Work Daze

Good news, neighbor. If your constant complaining and worthless work habits and garrulous gossiping and alienated attitude have so far failed to drive your managers from their mahogany-lined aeries, hope is here. Those of us who pride ourselves on being a difficult mother to work with have started receiving assistance from Father Time.

It’s true! According to a William C. Byham, Ph.D., the author of “70: The New 50,” calculates that approximately half of all managers and key professionals in many companies will be eligible to retire by 2010, with about seventy percent turning in their key to the executive washroom by 2015.

While this is welcome news for the troops in the trenches, the mass retirement of the managerial class may represent something of a headache for the companies they – theoretically – manage. This is why Dr. Byham has subtitled his latest tome, “Retirement Management: Retaining the Energy and Expertise of Experienced Employees.”

Having discovered and service-marked the concept of “Retirement Management,” author Byham may be more interested in preserving the managerial class than thee and me. “If these and other members of the boomer generation choose to leave the workforce en masse over the next few years,” he or his press agent fume, “organizations will be facing a severe loss of key leadership knowledge, skills and contacts.”

If you think losing key leaders is a problem, consider the disaster potential in keeping the same bozos in place for another decade or so. Yet this is exactly what Retirement Management is all about – cementing the addled and infirm into their Aeron Chairs until a HR swat team can come around to bag and tag ‘em.

The reason Byham wants to keep the current leadership in place is not because they are so good, but because their successors are so bad. “Companies will not be able to rely on the next generation to pick up the slack,” he writes. “The Generation-X cohort following the baby boomers is one-quarter smaller and not nearly as experienced.”

Perhaps, but the Generation-X crowd certainly could not do any worse than our current crop of clowns, and maybe their lack of experience will result in some wild new ideas, like actually manufacturing products in this country, instead of outsourcing everything to some offshore hell-hole, or treating workers with respect and dignity.

Of course, many managers do not want to go gentle into that good night of retirement. They simply do not have the courage, or the cash.

“Forty-three percent of baby boomers don’t have sufficient savings or pension income to retire at anything approaching the lifestyle they would like,” writes the good doctor. He forgets that if the impoverished managers we so much want to keep had been better at their jobs, they might have had the cash they need to turn meeting time into Miller time.

Imagine! The baby boomer management class squeezed our paychecks and scuttled our pension plans while keeping themselves knee deep in bonuses and perks. If these management superstars are so dumb they can’t even salt away sufficient cash emollients to allow them to retire, who wants them running our businesses?

On the positive side, at least for the older manager, Dr. Byham suggests that the seventy-year old – representing the “new 50” – will benefit from better health and less physically demanding work. Very true. It’s much less stressful to send a pink slip than receive one, and with today’s astonishing developments in health care, it is possible to stay fit and well, well into your seventies. Assuming, of course, you have health care.

Still, older managers will experience the “usual problems associated with aging,” Byham writes. These include “reduced strength and endurance, slower reflexes, and a decline of sensory functions.” While this may explain the many bad decisions that roll down from Mahogany Row, it doesn’t explain why we want to keep these old fogies in place, at least, not until medical science goes behind the hip replacement to perfect that much-needed brain replacement.

And remember – just because you’re old and in the way doesn’t mean you get a free ride. An integral part of Retirement Management suggests, “older underachievers will have to be remotivated or culled from the organization.”

Personally, I hope they just let me retire to my refrigerator box under the freeway. I don’t know how you can be “remotivated” when you never were motivated in the first place, but I can tell you this – it sure beats being “culled.”