Exploring Life: Web Clips

So why is there not more progress towards working at home? I think that the answer is culture. We have confused attendance and physical control with being productive.

via Robert Paterson’s Weblog: Telecommuting – One of the Best Responses to this economy – Undress for Success THE best Guide for this.

Economic Pain Not Spread Equally | Martin Prosperity Institute

Economic Pain Not Spread Equally
December 10, 2008

If a recession hits Ontario, as many think is already the case, will its turbulence affect all of us in the same way? Not if past history is a guide.

Martin Prosperity Institute researchers using the definition initially introduced in Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class have examined century-long trends in employment in four major economic classes of workers:

* Creative class – High autonomy occupations where workers are paid to think (e.g., artists, doctors, nurses, senior managers, architects).
* Service class – Low autonomy occupations in the service sector (e.g., food service workers, janitors, grounds keepers, secretaries, clerks).
* Working class – Occupations that depend highly on physical skills and repetitive tasks. (e.g., construction trades, mechanics, crane operators, assembly line workers).
* Farming/forestry/fishing class – Occupations specific to the farming/forestry/fishing industries.

These distinctions are different from the usual industry classifications. Somebody may be working in the automotive industry but is not necessarily working on the assembly line in a working class occupation. In fact, about a third of employees in Ontario’s manufacturing industries are in the creative or service class.

Creative Class » Blog Archive » Talent, Creativity, and the Crisis – Creative Class

Richard Florida, author of “Who’s Your City?” and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, sees the gravitational pull away from Wall Street and toward more creative industries as part of a necessary economic recalibration. “The economy couldn’t survive on speculation and what really amounted to advanced financial alchemy,” he said. “We are now realizing it is our human creativity that is our real capital. “The economic downturn is going to free up top talent to do other things that are going to change the metabolism of cities like New York in a very good way.”

Mr. Gatter said that many of his colleagues at the bank commended his choice to leave, telling him that they also nursed ambitions to be chefs, photographers, writers and artists. “Everyone seems to have something else they would rather be doing than their 9-to-5,” he said. “I think that people who are losing their jobs are being forced to pursue their dreams and, in a way, are being liberated from the golden handcuffs of Wall Street and venturing into something that might fulfill them.”

About The GoodWork Project

The GoodWork® Project is a large scale, multi-site effort to identify individuals and institutions
that exemplify good work—work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful
to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our
society. The project began as a social scientific investigation of how members of different
professions approach their work at a time when circumstances are changing very quickly,
markets are very powerful, and few if any forces exist to counter overwhelming market forces.
From 1996 to 2006, members of the research team conducted over 1200 interviews with
leading professionals and our findings have been reported in numerous books, articles,
and papers.

Pension Funds Collapse: The End of Retirement?

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Unless things change fast, human history will show that the phenomenon of “retirement” was limited to one generation. After World War II, when European and Japanese economies stood in tatters, American capitalism could fulfill “the American dream,” since there was little foreign competition to speak of. For the first time ever, workers were promised that — after working thirty or so years — they would be able to securely retire. That was largely the case … for one generation.

The second generation is having a devastating reality check. 2008 was supposed to be a watershed year for retirement: it was the first year that the baby-boomers turned 62, and the retirement frenzy was to begin (since people could begin to draw on their social security benefits). Early in the year, however, a study was conducted that found one-fourth of these boomers were delaying retirement (only the baby-boomers who were actually able to plan for retirement were studied). The economy has since nosedived, and many more retirements are being delayed. The unfortunate reality is that many who planned on retiring will work until the grave, joining the millions of other baby-boomers who never had such dreams.

The experts are calling this the “perfect storm” for retirement. Everything that could go wrong is in fact going wrong. This storm, however, was not created by supernatural forces, but the coordinated effort of big-business and their puppet politicians.

PsyBlog: Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted

In reality, people frequently don’t know what they want and psychology has proved it. That’s why career planning, or at the very least just deciding what you’re going to do next, is so unpleasant. It’s no fun at 18 years old when people ask what you want to do. There seem to be so many different options, each with myriad branching possibilities, many of which lead in opposite directions, but all equally tempting. Surrounded by these endless spiralling futures, it is no wonder that many a school-leaver sticks with what they know and follows in parental footsteps. But we don’t all want to trust the tried and tested, whether for good reasons or bad. We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences.

PsyBlog: 7 Reasons Leaders Fail

Around two-thirds of workers say the most stressful aspect of their jobs is their immediate boss, their line manager (Hogan, 2006). While this will come as no surprise to most, this statistic suggests a massive number of unhappy working relationships. So, does this mean that leadership is failing on a massive scale? Well, not exactly…

A recent article published in American Psychologist beautifully explains why so many people experience their managers as piping hot geysers of stress (Vugt, Hogan & Kaiser, 2008). What emerges is that bosses aren’t inherently bad people (mostly), but that the modern culture of work sets them up to fail. Here are the seven main reasons I’ve picked out from this article for why leaders fail: