© 2007-2010. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
Update Your Risk Analysis: Technology and Your People
Despite the metrics, risk persists as poorly quantifiable in the real world. The catastrophes occur in unexpected corners of the enterprise or result from unintended consequences of careful plans. A critical contributing factor is the uncertainty of new technology and new variations on edgy products. These uncertain technologies and variations on edgy themes are not so much unreliable as they have unexpected collateral effects and unintended consequences. Take, for example, MSFT Vista or CDO derivatives or social networking tools. A Vista bug unexpectedly costs a system functionality for half a day and workers lose critical work and time. CDO derivatives turn out to be riskier than assumed and take out a formerly solid bank. A trusted employee while social networking compromises proprietary information through mistaken use of a cool tool no one understood, including its developer and social utility enterprise. Or no one expected that an employee would spirit out a large secret data file by IM. The competitive advantage is lost or clients are compromised. The dollar cost is huge; the goodwill loss is major.
This new uncertainty yields these and additional events which will not be rare but are merely new and have yet to spawn statistical data points, except in catastrophic size of financial loss. Short of battening down the hatches and hunkering down with the tried and true, what are you to do?
1. Impress upon your entire range of employees from mail room to C-suite and Board room the material value of their work in both human and monetary terms;
2. Demonstrate comprehensibly the catastrophic human and monetary losses possible through seeming small missteps, mistakes, and omissions. Make it palpable by fleshing out a hypothetical showing that if item A is compromised by this loss B, then consequences X and Y result in dollar loss $Y.
3. Verify that employees, officers and boards understand the technologies they see and use. Teach the technologies. Don’t hire expecting prior training through education and experience. Hire expecting to do the training.
4. Develop a cross-discipline department, section or committee to keep ahead of the technology curve: all the technology, from industry methods to communications, transportation and corporate espionage. Pay your staff to keep fresh and alert and to foresee the unexpected consequence of what is new.
5. Constantly refresh your working rules which work along with the new technologies. Don’t leave the rules in the employee handbook. Make them part of every day function and procedure.
6. Verify not only that steps are followed; verify that the reasons are understood. Too many financial institutions and other businesses have everyday practices which change abruptly when the auditors or regulators are about to arrive.
7. Do not indulge refractory behavior by generation, rank, department, contractor/employee status or upon other excuse. Train, don’t cluck. If you often find noncompliance occurs within a group, look for lack of knowledge, preparation and leadership. It may be that no one knows exactly what to do, or when or how.
© 2009 Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
Does Your Company Need a Shrink?
If this Hypercompetitive Culture Continues, Will You?
In law and business, my clients have come to me all the time with business developments which have a powerful personal impact. Success or failure, venture struggle or corporate crisis, work is never “just business.” I have seen my clients struggle personally to understand the human environment and their interactions in it. Just as success can trigger “irrational exuberance” and greed, crisis and failure can trigger personal trauma. My clients have grappled with profound feelings of fear, shock, betrayal, and anger and struggle to understand the same on the other side of the table. At a time when competition in the workplace and in commerce has steadily lowered the bar on acceptable behavior and practices, from plundering of work product, technology and talent to sadistic hiring and firing practices as chronicled in the WSJ, FT, and NYT, there is a lot making people unhappy at work. As we can tell from the cases heard by courts, handbooks, rule books and laws don’t deter commercial and workplace ill behavior. How healthy is your company? Does your company need a shrink?
As a commercial society, we have apparently rejected moral constructs for cost-benefit and personal competitive relativism. When you take away the moral standards, all there is left is psychotheraphy and psychoanalysis if we want to try to maintain standards and protect intrinsic human value. Hostile takeovers, splintering integrations, and fallout from economic crisis take huge toll. As a practicing lawyer and consultant, and before that a graduate student , I have never ceased to be amazed and aghast at what petty or greedy people will do to each other, even for no real advantage or on absolutely no provocation. This wreaks havoc on an organization and people’s lives. The waste spreads like wildfire and takes with it productivity, invention, retention and continuity. Psychoanalysis or psychotherapy can help confirm that people are seeing what they are seeing, teach people how to anticipate and minimize the commercial psychopaths; and help them deal with both the danger and the aftermath. In a word, in business practice I see a lot of people who are lost. Or will be. Whether on the dishing end or receiving end, does your company need to see a shrink?
© 2009. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
Hazy Thought, Big Risk: Getting Your People to Think
At the crux of this generation’s economic calamity is the unwillingness to think past the desired goal. Whether a function of an age of instant gratification or the popular elimination of rigors of logic in favor of marketing and hype, business teams have been weakened by mythologies of winning strategies, power of positive thinking and the hype of sales systems. Eschewing voices of prudence, dismissing identification of risk as pathologies of gloom, doom and defeat, they walk brazenly and self-blinded into traps and disaster. They shrug off advance warning citing competent counsel in the wings to “document around it” or to file suit in the event. The reality is that they are tall thin managers, siloed and specialized like counsel and all too many would rather bully and buffalo than think things through–or admit the wider thinkers who can guide the necessary analysis. What do you do? You have to understand that the confidence, the ambition, and the defiance of exogenous reality is underlain by fear. Fear of not getting the bonus, not scoring the win, certainly, but the essential fear is the fear of being told “no.” You have to talk them around the fear, through the reality of certain facts, processes and consequences so that they and you can concentrate on what is really to be done.
These managers have stalled somewhere around their 16th year. They have never learned that acknowledging risk does not equate with giving up. Their thought process is immature. They would rather flit in excitement, bully in arrogance and move forward in folly than simply sit down, assess the risks with those who work beyond the silo, and then cost-benefit balance the risks. They don’t want their enthusiasm dimmed by the laws and facts of the physical world, the relationships and behavior of the natural world, and the complications of pesky regulation, law and insurance. They really do want to be brilliant center stage in the sun and to get the closing bonus. In an age which venerates spending as representation of wealth, it is not surprising that teams would be quick to idealize the path to a lucrative goal, a state known as “having dollar figures in their eyes.” From dotcom to biotech, from weather trading to derivatives, from the eternity of the China miracle to white nights riches in Russia, through every sector and region, business has been there too long.
In all these years of hearing managers, founders, true believers and, worst, C-Team climbers fend off questions, insights, doubts and actual red flags and fog horns of disaster ahead, I have realized that the process of achieving reality thinking is laborious and very individual. The process is the more challenging the thinner the executive, the more dependent on outside expertise the executive has been allowed to be. The CXO who has come up through a narrow regime of a single specialized silo is the worst: arrogant, narrow and all too often inclined to bully rather than lead. Moreover, reaching reality with any CXO is never sufficient; one has to reach the entire team. Unless one reaches the entire team, the necessary will not get done. The CXO will be coaxed in a critical moment, schisms will appear or passive-aggressive noncompliance will ensure that the metaphorical O-rings are not re-engineered. The project will still blow up, even as it achieves the stratosphere.
To be effective in reaching the entire team, you have to figure out who is who. Some team members are rationalists and are pressured only by the need not to dim the Sales/Marketing enthusiasm (hype) with sticky floor facts. They can be faced with facts and set about to solve the problems and balance the risks and benefits. Others are blind cheerleaders who, apprised of the factors to be considered, will subdue the hype while the team works and then can reignite the enthusiasm at the same fevered pitch. Yet others are not able to compute distinctions and have to be led through the facts, risk, consequences and alternatives; once given alternatives, they are able to pick and choose on the basis of a screen for success: dollar values, physical consequences and legal penalties. The most obdurate may need to balance dollar figures with prison terms. (As in this decade’s Enron/Tyco business cocktail query: What would you do for $5 million dollars (both misconduct and prison term, presumably).) And then there is the worst case: the arrogant hitherto successful narrow bully who will need to be bludgeoned with pertinent fact, factors, truth and consequences. (Do not go alone.)
Once you do have them at the table, acknowledging risk, acknowledging fact, you can get down to further research and consideration leading with the rationalists, bolstered by the cheer leaders. It is key to offer constant avenues of new opportunity and benefits of solutions to the risks even as you plod a prudent course to minimizing risk and maximizing value. You yourself maximize value if you have breadth of knowledge beyond mere exposure so that you can do critical thinking where they cannot or they have been conditioned to “will not.” Beware of counsel or accountant who blandly reassures, cynically knowing the firm will get the litigation when the inevitable complications and even disaster befall the team. Redirect the team to ounderstand that to say “”that never happens” is merely a substitute for thinking or a blind for ignorance. Help them choose the best path, the one not airbrushed and photoshopped but the legitimately prudent path to the greatest and most likely success not on the edge of an inconvenient abyss. And no derivatives until they are 21.
© 2009 Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
GET YOUR TEAMS TALKING: MAKE YOUR BUSINESS LOOK GOOD.
AVOID FIASCOS WHICH MAKE THE WHOLE BUSINESS LOOK BAD
SAKS Interface
Saks upgraded its system for Saks.com just 5 days before a major online one-day marketing promotion which promised generous gift cards on the basis of total order purchase amounts. What upgrade ever does go smoothly? This one did not. Then, on the day of the promotion, customers online watched as orders disappeared, sales product images disappeared, pages failed, and the site was taken down. The site came back up only to offer to download whole pages to shoppers’ personal pc’s and then to deny shoppers the promotion code at checkout. The next day, there was bad blood on the floor between IT and marketing.
Why did these two teams not cooperate? An upgrade is a nightmare in any circumstances. To time a system upgrade to less than a week before a major semi-annual promotion is suicide-or murder-for a company. It certainly must have generated homicidal fever between these two teams.
COOPER INDUSTRIES Integration
The Leatherman Pocket Survival Tool™ had become a consumer favorite over ten years when Cooper Industries decided to replicate the success with its own version of the tool. Many companies had already imitated and had been sued when Cooper’s team went one better. Calling its imitation the “Cooperman” in-house but observing the finer points of trademark law and officially naming it “Toolzall”, the team was slow to produce a prototype in time for an upcoming trade show. When the ToolZall brand manager told the team to prepare a prototype for advertising, in a striking misfire of team integration, a Cooper team member actually modified a real Pocket Survival ToolTM to produce a prototype which the rest of the team then photographed for posters, packaging, press kits, catalogues and magazines.
Then Tim Leatherman saw the promotions for the ToolZall, and the ToolZall not only looked like his Leatherman, it was his Leatherman. Suit ensued to the tune of $50,000 in compensatory damages and $4.5 million in punitive damages. (Cooper Industries, Inc., Pet. v. Leatherman Tool Group Inc., Resp., Brief for the Petitioner, Wm. Bradford Reynolds, USSCt., No. 99-2035.) The team caught the name issue but not the real issue. It should make one think about how to fully integrate one’s team.
© Copyright 2007-2008. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
Atonal Marketing: Turn It Around;
Don’t Let Advertising Keep Shooting You in the Foot (Or Head).
It was my 17 year old son who noticed it first: KFC’s new “unsub side” commercial. “So KFC’s the criminal or the investigator?” he asked. Fan of NCIS, to him “Unsub”= “Un”known “Sub”ject of an Investigation. KFC confirmed what his father’s secretary had always told him: there was something suspect about that chicken. And this is supposed to be KFC’s answer to the raucous Subway commercials. Atonal advertising is nothing new, but one wonders why the lowest common denominator of taste, intelligence and aesthetics is somehow thought to encourage one’s clientele. So often with a turnaround, the expert will come in with draconian measures to evaluate numbers, control cash, bully Sales and shake up vision but never to rationalize that creative interface with the customer, the marketing, and inject vigor, taste and smarts. Aesthetics have become so relative that the numbers guys never see them. They should: Insulting your customers’ intelligence has real costs.
Unsub KFC should marked for the annals of toxic marketing along with the notorious “Nova.” Notoriety is not fame. Notoriety is a negative. Negative associations sank the Chevrolet Nova in Latin America. You don’t need be entrained by the “CSI” TV genre, for “Unsub” to generate its own negative associations, negative associations unrelated to putative Subway inferiority: “Unsub”= unsubscribe, unsubstantiated, unknown subject. Prius commercials are inane; iPhone commercials are fatuous; the competing Subway commercials are a celebration of stupidity. And in a deep recession, this is how companies put their best foot forward? No wonder customers close their wallets.
Bad advertising can have inventive costs. Not only did Cooper Industries knock off the immortal Leatherman tool, when Cooper marketing created its initial marketing, the Cooper tool pictured WAS a Leatherman tool, doctored. How expensive was THAT case? Trademark infringement, copyright infringement, publicity infractions, privacy intrusions, torts, breaches: is anyone minding marketing? Have someone there to spot it and to solve it: It’s not clever; it’s not creative license; it’s dumb. Don’t let it go out the door and ruin your buzz or your year or your years–or close your doors.
© 2009. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
How Do You Integrate The New Senior Hire?
It is crucial for new hires, particularly at highest executive levels, to be coached or to be given structured support continuously over the first quarter and at lesser intervals over the first year of their hire as they go through the “seasons” in both financial and product cycles. This integrates them more fully with crucial compliance, business model, product and market needs, and requirements of and changes in talent or staffing. It is particularly important to provide functional, business and cultural integration support in technology or engineering fields and companies where the inclination is to constantly test the new hire and look for weaknesses. Anecdotally, many good hires do not succeed merely because of poor integration and insufficient cultural or social support.
Sufficient purpose driven social/internal networking events help new hires make friends and find collaborative colleagues. It gives new hires a chance to learn what they and others really do and with the fresh insights of the outsider they may become true innovators in product, process and/or procedure. They assimilate into the culture more fully. Sufficient purpose driven (as opposed to keg or mere informational) events help integrate everyone into the mission, culture and operations of a company. Cross-functional, cross-departmental meetings, or show and tell, can keep everyone better integrated into the model and smooth entry for new hires.
Mentoring has been shown to have uneven effectiveness, particularly when initiated by HR. HR does not always grasp the technicalities and skill sets of particular functions and people and so often mismatches mentor and mentee. A department head, administrator or even AA or PA may have a better sense for matching people. The new hire should have a performance review-safe way of admitting skill set or cultural blind spots, inadequacies, confusions or misfires early on so that support in the form of mentor or trainer may be supplied fast. Mentors should be chosen for generosity with information and not for mere skill set, willingness or rank; the mentor should be willing to train and take the right attitude toward training, understanding that it is a tutoring and not testing role. Don’t let the new hire grope in the dark!
© 2008 Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
Across the Date Line: Work When We Work. Work How We Work.
Do your teams work for you? Whether you have teams spread across silos in one corporate park, you understand the problems of getting them to work together. But now in a globalized workforce, spread around the world in separate offices, subsidiaries and joint ventures, how do you get them to work together across the dateline? A tech team manager recently complained that in working extensively via conference call with other tech teams spread over all continents, he has had a problem getting everyone to show up on time and hit project deadlines. Everyone agrees on the target times, but some regions don’t show up. The wider collaborative team then misses the ultimate target, the project deadline, and yet the missing teams don’t feel they have failed in a commitment. How do you improve on that? That’s a complex problem.
First, deal with the time element. Try reinforcing with a delinquent team the vast differences between time zones and the difficulties this time element presents in getting everyone free during working-or waking hours-amidst other commitments. Particularly in coordinating a three-way call between the US and, say, the Mid East and Australia, one can run into some knotty problems of day and night. Find a way to visually impress on the other tech teams the time in each zone for a set of their times: 8 am, 11 am, 2pm, 4pm and 10pm. Show them what time -and day – it would be in ýour zone. Make them understand the density of the problem. Get them to think about the flow of other work and other meetings.
It may be easiest to set one agreed time and day of the week as a scheduled recurring meeting regardless of progress and need. Alternatively, you can have the teams trade around the inconvenience so that it is not always the same team coming into the call at a bad hour. Tech teams often work at odd hours, late into the night (or early into the morning) and on weekends, but so do other teams in finance, law, sales and testing. You may have real flexibility.
If international teams are missing calls and causing the collaborative group to miss project deadlines, it may seem that those teams do not want to work with other teams. You may simply need to increase visibility by video conference. Empty chairs stand out. However, the real problem may be as simple as their having a hard time understanding the common spoken language and needing to see words in writing. I have found that in collaborating even with fluent speakers of multiple languages that they fall into one category or another: either they are weak in reading or they are weak in listening. You might think of other forms of collaboration or, however cumbersome it may be, a translator. You may want to consider having not just conversation but documentation translated real time. The added expense may justify itself in time saved and mistakes prevented or corrected.
However accomplished, however senior, your people may be having a real problem understanding each other at a basic level. I have seen more deals and projects fall apart because people simply did not understand each other. At a basic level they may have agreed but at the same basic level they could not communicate about parties, structure, specs and risk. Distrust develops as miscommunication grows. Memorializing in writing overcomes as good deal of distrust.
Alternatively, the uncooperative team may feel autonomous and not required to contribute. They may feel immune to layoffs or firing because of country laws. They may feel inadequately recognized, compensated or heard. They may feel excluded. They may feel used. They may not like the mix of work assigned to them. They may disagree seriously with specs, architecture, goal or strategy. They may have some critical information and insights. In some cultures, an employee will never say no and will not argue; the work just won’t get done. They may have their own internal squabbles. They may simply be lost and be unprepared.
You have to travel and sit down with each team and take the time to take the temperature and pulse of all the members. And you might just buy all the members a compact pocket worldtime clock so that they can see time for themselves.
© Copyright 2009. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All rights reserved.
Is Your Head in the Clouds Yet? Cut IT Costs.
What are the computational dynamics at your company as you cut costs? Even if you are not cutting IT costs, pushed to the max by demand for computation and storage, have you focused on grid computing as an economical escape from the ruthless technology cycle? Have you discovered cloud computing? Do you understand the risks as well as the savings?
Whether your revenues are down or not, these are a bold new means of cutting your IT costs without curtailing projects or rotating more computation to the graveyard shift. Moreover, you can stretch out the technology cycle. Delay or even eliminate that new lease or purchase of power at a high price when you know that, even as you sign, the value will slide down fast towards the release of the next generation or the next technology.
Grid computing, a workstation or desktop infrastructure solution under development for the better part of a decade, flexes computationally dense applications from overtaxed or undermuscled networks to underutilized networks. It is both a space and power sharing solution which saves you the costs of building out a network which you only need it for a particular project, a specific dataflow, or an occasional spike in enterprise demand. Grid computing shifts your needs from division to division, subsidiary to subsidiary, or for the bold, from your enterprise network to the loaned network of another enterprise or multiple enterprises. It allows you to access applications without going to the capital expense and trouble of adding a specific application to each unit on your network Grid computing can be your alternative to a first or a duplicated investment in servers, storage and a different class of management and concerns. This can be a reasonable way to bide your time until revenues rise, cash flow improves or reason takes hold of your sector. This can also be a great way to control costs for that integration of two like enterprises or that new joint venture, that one off project, that demonstration project, that gamble on the bleeding edge of your own technology.
Cloud computing is the cutting edge cousin of grid computing. Also years in the making, it transfers your computational needs from infrastructure rich data center to data center–or from your data center to a loaned data center via the Internet. It can give you access to software solutions enabled at a different data center. It too solves your peak, hedged bet and transitional needs. Look to it for major joint ventures where costs and returns remain fuzzy. It can save major costs during the honeymoon phase of that joint venture or for periods of political, regulatory and economic uncertainty, and those periods of political, regulatory or economic uncertainty when you need to hedge your bets. Look to cloud computing for those periods of integration when both merging entities have to work simultaneously and together but the ultimate computational merger need of 1 + 1 = 1.5 or even only 1.
What are the major risks? You have to trust your partners. Whether within the enterprise, division to division, or across multiple enterprises, enterprise to enterprise, you need to assure yourself of competence and ethics and security through careful vetting of reliability and defenses. You have to make sure not only that the other side or nodes of your grid or the other cloud or clouds will be available as you need it when you need, you need to make sure that IT management on the other side is adept and the infrastructure is robust, backed by technological redundancy and financial soundness. ‘When the peak comes, you don’t want to find the other side bankrupt, morally, physically or financially. Moreover, you do need to be satisfied that the connective technology simply works moment to moment. It needs to be debugged in advance and not just when you are about to learn the meaning of life, even if it is only Douglas Adam’s Number, 42.
Security is, of course paramount, and militates towards using your own internal networks or data centers or utilizing a major provider which specifically architects privacy, sequestration of data flows, redundant infrastructure, robust personnel security controls and realistic defenses against social engineering of lapses and gaps. Competency of firewalls, encryption and compliance should all be verifiably assured. From identity theft to industrial espionage, the concerns are real. The Internet pipeline of cloud computing raises risks even further in form of attack, exposure and unintended consequences. Dealing with a major provider with a long history of satisfying the technological, legal, financial and regulatory requirements of major commercial enterprises is paramount. While globalization has been fashionably extolled for economic efficiency, cost cutting, world affluence and distributed brain power, it has not only globalized financial risk and perilous economic interdependence, it has added clearly heightened exposure to IP theft, international fraud and compromise of security at many levels. You may well want to make certain that your data does not cross international boundaries. Your data on the other side of the line may be subject to unexpected consequences of differing regulations, protections, and exposures–on both sides of the line. Export regulations, including deemed export rules need to be considered closely as the export can be an unthinking touch of the keyboard away. Intellectual property law, tax law and other laws and regulations can bite you. Work with the likes of IBM, Oracle, Cisco, HP, Sun and Microsoft in developing these technological solutions.
© 2009 Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
Aging Out: Your Employees or Even You
It has been the increasing fashion of the past decade to push highly educated workers out to retirement at younger and younger ages, hiring younger workers in preference to “older” (over 45), and promoting ever younger workforces as evidence of hiring only the best and the brightest. The bias has been justified as cost effective and technologically necessary. Common wisdom has come to eschew older workers as slow, technologically backward, recalcitrant and too expensive. Not only is the bias not justified, it violates anti-discrimination principles and the Age Discrimination Enforcement Act. It wastes talent. It damages lives. It cripples businesses. It can hurt you, personally. If you set up a system to discriminate against the older worker, eventually your turn will come. Wealth is transitory, and regardless of your success, wealth for the future can disappear with illness, bad fortune or the next bust of a market bubble. But where does the issue rest now?
First, older workers are valuable. Experienced workers simply know more, work faster, are better able to screen out the background noise and get right down to the heart of a problem. Additionally, older workers have seen much more variation in issues, opportunities and problems, have a historical and evolutionary perspective and are often able to draw on experience from different silos, methods, industry sectors and geographical location. They have greater depth. One of the problems with younger workers is that they do not know how little they know and can confidently embark on disastrous courses of action an older worker would have avoided.
In terms of prevailing in an age discrimination case, older workers have very mixed prospects. It may be easier for the older worker to prevail as one of a relatively large group of older workers proving “disparate impact” than in an individual case of discrimination. Older workers’ disparate impact protections continue, however, to be weakened by the ability of employers to show “business necessity” for adverse employment decisions.
Furthermore, older workers’ ability to prevail in an individual age discrimination case, always difficult, has been sharply circumscribed by a very recent US Supreme Court decision in June 2009. Absent new legislation, age discrimination is likely to continue and even increase. In Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc., the Court (guaranteed employment for life) decided 5-4 that in a suit brought under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) the plaintiff employee must establish that age discrimination was the decisive “because of” (“but for”) reason for the employer’s adverse action. Age cannot just be a motivating factor among lawful factors.
This is very different from the Title VII case where discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin can be a “motivating factor” among lawful factors. After a Title VII plaintiff has shown that unlawful discrimination was a motivating factor in the adverse employment decision, the employer must show (has the burden of production and persuasion) that it would have made the same adverse decision regardless of discrimination. Under Gross, this “burden shifting” analysis is not applied under ADEA except in disparate impact cases as previously decided by the Court in a 2008 case, Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Lab.
A key difference to the Court in deciding Gross is that Congress used different language for Title VII and ADEA. The Court practically invites Congress to change the ADEA law, noting that Congress specifically amended ADEA but still did not add any language citing age as a “motivating factor” among mixed lawful and unlawful factors. Interestingly, at the tail end of the decision, the Court complains strenuously of the “problems associated with [the] application” of the “burden shifting framework” and may be inviting legislative revisions of both ADEA and Title VII.
Age discrimination decisions have been all over the map; it is time for clearer legislative drafting to protect workers from generational prejudice. In the final analysis, we have generations living longer healthier lives, and society is not going to function economically or socially if workers are essentially retired by age 55 and yet expect to live to 85 in an environment where pensions are a benefit of the past, retirement benefits can disappear overnight, prospects depend on individual investment acumen for which they have little time or training amid their career demands, and illness, bad luck and markets can destroy retirement savings and investments in a bad quarter.
© Copyright 2009. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. LLC. All Rights Reserved.
