Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;...
The very public disaster in financial markets overshadows the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of small private disasters that it creates in its wake. People are going to lose their houses, their marriages, their dreams, through no great fault of their own. For every one of those with six figure salaries that looses a job, a dozen – perhaps a hundred – others on very ordinary and even low paid jobs will find their way onto the scrap-heap with rather less in the way of resources to see them through.
We all enjoy the sight of hubris undone. The sight of Richard S. Fuld, Jr, the Chief Executive of Lehman, being reduced to only two mansions to live in - and one of those with only one swimming pool – may give us scope for a wry smile, but the cleaning lady from Lehman’s London office goes home to her council flat after forty years of service not knowing whether she can pay her gas bill this winter.
So where can we help, or more pertinently, where can I help?
Well it happened to me three times but, unlike the cleaning lady, I had a hand in my own downfalls. I don’t know how it happened but I was always the maverick, the fixer of problems, the expensive resolver of complex issues, tolerated when there were problems and complex issues to resolve but discarded once those had been sorted away. Then people with hands too delicate to grasp nettles could move back in and start the whole process of decline off again.
The hangman rarely gets much credit for his labours.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not wallowing in self-pity; I’m just getting it on record that I have something to contribute to this debate. I have been unemployed three times, and every time I have been on the wrong side of the age Rubicon: I was over 50.
So what is my message? Well basically it has three elements :>
Spend a few days, a few weeks rethinking your life, your priorities and your goals and then go get them with the same energy that you used in your job.
Easier said than done?
Well of course it is, but as I said at the beginning, I speak from experience: I’ve done it three times. I watched the pictures of the newly redundant emerging from the plush offices they had inhabited at Lehman Brothers. I saw them in the pubs drowning their sorrows.
I can imagine home-comings to flats and houses now worth far less than they owe on them or can now afford. For sure they need time to work out their anger but then they need start out on the first days of the rest of their lives.
Of course most of the telegenic ones – the ones the news reels like to show us – are young and have the time to rebuild their lives to a completely different architecture. There was a man on the radio this morning that had been made redundant by Morgan Sachs in the last recession. He’d been a high-flyer, well on his way to being a master of the universe, when the axe fell. Now he owned a small bistro on the waterfront somewhere or other and his mega-deals involved new table cloths, his analyses determined which wine sold best, his cash flows could be measured in his till every day.
He seemed very happy.
But us mature folk?
Well we’re more expensive, have more exposure, are more difficult to place. Where do we go?
Well we have three basic choices:
Well I’ve not contemplated a life in Thailand, but this time when I became jobless – luckily within seven months of my retirement date, I realized that I could live on my assets. I was lucky indeed that I had reserves and that various elderly relatives had done their duty by my bank balance, but by drawing in my horns I could live in reasonable comfort. I had been the CEO of an SME and enjoyed posh lunches, trips to Newmarket, and being a figure respected by my peers.
I liked it but I didn’t need it.
But in the past I had not enjoyed this luxury. I had left a safe job in a multi-national to set up a company of my own. Life in the multi-national was not unbearable. I had an interesting job, prospects, and a good salary. When it was hit by near-bankruptcy it drew in its horns and shut down all its overseas branch offices and ‘focused on core business’. I was part of that core and went the head office in the Netherlands where I was well paid and well respected. However, my family couldn’t cope with Holland, or I with international commuting. So when we got a small legacy I jacked it in and set up in business with a friend.
Well we were doing just fine. He was in recruiting in the financial sector and I had a practice in Quality Assurance – a coming thing at the time. We shared facilities: offices, secretarial aid etc and I built his software for a practice based on the then-new concept of a data base of names and jobs. Nigel Lawson saw to that. The Lawson recession started in financial services and wiped out our recruitment practice, and then an oil rig sank in Norway and wiped out our oil industry QA business.
Unemployed #1
Well of course I felt angry and demoralized. My old employers had troubles of their own and didn’t want to know, the employment market was a walking corpse and I had a huge – by the standards of the day – mortgage and 3 kids in private education, and I was over 50.
So I’ve been there.
I took the view that finding a job is a job. I set up an office in the house and worked office hours on my job-finding project. Word processors were new, but I had one from our recently-deceased office, and I used it to assault the market. I responded to every job-ad and often had fifty applications in process. I wrote to every head-hunter and travelled to Aberdeen and the Netherlands, centres of the oil and gas industry, knocking doors and pressing the flesh.
I met an old friend in a hotel in Holland and he had nothing to offer.
It was all going nowhere: I had more rejection slips than J K Rowling and an ego lower than the Dead Sea.
Three months later my friend called me from the Emirates. Did I want a job – temporary but might lead to something….
Did I want!
I then spent seven years in West Africa setting up a major operation there and then consultants moved into head office to sort out their malaise. They concluded that the problem was at the very top and the CEO needed replacement and I was the hot candidate. But in the end they plumped for safety and kept the old man in place and you know the fate of heirs apparent.
I was out of work again and now 57.
Unemployed #2
Back to the grind of job applications.
Well I won’t bore you with it again but this time my networking got me two weeks consultancy helping a company with an international bid, and that seemed to be that.
But then 3 months later the guy I had done the consultancy for was in a yacht race and ended up with a slipped disk. Well I lived next door to a physiotherapist and went off to collect him and deliver him for treatment. Well at lunch – on the yacht – I met another guy who owned a shipping company focused on the offshore industry.
So what am I saying?
Well even though you have seen rather too many summers come and go the show isn’t over till the fat lady sings, and for most of us she hasn’t sung yet.
Ponzis and Pyramids
Fraudsters prey on the gullible and the greedy but all too often that includes you and me. Looked at dispassionately both are transparently dishonest, but when we are confronted with the chance to make 'real' money how many of us are truly dispassionate.
Ponzis and Pyramids - words to the wize
Fraudsters prey on the gullible and the greedy but all too often that includes you and me. Looked at dispassionately both are transparently dishonest, but when we are confronted with the chance to make 'real' money how many of us are truly dispassionate.
Watching the Pennies
Retirement changes everything, and retirement in a recession where interest rates are non existent and dividends a joke means we have to look after the pennies, the cents, the annas.
