a sustainable advantage. There are any number of great books that unpack this, led by Jim Collins’s ‘Good To Great’ and William Thorndike’s ‘The Outsiders.’ Plentiful research proves how businesses blessed with humble team leaders outperform those led by brilliant individuals.
On a broader front, the ‘lost cause’ principle behind Cheslin Kolbe’s charging down of that all-important two-point conversion should be embedded into the Multi Party Charterists.
Sometimes, it seems SA’s political opposition listens too closely to pollsters who say ANC supporters are too thick or too historically invested to vote rationally.
Instead of waiting for the ANC to eventually self-destruct - maybe in 2029 - consciously ignoring pundits in favor of an obsessive belief in the ‘lost cause’ principle could deliver the only really rational 2024 election result.
The obvious conclusion: It’s time for Steenhuisen and Co to channel their inner Cheslin. Start by adopting a higher purpose that supercedes petty politics. Then forge a team to guarantee victory from the jaws of yet another electoral defeat. It’s the very least deserved by the nation - and our super-charged rugby gladiators.
Sterkte. | |
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From the FT: It’s time we stopped talking about retirement | |
Michael Skapinker writes that the number of over-65s working is rising as older people take an active role in the world rather than slinking off life’s stage | |
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By Michael Skapinker for the Financial Times
When my 34 years on the staff of the Financial Times came to an end, I bristled when people asked about my “retirement”. I have since discovered that others my age also resent the word.
Why? First, because we dislike ageing. Baby Boomers were the generation that was never going to grow old. The music we listened to expressed our horror at the prospect. “Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m 64?” the Beatles’ lyrics went. Simon and Garfunkel sang: “Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be 70.” Yet here we are. Those of us born into the population bulge that followed the second world war are now in our sixties and seventies.
A second reason I resisted the R word is that I had no plans to stop working. I had begun preparing for my post-FT life several years earlier, spending evenings and weekends training to become a counsellor, with the hope of helping others deal with their career dilemmas. When the time came to leave full-time journalism, I discovered my bosses were happy for me to continue contributing articles and teaching in the executive education business I had helped set up. So I have settled contentedly into a three-part career of writing, lecturing and counselling.
I am not alone. The number of UK over-65s still working rose to 1.47mn in the quarter to June 2022, an all-time record, according to the Office for National Statistics. This compares with 1.1mn in 2014. Much of the increase was driven by part-time work and self-employment.
Part of the reason people carry on working is financial. Rising prices and the ending of gold-plated company pensions mean many cannot afford to stop working entirely. Even the best of the old-fashioned private sector final-salary pension schemes provide annual increases that fall far short of current inflation.
But there is also the desire to continue to matter. Moving on from a full-on job brings with it more identity issues than simply accepting one’s age. There is a loss of status. The question “what do you do?” requires a new answer. The “well, I used to . . . ” response palls after a while.
Many 60- and 70-somethings I come across want to continue being players rather than spectators. Having more time to watch sport, travel or go to the theatre has its attractions. But for many, there is still a drive to participate, to be in the fray.
One of the problems with giving up work entirely is that you could be a long time retired. The average 65-year-old can expect to live into their mid-80s in developed countries, according to OECD figures. And many are living longer than that. Worldwide, there were nearly 500,000 people aged 100 or more in 2015, four times as many as in 1990, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center report, which said the number of centenarians was likely to reach 3.7mn by 2050.
Health problems start to intrude at some point. But healthier eating and exercise (one of the pleasures of self-employment means you decide when to go to the gym) help stave them off.
It is not just that many older people want to work; ageing societies will need them. Bain, the strategy consultancy, predicts that a quarter of the US workforce will be aged 55 or more by 2031. In Germany the figure will be 27 per cent, in Italy 32 per cent and in Japan 38 per cent.
So if we aren’t going to call these later years retirement any longer, because so many are still working, what should we call them? In their book Changing Gear: Creating the Life You Want After A Full-On Career, Jan Hall and Jon Stokes call this next period “the third life”. But in The 100-Year Life, Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott argue that the three-stage life — education, employment and retirement — no longer describes how we live. They prefer to talk about a “multi-stage life”. My answer, when people asked about my retirement, was that I wasn’t the retiring type.
And those who once sang about how awful old age would be? How have they adjusted, now that they are in their early eighties? Of the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are still performing. Paul Simon has stopped touring (hearing loss), but has just released a new album, Seven Psalms. Art Garfunkel told Forbes that when he reached 70 he thought: “Piece of cake. Drive right through, man.” His body started letting him down a year later but, he said: “If anything, I burn stronger at this age.”
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