David Brooks, writing in the New York Times the other day, said that General Motors for 30 years has been not in the car business, but in the restructuring business.
“For all these years,” Brooks wrote, “GM’s market share has endured a long, steady slide. But this has not stopped the waves of restructuring. The PowerPoints have flowed and always there has been the promise that with just one more cost-cutting push, sustainability nirvana will be at hand.”
And yet the company’s latest restructuring plan, along with that of Chrysler, was rejected this week by the Obama Administration’s auto task force. GM was given a 60-day extension and Chrysler 30 days to make one try at restructuring on their own. The restructuring saga will continue, at least for a while.
Winston Churchill said famously, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few,” speaking of the RAF’s valiant efforts in the Battle of Britain. Today, with our manifold debts – including the national debt -- rising out of sight and the government printing money like it was going out of style, one might say, “Never have so many owed so much to so many.” And never have so many had such great need to restructure, reinvent and reboot themselves. We’re all in a mess, and we need to dig our way out of the biggest hole we’ve been in for decades.
The phrase, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” means that “a need or problem encourages creative efforts to meet the need or solve the problem.” If necessity is the mother of invention, surely it is also the mother of reinvention. And we’ve got about all the necessity we need right now.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Thinking in metaphors
Yesterday, as I was waiting for a traffic light to change near a freeway intersection, a huge truck slowly came down an exit ramp with a trailer full of flattened and crushed automobiles.
The thought occurred to me: there goes the U.S. automobile industry, maybe the whole world’s automobile industry. Smashed flat by a perfect storm of devastating forces – bloated gasoline prices, poor design choices, frozen credit, unmanaged labor and other costs, changing consumer tastes and a global economy in the tank
I was thinking in metaphors. My mind was ready for any symbol, any sign, any clue that would help me understand the fix we are all in. I saw a load of junk and it became in my mind the industry that had created it.
It was a bummer of a thought, and it stuck with me for a while. Then a ray of optimism crept in.
Those flattened cars were going to a processing plant somewhere to be further broken down into reusable basic materials, then recycled and made into something new. What had been at first a depressing thought became a positive one. It was EOL (end of life) for cars, and BONL (beginning of new life) for the materials in them.
Then another figure of speech came to mind, a simile: those cars are like all of us – people in my town and my state and my country who have been flattened and crushed by the global economic storm, but who are reinventing and rebooting themselves into something new.
President Obama said it in his inaugural address: It’s time for us to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get moving again. We are not worthless junk to be thrown away. We are valuable raw material with new possibilities and new purposes.
It’s time to reinvent.
The thought occurred to me: there goes the U.S. automobile industry, maybe the whole world’s automobile industry. Smashed flat by a perfect storm of devastating forces – bloated gasoline prices, poor design choices, frozen credit, unmanaged labor and other costs, changing consumer tastes and a global economy in the tank
I was thinking in metaphors. My mind was ready for any symbol, any sign, any clue that would help me understand the fix we are all in. I saw a load of junk and it became in my mind the industry that had created it.
It was a bummer of a thought, and it stuck with me for a while. Then a ray of optimism crept in.
Those flattened cars were going to a processing plant somewhere to be further broken down into reusable basic materials, then recycled and made into something new. What had been at first a depressing thought became a positive one. It was EOL (end of life) for cars, and BONL (beginning of new life) for the materials in them.
Then another figure of speech came to mind, a simile: those cars are like all of us – people in my town and my state and my country who have been flattened and crushed by the global economic storm, but who are reinventing and rebooting themselves into something new.
President Obama said it in his inaugural address: It’s time for us to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get moving again. We are not worthless junk to be thrown away. We are valuable raw material with new possibilities and new purposes.
It’s time to reinvent.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Yes, Virginia, there is some good news
The whole concept of RebootYou.com has been shaken badly by the economic downturn.
My original idea was that there were a lot of reasons to continue working beyond normal “retirement age” – the value of one’s contribution, the personal renewal factor, the waste of talent from a sedentary retirement.
The need to keep earning money was there, too, but it was a very minor reason.
Things have changed. A lot.
Millions have seen a huge chunk of their retirement savings vaporize. Millions have lost their jobs – well before “retirement.” Millions have lost their homes.
The number of available jobs for anyone – retirees or anyone else – has shrunk drastically. Far more people are competing for far fewer jobs.
Is there any good news anywhere?
The answer is “Yes.” These dire forces are stoking entrepreneurial ideas and energies.
The New York Times reports that “(many) laid-off workers across the country, burned out by a merciless job market, are building business plans instead of sending out résumés. For these people, recession has become the mother of invention.
“Economists say that when the economy takes a dive, it is common for people to turn to their inner entrepreneur to try to make their own work. But they say that it takes months for that mentality to sink in, and that this is about the time in the economic cycle when it really starts to happen — when the formerly employed realize that traditional job searches are not working, and that they are running out of time and money.”
This wave of downturn start-ups is different from those in the past, said the Times. The biggest difference is that “the Internet has given people an extraordinary tool not just to market their ideas but also to find business partners and suppliers, and to do all kinds of functions on the cheap: keeping the books, interacting with customers, even turning a small idea into a big idea.”
I’m betting that you can turn your small idea into a big one. Give it a try!
My original idea was that there were a lot of reasons to continue working beyond normal “retirement age” – the value of one’s contribution, the personal renewal factor, the waste of talent from a sedentary retirement.
The need to keep earning money was there, too, but it was a very minor reason.
Things have changed. A lot.
Millions have seen a huge chunk of their retirement savings vaporize. Millions have lost their jobs – well before “retirement.” Millions have lost their homes.
The number of available jobs for anyone – retirees or anyone else – has shrunk drastically. Far more people are competing for far fewer jobs.
Is there any good news anywhere?
The answer is “Yes.” These dire forces are stoking entrepreneurial ideas and energies.
The New York Times reports that “(many) laid-off workers across the country, burned out by a merciless job market, are building business plans instead of sending out résumés. For these people, recession has become the mother of invention.
“Economists say that when the economy takes a dive, it is common for people to turn to their inner entrepreneur to try to make their own work. But they say that it takes months for that mentality to sink in, and that this is about the time in the economic cycle when it really starts to happen — when the formerly employed realize that traditional job searches are not working, and that they are running out of time and money.”
This wave of downturn start-ups is different from those in the past, said the Times. The biggest difference is that “the Internet has given people an extraordinary tool not just to market their ideas but also to find business partners and suppliers, and to do all kinds of functions on the cheap: keeping the books, interacting with customers, even turning a small idea into a big idea.”
I’m betting that you can turn your small idea into a big one. Give it a try!
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Coping with forced rebooting
A story by Reuters last week described the sad stories of several seniors who have been forced to go back to work because they lost their savings in Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme:
• A 90-year-old California man working in a grocery store to make ends meet.
• A 60-year-old Pennsylvania widow giving up her retirement to work as a house cleaner.
• A 73-year-old Florida man looking for a part time job after being financially devastated.
This is not the kind of rebooting I had in mind when I started RebootYou.com. And unfortunately, these are just three of many who are looking at a forced rebooting. Countless others have also lost money because of the economy’s collapse and need to go back to work to pay their bills.
Adding to the pain, millions more are now unemployed than a few years ago making it more difficult, if not impossible, to find that “rebooting” job: too many people on the job market competing for a shrinking number of positions.
What’s a person to do?
Well, I believe the same strategies for reinvention apply, whether the rebooting is voluntary or involuntary. Here are some ideas:
• Be willing so start over, maybe at or near the bottom. Don’t let pride stand in your way.
• Start a business in some line of activity that you love. It will be a small business to start, but a well-thought-out small business can make money – maybe just enough to make a difference.
• Go back to school. Don’t we all need to “go back to school” to learn how to cope in hard times? Going back to school to learn a new skill or brush up on an old one is a healthy and usually productive way to manage a setback.
• Volunteer at a church or non-profit. You may not make money, but you will gain a psychic satisfaction that will be emotionally rewarding and get your mind off your woes.
• Become a teacher or mentor for young people in need.
• Join the Experience Corps (see http://www.experiencecorps.org/index.cfm)
• Do “good work” and get paid for it (see http://www.encore.org/)
OK, not easy. I agree. But as the old saying goes, nobody said this was going to be easy. The most important requirement for rebooting is simple — the desire to do so. The second most important requirement is belief in yourself — confidence that you can do it. Just remember: What you want to do, and believe you can do, you can do.
• A 90-year-old California man working in a grocery store to make ends meet.
• A 60-year-old Pennsylvania widow giving up her retirement to work as a house cleaner.
• A 73-year-old Florida man looking for a part time job after being financially devastated.
This is not the kind of rebooting I had in mind when I started RebootYou.com. And unfortunately, these are just three of many who are looking at a forced rebooting. Countless others have also lost money because of the economy’s collapse and need to go back to work to pay their bills.
Adding to the pain, millions more are now unemployed than a few years ago making it more difficult, if not impossible, to find that “rebooting” job: too many people on the job market competing for a shrinking number of positions.
What’s a person to do?
Well, I believe the same strategies for reinvention apply, whether the rebooting is voluntary or involuntary. Here are some ideas:
• Be willing so start over, maybe at or near the bottom. Don’t let pride stand in your way.
• Start a business in some line of activity that you love. It will be a small business to start, but a well-thought-out small business can make money – maybe just enough to make a difference.
• Go back to school. Don’t we all need to “go back to school” to learn how to cope in hard times? Going back to school to learn a new skill or brush up on an old one is a healthy and usually productive way to manage a setback.
• Volunteer at a church or non-profit. You may not make money, but you will gain a psychic satisfaction that will be emotionally rewarding and get your mind off your woes.
• Become a teacher or mentor for young people in need.
• Join the Experience Corps (see http://www.experiencecorps.org/index.cfm)
• Do “good work” and get paid for it (see http://www.encore.org/)
OK, not easy. I agree. But as the old saying goes, nobody said this was going to be easy. The most important requirement for rebooting is simple — the desire to do so. The second most important requirement is belief in yourself — confidence that you can do it. Just remember: What you want to do, and believe you can do, you can do.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Dept. of Shameless Self-Promotion
I'm pleased to report that the latest issue of Stanford Business, a quarterly magazine for alumni and alumnae of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, carries a short item on our website, www.rebootyou.com. Here's the item:
Trail Guide for Career Changers
After rebooting professionally a number of times, Lee Callaway, Sloan '77, repotted himself once again as an online resource for people -- some retired, some not -- who want to change their lives and take off in new, meaningful directions. Callaway's new venture for new venturers is a website called RebootYou.com, which both inspires and informs. It features stories about people who have successfully changed course, suggestions for volunteer and career opportunities, and a list of books, web links, seminars, and more, all designed to guide the rebooter-to-be.
A thank-you tip of the rebooter hat to Kathleen O'Toole, Stanford Business editor!
Trail Guide for Career Changers
After rebooting professionally a number of times, Lee Callaway, Sloan '77, repotted himself once again as an online resource for people -- some retired, some not -- who want to change their lives and take off in new, meaningful directions. Callaway's new venture for new venturers is a website called RebootYou.com, which both inspires and informs. It features stories about people who have successfully changed course, suggestions for volunteer and career opportunities, and a list of books, web links, seminars, and more, all designed to guide the rebooter-to-be.
A thank-you tip of the rebooter hat to Kathleen O'Toole, Stanford Business editor!
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Time to Reboot America
Thomas Friedman, the highly respected New York Times columnist and author of numerous best selling books, has a great column today, Christmas Eve. The headline:
Time to Reboot America
He makes a strong case – so strong, so urgent, I want to quote liberally from it:
“We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
“To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.
“For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.
“That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.”
Friedman is not the only national figure calling for rebooting America. Almost every day someone in government or business or society at large is calling for the reinvention of our country, or some huge part of it, on a scale not seen in decades, maybe ever.
For such a rebooting to happen, I think we need much more than government bailouts and stimulus packages. We need for people by the thousands and millions, at every age and in every walk of life, to face up to and overcome the hard times by rebooting themselves and their organizations – their governments, schools, companies, churches, civic and charitable organizations.
Remember that the term “rebooting” and its counterpart “booting” were adapted for computer talk from “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.” It is time for some major pulling up on our own bootstraps. We collectively got ourselves into this mess. We collectively need to get ourselves out of it.
It is the challenge and the opportunity of our lifetimes.
Time to Reboot America
He makes a strong case – so strong, so urgent, I want to quote liberally from it:
“We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
“To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.
“For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.
“That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.”
Friedman is not the only national figure calling for rebooting America. Almost every day someone in government or business or society at large is calling for the reinvention of our country, or some huge part of it, on a scale not seen in decades, maybe ever.
For such a rebooting to happen, I think we need much more than government bailouts and stimulus packages. We need for people by the thousands and millions, at every age and in every walk of life, to face up to and overcome the hard times by rebooting themselves and their organizations – their governments, schools, companies, churches, civic and charitable organizations.
Remember that the term “rebooting” and its counterpart “booting” were adapted for computer talk from “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.” It is time for some major pulling up on our own bootstraps. We collectively got ourselves into this mess. We collectively need to get ourselves out of it.
It is the challenge and the opportunity of our lifetimes.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Bring back the wooly retiree
Scientists are talking – seriously, it seems – about the possibility of regenerating a wooly mammoth, a furry elephant-like mammal that went extinct toward the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. With the mammoth’s genome now decoded and DNA available, the experts say it could be done for about $10 million.
By today’s standards, when “trillion” is the new “billion,” that sounds pretty cheap. But we think it would be a better idea, and much less expensive, to bring back some wooly retirees.
We’re talking about bringing them back into the active, productive, vibrant life of the rebooter. Out of the TV room, out of the lounge chair, on their feet, doing things, and back into the mainstream.
Now of course, retirees haven’t become extinct, but going into a passive, do-nothing retirement bears some similarity to going extinct, doesn’t it? Withdrawing from the active life, shutting down the inner computer and basically checking out of life accomplishes about the same thing as disappearing.
Maybe we should start considering the passive retiree as a missing person. Perhaps not physically missing, but mentally and emotionally and psychologically missing.
Rebooting offers a healthy alternative to retirement “extinction.” Continuing to work, volunteering, going back to school, teaching, consulting, turning that lifelong hobby into a business – all are ways to recharge the batteries and bring oneself back into life on earth.
And the really good news: no danger of a retiree Jurassic Park!
By today’s standards, when “trillion” is the new “billion,” that sounds pretty cheap. But we think it would be a better idea, and much less expensive, to bring back some wooly retirees.
We’re talking about bringing them back into the active, productive, vibrant life of the rebooter. Out of the TV room, out of the lounge chair, on their feet, doing things, and back into the mainstream.
Now of course, retirees haven’t become extinct, but going into a passive, do-nothing retirement bears some similarity to going extinct, doesn’t it? Withdrawing from the active life, shutting down the inner computer and basically checking out of life accomplishes about the same thing as disappearing.
Maybe we should start considering the passive retiree as a missing person. Perhaps not physically missing, but mentally and emotionally and psychologically missing.
Rebooting offers a healthy alternative to retirement “extinction.” Continuing to work, volunteering, going back to school, teaching, consulting, turning that lifelong hobby into a business – all are ways to recharge the batteries and bring oneself back into life on earth.
And the really good news: no danger of a retiree Jurassic Park!
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