Want to know just how screwed up things are right now for America’s workforce?
Here’s one telling sign: A Florida plastic surgeon is offering free cosmetic procedures to older job seekers so they can look younger and be able to better compete for a new job.
According to an amazing-but-true story in the Miami Herald, some “1,200 of South Florida’s newly jobless … recently vied for free Botox, dermal fillers, laser liposuction and other cosmetic procedures offered by Dr. Jason Shapiro … . [T]he Fort Lauderdale internist who gave away free procedures said he was moved by the applicants’ tales of being jobless, feeling unattractive and getting overlooked by employers despite their experience.”
And lest you think this is just an oddball trend that is somehow unique to South Florida, think again. The newspaper went on to note: “Nationwide, a growing number of people are turning to cosmetic procedures to put their best face forward as they look for a job—or try to hold on to the one they have. A survey of physicians by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery showed that 75 percent of them said they had treated patients who requested facial plastic surgery to stay competitive in the workplace.”
“Youth is becoming more and more emphasized in the workplace,” Dr. Steven Pearlman, past president of the organization, told the newspaper. “The seasoned experts, once pictured in ads with lots of wrinkles, have been replaced by young go-getters with multiple degrees and the appearance of boundless energy.”
Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t you rather hire someone who really has actual energy and real experience, even if they are older and more wrinkled, then someone younger looking who only has “the appearance of boundless energy”?
There are a number of factors that are challenging workers right now: a terrible economy with massive job losses, a huge generation of older workers (baby boomers) who now can’t afford to leave the workplace, and a business environment where companies want a clear and unmistakable sign of a recovery before they are willing to invest in any new jobs.
But I wonder: For all the glib talk from so many organizations about constantly striving to win the “war for talent” and hire the best people possible, what does it say about our national hiring practices when highly experienced older workers feel they need to enhance their looks in order to get companies to seriously consider them for a job?
Keep this in mind the next time you hear some talent management “expert” prattle on about how tough it is to win the war for talent. It might not be as tough as you think, especially if you aren’t hung up on just getting young and cheap talent in the front door.
In fact, you might actually find that older workers have a few things to offer—experience, depth of knowledge and a broader worldview—that are positive qualities to add to your workforce. Bottom line is, you need the best people possible for your workforce regardless of their age or looks. Smart managers are already aware of that, of course, and no amount of Botox is ever going to EVER change it.
I’ve been in the workforce a long time, and one of my basic “rules” is that whenever I hear someone trying to make a case for a merger or deal predicated on all the wonderful “synergies” it will bring, well, that just tells me to run and get as far away from it as quickly as possible.
Sound extreme? Maybe, but in my experience, deals that are predicated on the great synergies they bring are almost always doomed to fail. That’s because the benefits of the synergies are wildly exaggerated and overstated (especially the so-called cost savings) in order to sell the deal, then grossly under-realized later after the dust from the actual merger has settled.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: the just-unwound merger between Time Warner and AOL. Not only was it terrible financially— “valued at $166 billion when the self-styled ‘deal of the century’ between America Online and Time Warner was announced on January 10, 2000, an AOL-containing Time Warner today commands a market capitalization of $28 billion … an 83 percent loss in market value,” according to TheDeal.com—but it was also a horrible cultural fit, bringing together an overhyped and overvalued new-media company with a solid and sober old-media giant.
How did it work out? Well, the overhyped new-media company tried to cram its culture and coolness down the throat of the stodgy old-media giant, and the results were predictably bad.
“Although the partnership between Time Warner and AOL was once pitched as a way to advantageously meld old media with new,” The Washington Post notes, “the deal has been regarded in recent years as one of the largest blunders in corporate history. None of the supposed synergies of the expensive union between the two ever paid off, and in recent years AOL’s flagging fortunes have increasingly cut into its parent company’s profit.”
Time Warner brought a ton of great brands to this deal—Warner Bros. Entertainment (including Warner Bros. Pictures), Turner Broadcasting (which includes CNN, TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies), HBO and magazine publisher Time Inc. (Time, People, Fortune, In Style, and Sports Illustrated magazines).
American Online brought its Internet service provider business that claimed as many as 34 million subscribers at its peak, according to PC World, “but it lacked the infrastructure and management savvy to transition from dial up to broadband, and its ISP business remained stuck in the ’90s. … While AOL remains a major Internet service provider with about 6.3 million subscribers, it has been letting that business waste away for years. … Today it’s [primary] income source is its declining online advertising generated by its eclectic mix of content sites, including the AOL.com portal, gossip site TMZ.com, and MapQuest. There’s a business model there, certainly, but AOL is small potatoes compared to competitors Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—not the Internet behemoth Time Warner wants it to be.”
In fact, the cool new-media company ended up being a gigantic albatross around the neck of Time Warner, pulling down the value of the combined company. And those great synergies that everyone touted when the merger was announced back in January 2000? Well, they ended up being as overhyped as AOL’s pre-merger stock price.
The New York Times points out: “The [Time Warner-AOL] merger was fed by heady ideas that did not quite pan out—that big online audiences would necessarily yield big profits, and that there were profound synergies to be had by owning different media.”
Synergies in business always sound great, but they should simply be regarded as a nice bonus if they actually work out and not the main reason for making the deal in the first place. In other words, the concept of synergy is more myth than anything else. In fact, if you are basing your deal on the synergies you’ll see, well, my guess is that you don’t have much of a deal to begin with. Just ask Time Warner.
My recent posts on the battle over the union wrangling about “lifetime jobs” at The Boston Globe (see “The Value of a Lifetime Job: Would You Believe It’s $33,000” and, earlier, “Does Anyone Really Think They Have a ‘Job for Life’?”) were based around what I consider to be a pretty obvious premise—that the concept of a “lifetime job” is completely unsustainable in our 2009 economy, and it is reckless to put a lifetime job guarantee ahead of the survival of the business and jobs for everyone else.
That’s why this story in The New York Times this week about lifetime job guarantees in Japan resonated with me. According to statistics released Wednesday, May 20, the Japanese economy in the first quarter suffered its worst contraction since 1955, declining 15.2 percent on an annualized basis. But a far smaller portion of workers have lost their jobs in Japan than in either the U.S. or the European Union (Japan’s unemployment rate in April was 4.8 percent, compared with 8.9 percent in the U.S. and Europe).
And here’s the kicker, according to the Times: “Analysts say this is because lifetime employment is alive and well in Japan, with the state playing a big role in keeping it so.”
The story goes on to point out that “Japan’s obsession with keeping workers employed—even those who are not needed—comes at a cost. Companies slash wages, which reduces consumer spending. Businesses become more reluctant to take on new recruits, shutting young people out of the labor force. And productivity plummets, hurting Japan’s competitiveness in an increasingly aggressive international market.”
A lifetime job was a reasonable notion in my grandfather’s time, but it is completely out of whack in a 21st century economy. It’s a holdover from a long-ago time and about as functional in today’s world as a buggy whip. No wonder Japan’s economy hasn’t been able to ever really recover, and shame on the Boston Newspaper Guild for having the chutzpah to even make this a part of labor negotiations.
As I’ve said before, don’t get me wrong: I love the concept of a “job for life,” but I put that in the same category as buying a ticket in hopes of winning the lottery. It’s a wonderful fantasy, but totally removed from the reality of day-to-day life. If you want proof of that, just take a good hard look at Japan.
As someone who writes about workforce and management issues, this terrible recession is yielding so many things to write about that I hardly know where to start. Here are a few workforce stories and issues that caught my eye today:
• The COBRA subsidy is a big hit, at least with unemployed workers. This hardly qualifies as a shocker, but the COBRA provision in the big stimulus package signed by President Barack Obama is going over very well with workers, according to a story in today’s issue of The Arizona Republic. We all expected that, of course, but the big “news” for me in this story was the estimate that 20 to 25 percent of laid-off workers will now take COBRA coverage, according to Linda Wurzelbacher, president of Basic Western USA, which administers COBRA plans on behalf of large employers. That’s up from the 10 to 12 percent of workers who took advantage before the subsidy in the stimulus bill was passed.
This is bad news, no? Well, that’s how I view it, although I had to laugh at a headline on one recruiting industry Web site that tried to claim that “February job losses are bad, but no worse than expected.” That’s one way to spin it, although this is the same Web site that had commentary last year claiming that the media was largely to blame for the negative economic news and that the media was “rooting for a recession.” As one of my editors is fond of saying, these guys need to wake up and smell the recession, especially since the “real” number of people out of work may actually be a whole lot higher.
• What happens when you’re 55 and you lose a $100,000 job? It’s a good question and a frightening prospect, but if you’re New Yorker Lois Draegin, it means you work hard to learn some new skills to make you employable—as an intern. It’s a fascinating sign-of-the-economic-times tale in today’s Los Angeles Times, and it just goes to show you how far people will go when they are desperate and out of work, as so many are these days.
• A hot new work trend is the “portfolio career.” I’ve known lots of people who could juggle a lot of different jobs, but a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer actually made sense of this growing trend. “Career coach Pam Dibbs has noticed a new phenomenon in the wake of layoffs sweeping the Puget Sound region: People are embracing the portfolio career. ‘Instead of one full-time job, [people are] choosing to work two or more part-time jobs and/or freelancing in two or three areas. It challenges our conventional thinking about careers, yet offers big rewards for those comfortable with some risk,’ said Dibbs, who works for the nonprofit Centerpoint Institute for Life and Career Renewal in Seattle.”
It may not be the right thing for everyone, but Dibbs told the newspaper that she likes the flexibility a portfolio career gives her. She added this sobering observation that seems all too true with each new month of massive layoff notices: “The whole idea of having a job for life just isn’t the same as it used to be.”
When workers leave, they take things with them. And often, what they take are things that rightly belong to their company.
“Nearly 60 percent of employees who quit a job or are asked to leave are stealing company data, according to a report by the Ponemon Institute, a Tucson-based research group,” said the Post story. The survey was based on interviews with 945 adults who were laid off, fired or changed jobs in the last year.”
Sounds bad, right? Well, it gets worse. “Seventy-nine percent of those who admitted to taking data said they did so despite knowing that their former employer did not permit them to take internal company information,” the Post story added. “Sixty-five percent of those who took data from their former employer grabbed e-mail lists. The next most frequently stolen data included non-financial business information (45 percent), customer contact lists (39 percent), employee records (35 percent) and financial information (16 percent).”
It’s a longstanding worker tradition to stick it to the organization that just got rid of you by taking something you shouldn’t. Anyone who has managed for any length of time has seen it happen. It’s not surprising that it seems to be happening more now, with so many people losing their jobs, but it was an issue even back during much better times.
Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, told The Washington Post that there are a number of factors that contribute to the cavalier attitude so many workers have toward data theft, including telecommuting and a lack of employee loyalty.
“What’s interesting is more and more people seem to feel entitled to information they create on the job, and an increase in mobility in the workforce means many employees don’t have a lasting relationship with their employers,” Ponemon told the newspaper. “Also, as you have more employees working from remote locations and on home computers, the concept of who really controls this data isn’t often clear to people.”
His last point—that it is not always clear who controls the data—isn’t a new issue. I know many former co-workers who walked out of a job with materials that they thought they were entitled to, and I saw it 20 years ago when people weren’t working on home computers from remote locations.
Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is never right, but when people lose their jobs and livelihoods, they don’t always act rationally. They take things with them that may help them get their next job. They view the information they take as a “benefit” to them. Even if it’s highly illegal to you.
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