I got a huge response to my earlier blog item on “The Talent-Shortage Myth”—too many to put here in a blog item. For the most part, I found the huge outpouring of response to be intelligent and insightful. Some agreed with me, many thought I was wrong, but the majority said something along the lines of “Yes, you are right in part, but have you considered this … ?”

In order to publish as many of these reader responses as possible, we have put them here in a format that should make it easier for you to scroll through them and dig into what these many different people have to say about the notion of a coming talent shortage with the retirement of the baby boomer generation as ground zero.

I’m still game for any additional comments about the talent shortage, real or not. See below to post your own comment.

Whenever I think that I’ve seen just about everything in the way of management practice and behavior, I get shocked by something so outlandish, ridiculous or just plain unbelievable that even my jaded and cynical soul is shaken by it.

This one hits close to home (more on that in a bit), and is something you won’t see taught to MBA students anytime soon: An impassioned management defense of an employee’s boorish behavior, and his right to embarrass the company by picking his nose in public, on television.

It’s a little complicated to fully explain and do it justice, so you might want to check out this link to the Los Angeles-area blog LAObserved.com for the full background. Essentially, the story is that a longtime newspaper employee who was taking a buyout was accused of deliberately picking his nose and embarrassing the publication on camera during a television broadcast from the newspaper’s newsroom. When the television producer complained about the on-camera nose picking and behavior of this newspaper employee during this and other newscasts, the story was picked up by both local and national blogs and media Web sites.

Here’s the outlandish/incredible/unbelievable part: The supervising editor/boss of the on-camera nose-picker wrote a long, impassioned memo defending the behavior and complaining that he was the victim of “drive-by journalism.”

This all happened in the newsroom of a large suburban daily newspaper in Southern California—The Orange County Register, where I worked as an editor for nearly 12 years, departing in late 1992. I also know the principals involved in this, both the accused nose-picker, who used to work for me, and the editor who wrote the nose-picking defense.

While I greatly admire any manager who goes to bat for a subordinate wrongly accused, I still can’t believe that the defense essentially comes down to “Yes, he picked his nose on camera and embarrassed us, but he didn’t mean to. And by the way, being loud and boorish is just the way he is.”

Defending bad behavior is not a sound management practice anywhere on this planet. As bad as this employee’s behavior looks, whether he did it on purpose or not, I’d hate to be the manager known for defending an employee’s right to pick his nose in front of a substantial television audience.

What do you think? Add your comment below.

You may not be familiar with HSM, but they put on some pretty good executive education events, including the World Business Forum. They get great speakers—this October’s World Business Forum in New York has names like Alan Greenspan, Kofi Annan, Herb Kelleher and Michael Eisner on the program—and are generally well attended, a sure sign that people are hungry for business insight and wisdom.

A staple of the World Business Forum is Jack Welch, the former General Electric CEO who seems to be the go-to guy for management wisdom. In fact, Welch is such a big draw that the people at HSM have done a spinoff conference where, for $10,000, you and 99 other executives get to spend two days hobnobbing and listening to Jack up close and personal.

I’ve never been to one of these special “Two Days With Jack Welch” events, but I get lots of marketing materials about them from HSM. What struck me this week was that they’re now marketing Welch like this: “20 Years as Head of General Electric, Greatest Manager of the 20th Century, Bestselling Author and Business Icon.” Greatest manager of the 20th century????? I like Jack Welch and respect his wisdom, but is he really the “greatest manager of the 20th century?” Is that a demonstrable fact, or just marketing hype and hyperbole?

What do you think? I’d love to hear if you believe he is, or if not, whom you might suggest as the greatest manager of the past 100 years. Post your comment below.

Last week, I listed the top-selling books at the Society for Human Resource Management annual conference in Las Vegas. I asked, “What does this list of the top-selling books purchased at last month’s Society for Human Resource Management annual conference in Las Vegas tell you about the HR professional in the 21st century? Let me know if you can figure it out.” Here’s what some readers had to say:

From Dr. Janice Presser, CEO of The Gabriel Institute in Philadelphia—”SHRM’s typical member is the HR person for a 100-person or fewer organization, so this likely represents people who haven’t thought *if* they should be doing things like performance evaluations, just *how* to get people to do them with the least amount of pain. My wish list reading list for HR professionals would include The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) and A Whole New Mind (Dan Pink, who spoke at the conference and I think sold fairly well).”

From Michael Mercer, author, business psychologist, and president of Mercer Systems in Barrington, Illinois—”Probably the main reason those books sold best at SHRM conference is very simple: The authors of many or most of those books delivered presentations at the SHRM conference. I am the author of five books. I consistently find that when I speak at a conference, more of my books are sold than when I do not speak at that conference.”

From a training and development professional in eastern Tennessee—”If I had to derive a single message from the list, it appears to be around managing the upcoming generations from Generation X forward. It’s all about retention and effective management.”

Every week, I get pitches from PR people touting experts who want to talk about the great talent shortage that will soon be upon us, given that the 76 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 will start retiring soon. I’m sure these “experts” are well-meaning, but like a lot of the verbiage that experts and consultants spew, I don’t buy it.

That’s not to say that there won’t be worker shortages in some specific areas (think nurses or other health care workers, for example), but the notion that the baby-boom generation will retire in lockstep once they hit age 65 is ridiculous. We’ve said it in numerous stories in Workforce Management, like in this story by Ed Frauenheim.

A story this week in The Detroit News also hits this baby boomer talent-shortage myth squarely on the head. The story, “Baby boomers stay on the job longer than other generations,” focused on the need for companies to help older workers who plan to remain in the workforce past the typical retirement age of 65. The article pointed to an AARP survey that found that 69 percent of laborers between the age of 45 and 74 plan to work during their retirement.

According to the story: “The economic impact will be ‘positive,’ said Dana Johnson, chief economist for Comerica Bank. Retaining older workers will ease the burden of finding enough new employees to replace the 10 million baby boomers who will be eligible for retirement by 2010. Working longer also means seniors are still contributing to the dwindling Social Security fund. ‘To me, it’s a good example of the flexibility of our economy,’ Johnson said.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that businesses should sit back and do nothing because workers are going to magically keep working and stay on the job. It’s always prudent to plan for unforeseen shortages and contingencies, whether we’re talking about workers, materials or anything else. But I do believe that all the gloom-and-doom talk about some giant worker shortage because baby boomers are going to start retiring in droves is fueled by people taking an extremely limited and narrow look at retirement patterns. What they are forecasting will be, at best, a demographic ripple and not the giant tidal wave they want us to believe is out there.

“I plan on working until I drop dead,” Carol Dowdy, 59, wellness director for Artisan/National Logistics Management in Detroit, told the News. Amen to that, I say, because I’m one of those baby boomers who just happen to agree with her and plan to do the same. I suspect that there are a lot more of us in the same boat.