Demographics of a Hero

“It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man”

Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell

“Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens”

Jimi Hendrix

It was bound to happen with the Baby Boomers – they have always been at the forefront of social change, changes of attitude, fashion and music. And now that they are occupying the senior positions within the workplace, they aren’t going to slip towards retirement and a reduction of their ambitions – they are just starting to get really good!

Link this with the demographic of a growing numbers of a more fluid and personally ambitious workforce. These are the workers who are eager to capitalise on their personal capital while they can, rather than to invest their futures in companies which can easily make them redundant or see them left behind in a career sense. A phenomenon starts to emerge which will change the way that intellectual capital is used by business in the coming years

  • The number of individuals in the traditional post-retirement age sector will be much greater.
  • The number of young people who will be contributing to their retirement incomes through taxes and social transfer payments (pensions, social security) will remain small and from 2007 onwards the number of people aged 24 and younger is likely to fall even further.
  • Working lifetimes will have shrunk, owing to the combined effects of extended education, falling average weekly hours and, perhaps, forced early retirement. The opportunities to accrue savings and pensions rights will contract proportionately. People are just going to have to carry on working for longer…full retirement at 60 or 65 just isn’t a realistic aim any more for the Baby Boomers with their second families, their big mortgages and their scaled up expectations of life.

In his book “Capitalism is Dead, Peoplism Rules” Alex Reed talks of the dwindling of capitalism as the dominant force in shaping economies and puts forward the idea of what he calls Peoplism – the capital that is invested in human individuals. “Capital is not as important as human talent and ability. After all, a talented individual can make a good living working in a coffee shop with a laptop and a mobile phone. In addition, capital no longer provides competitive advantage because it is now so widely available.” He talks of the premium on human talent being the essence of peoplism and that although knowledge is incredibly important in the people economy, it is not as important, according to Reed, as the ability of an individual to use their knowledge. “Intelligence is key but intuitive intelligence is the real goal for employers seeking to win the war for talent.” Importantly Reed also believes that those people with the right skills and the right ability to use those skills will be in demand, regardless of their age or country of origin.

At any stage of life there are gains and losses of knowledge, skill, cognitive function and what might be labelled “purpose” in life. So in achieving a greater maturity during youth, there is almost inevitably a reduction in the ability to engage in fantasy and play behaviour. It is, after all, hard to carry on behaving like a big kid all of your life. Rather inevitably, Jung talked about his older patients “getting stuck” as the priorities of the first half of life ceased to provide meaning for the latter stages of life. But uncharacteristically there was also an optimism in his work as he wrote about the opportunity to be able to realise a sense of self beyond youth which benefited from experience but which was unencumbered with the traditional distractions of youth. Let’s call that thing Widsom – an underrated quality and one which is more often associated with long white beards and tall tails of how it was in the good old days. I think that there is a lot to be said for the wisdom of the Baby Boomers. It is wisdom with attitude, wisdom which can still relate to a youth ideology and yet can take the longer view of events and experience. This is a generation who have a capacity to take a polyglot view of themselves and the times in which they live.

After all, you may realise that you are never going to be an Olympic athlete, but alternative “selves” fill the space left by the non-realisation of that younger self and the limitless potential that went with that younger self – you are great at something else instead. And perhaps as importantly, you are far better at communicating those abilities. It is also important to be able to alter the levels of aspiration according to changing self-evaluation and the realities of ageing. This might be associated with the changing reference groups that we encounter as we age. So as we age, we are likely to compare ourselves to other ageing people and (hopefully) make comparisons which reflect favourably on ourselves. and finding positives about the changing range of their professional abilities.

Heroes is an articulation of new methodology and approach to creativity and innovative thinking in business. Set against the changing demographic shape of the creative industries - a pyramid shaped business now populated by more senior people than we have ever had to work with before, predicated on a fee structure which relies on cheap/young salaries and set against a more rigorous and demanding business backdrop which wants to see more measurable results from innovation, strategic branding and creative programmes and sees the value of design being set alongside and sometimes ahead of management consultancy input.

Heroes is an idea whose time has come. Never before has there been this cohort of talented people in the workforce with a particular agenda of personal ambitions, a desire for freedom from corporate life and an enormous wealth of intellectual wisdom to deliver.