Thursday, June 16, 2005

OPERATOR: This is a recording of the Sean Crowley teleconference with M & R Strategic Services, scheduled for Thursday, June 16, 2005 at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time. Excuse me, everyone. We now have Stefanie Weiss, Director of Communications for Civic Ventures in conference. Please be aware that each of your lines is in a listen-only mode. At the conclusion of today's presentation, we will open the floor for questions. At that time, instructions will be given as to the procedure to follow if you would like to ask a question. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Weiss. Ma'am, you may begin.

MS. STEFANIE WEISS: Thanks very much. Good morning everyone. And thanks for joining us for the release of the MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures New Face of Work Survey. The survey released today coincides with the release of a free online 16-page guide, produced by Civic Ventures and funded by the MetLife Foundation, designed to help boomers think about new careers in the second half of life.

The guide is written by Ellen Freudenheim, author of Looking Forward: An Optimist's Guide to Retirement. You can find the full survey report and guide along with specific clicks for the news release about the survey and the guide, the executive summary of the survey and analysis of the survey by Marc Freedman, Professor Kanter and others online at www.civicventures.org.

We have five speakers with us this morning, each of whom will focus on the survey results. Each will speak for just a few minutes, and then we'll open the floor for questions. So let's start with Sibyl Jacobson, President and CEO of the MetLife Foundation, funder of research you'll be hearing about more this morning. For the past five years, MetLife Foundation has devoted considerable resources to promoting healthy aging. Sibyl?

MS. SIBYL JACOBSON: I'm very happy to be here and happy that you are on the phone today. We're very excited about this project of MetLife Foundation and Civic Ventures for the New Face of Work Study. And it certainly fits in with a recent focus over the last number of years that MetLife Foundation has in funding a variety of initiatives that promote healthy and engaged lives for older people. And of course our interest in this field is driven by two things: driven by the demographics and also driven by the need.

I think that the survey adds a significant piece to a growing body of research on baby boomers and older adults and on retirement-what people think about, what they want to do, how they are different from previous generations, and probably most in particular how they are different from their parents in what they expect out of those years. So the survey was 1,000 Americans, and it was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. And this is the first survey to ask those in their 50s, those baby boomers, and then the pre-boomers-sometimes they're called the leading edge boomers-who are in their 60s, what type of work they aspire to, and what they want to accomplish through this work. And I think that the findings hold some "ahas," some surprises, and we intend and hope that they will be critically important as institutions and governments and so forth look at the future and at what older Americans will do.

MS. STEFANIE WEISS: Thank you, Sibyl. Our next speaker is G. Evans Witt, Principal and CEO of Princeton Survey Research Associates International, an internationally recognized expert on public opinion, politics and the media. Evans will talk a little bit about the survey findings.

MR. EVANS WITT: Good morning. Glad to join you all this morning to talk about what we think is a groundbreaking survey about the future. This survey is based on interviews with Americans age 50 to 70, and it focuses on what they expect, what they want to do, and what they would like to do in the second chapter of their lives. This research pulls together the threads of previous research, building on work that we and others have done to explain, we believe, just a bit better or perhaps quite a bit better, what's going to happen in the next 20 to 30 years as baby boomers hit what has been traditional retirement age in America.

In particular, most leading edge baby boomers, in fact most Americans age 50 to 70, are ready for careers of service helping their community-whether now or in retirement. That is, 50% say that they're interested, very interested or somewhat interested in jobs in one of seven specific areas where you give back to your community. The baby boomers are even more interested in the sense-these leading edge baby boomers age 50 to 59-fully 58% of those say they are interested in a job giving back to their community, whether now or in the future. That includes one in five leading edge baby boomers, 21%, who say they're very interested in taking such a job. When we move from right now and what today's leading edge baby boomers and those a little bit older say they're interested in in terms of giving back to their community to the specific issue of retirement-when this group faces retirement-again, giving back to the community is a very important issue for this group. Again, 49%, half of all the Americans in this age group, say that it's important that work in retirement help the community in specific ways. And once again, the leading edge baby boomers are even more dedicated to that thought of giving back to their community once they are working in retirement. Sixty percent of leading edge baby boomers say it's important that work in retirement serve the community and those in need.

This research breaks new ground for a number of reasons. First, it emphasizes and reinforces the findings of previous research that leading edge baby boomers are not just going to sit back and put their feet up in retirement. They're going to work, and they're going to give back to their community. In specific, this survey for the first time explores how this critical group of Americans, leading edge baby boomers and the pre-boomers, will in fact give back to their community.

This survey, as Sibyl says, is based on telephone interviews with 1,000 adults, conducted March 7 through April 11 of this year, and the sampling error margin for results based on the full sample is +/- 3 percentage points. The full survey methodology is in the report, for those of you who are interested.

But why do leading edge baby boomers and in fact this entire age group of workers 50 to 70 want to work in retirement? There are a variety of reasons. Fifty-nine percent say they want to stay involved with others. That's very important to their work in retirement. Fifty-seven percent say that work in retirement gives you a sense of purpose. And nearly half, 48%, say it's very important that their work in retirement improve the quality of life in their community. Now, this is not to suggest that anyone in this group really thinks this is going to be easy, to find this kind of job giving back to their community, whether now or in retirement. Fully 48% of those in this age group say it will be difficult to get a job giving back to their community whether now or in retirement. Only 39% say it will be easy. Some of the folks who will talk later will talk a little bit more about the policy options and the policy changes that may happen to enable leading edge baby boomers to do this. But let me just say that on each of the specific policy changes that we tested in the survey, strong majorities of all Americans, whatever their party, support helping baby boomers work in retirement and give back to their community.

MS. STEFANIE WEISS: Thank you so much, Evans. Next we have Rosabeth Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of 16 books, including her most recent bestseller, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Professor Kanter?

DR. ROSABETH KANTER: I think this is a very significant study added to all of the other things that are talking about what Americans want in later stages of their life, because I think that the leading edge baby boomers who are the ones who staffed the civil rights movement and the women's movement in the 1960s are now about to start a new phase of life that will someday be known as the phase of service. After career success in conventional organizations in which people are climbing career ladders to achieve positions of leadership and high income, they now want to take the same skills and apply them to making their communities a better place. And it's so clear that it's the generation that were activists in the 1960s that now want to be the activists for the next 20 to 30 years of their lives, solving community problems. And this can be a major benefit to America, and in fact, a competitive advantage over other nations that have aging populations where they do not have a tradition of entrepreneurship in the public sector, where people put their skills to work in the community and in non-profit organizations.

I think this is what we could call a "three-fer"-it's a source of meaning for seniors, of significance, of activity, of impact, as well as potential income as we face a crisis in Social Security and Social Security will fund a smaller and smaller portion of seniors' needs, because these people want to go to work and they want to be paid for it where possible.

This is also a source of talent for community and public sector organizations that desperately need not only bodies for work-we have a teacher shortage, we have a nursing shortage-but also that need creative minds that can apply the skills they learned as leaders in their careers-advanced skills-these are not people who want to stuff envelopes or deliver flowers in hospitals-people who have advanced skills and can apply those to public sector and non-profit organizations.

And thirdly, this is potentially a source of healing for America, where we're still debating the role of government in solving public problems. These are people who want to go to work to solve those problems, and as you've already heard, Americans across both parties want to do this. But one of the things that popped out to me in the survey findings is that the people who are most eager to go to work in service jobs are people who feel that they could have a significant or at least a moderate impact when they go to work. The people who thought they would have little or no impact are much less interested. These are people who are leaders, the baby boom generation was taught from birth-this is the Dr. Spock generation-about their own significance. They were raised in very child-centered families in which they learned that they could make a difference in the world and they want to continue to do that in the later stages of their life.

And so that new stage-I don't think we're going to call it retirement anymore-I think we're simply going to call it the third stage of adult life. There's education, there's career success-and people of course have multiple careers-and then there's a stage called service, significance, making a difference, leaving a legacy, leading the community. That's a very wonderful development for this country, but it also will challenge non-profit organizations and community organizations to find ways for people to enter at the top, find ways for people to use their leadership. It will challenge educational institutions, universities, colleges to find ways to give people the new set of skills added to their already considerable accomplishments in life that they can use to make a difference in education or health care, whether they go back into the classroom or they take a leadership position. It will challenge non-profit and community organizations to accommodate the kinds of schedules people want at this stage in life. They're tired of being tied to the workplace, not only 9 to 5, but sometimes 7 to 7, 24/7 in today's world. They want much more flexibility, the survey shows, as well as significance. So that means that community and non-profit organizations as well as the higher education sector, are going to have to accommodate this new stage. I think it's a very exciting prospect for America and it should be encouraged. Thank you.

MS. STEFANIE WEISS: Thank you, Rosabeth. Our next speaker is Joyce Roche, the former President and COO of the Carson Products Company. After 25 years in the corporate world, Ms. Roche left to become the President and CEO of Girls, Inc., where she is now, a national non-profit youth organization dedicated to inspiring all girls to be strong, smart and bold. Her personal story provides some real insights into the survey results. Joyce?

MS. JOYCE ROCHE: Thank you. It's really a pleasure to be here and I guess I'm somewhat of a poster child for the study. I love Rosabeth's comment about the third stage of life, because I did not consider this retirement by any stretch of the imagination. As indicated, after about 25 years, and at that point I was about 52 years old, I was leaving Carson Products then. I had spent almost 19 years as a senior executive in marketing at Avon, and then Carson, and just really felt that at this stage in my career, I thought it was going to be another corporate role, but I felt very strongly that this next thing needed to have a very strong-it would have to be a company with a very strong social responsibility agenda.

But during that time, as I was looking and reviewing companies, I decided that I would do pro bono work for some non-profits whose boards I was sitting on at that stage, because I felt like I had never had the time to really do that and I was going to do something for somebody. In the process of doing that, I got so enthralled with this and saw that my skill was being so fully utilized, I decided that maybe if the right organization came about, I would make a significant change from corporate into non-profit. I went about it by-I happened to have a little bit of luck, because an organization search firm who had put me on my first corporate board, also they specialized in non-profit and corporate searches, so I called one of the partners and had lunch with her and talked about how I was feeling and wondering if in fact she would think that I had three heads if I said that I wanted to do this. And she gave me a great deal of encouragement, she gave me reality checks as to I was not going to have the perks and it wasn't going to be the same salary, and I said I understood that. And she said, well, what would be the right organization? And I said I can tell you where my passion would be and it would have to do with either women or girls and/or education, would be something I think really would get me excited. I went back, and I was doing some consulting at that point, and the pro bono work I was doing, and she called and ended up having the Girls, Inc. search. And I didn't know Girls, Inc. at that point because the organization had changed its name in 1990-it was the old Girls Clubs of America. So it had a 140-year history. And as I looked at it, I said, boy, this really does look like what I would really want to do that would use my skills. And I was lucky, again, in finding an organization that clearly embraced new things and knew that they could utilize the skills of somebody who may not have been a traditional non-profit leader.

Since joining the organization, I have found that it is as challenging work as I have ever done, but it also is extremely rewarding, it fully engages not only my mind and my heart, but it fully utilizes the skills that I had developed in the corporate world. So one thing that Rosabeth said at the end, that the organizations had to accommodate the fact that when someone makes this move, they may not want to do the kinds of hours-I haven't been able to quite cut the hours-but it has been everything else that I could possibly imagine, and as I said, as engaging, as challenging, but at the same time really extremely rewarding and makes me feel like I'm out there, I want to come to work every day and know that I'm making a difference.

MS. STEFANIE WEISS: Thank you so much, Joyce. Our last speaker this morning, Marc Freedman, is the Founder and President of Civic Ventures, a think tank and incubator generating ideas and inventing programs to help society achieve the greatest return on experience. He's also the author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers will Revolutionize Retirement and Change America. Marc? MR.

MARC FREEDMAN: Thank you, Stefanie. And thank you to the other speakers as well. I also am excited about the findings of this study. The original impetus was to try to move beyond some of the established understanding about what the boomers were thinking about doing in this next phase of their lives. We already knew from a number of studies that people were going to make work an important part of their post-midlife years.

Most studies found that between 70 and 80% of the boomers were going to make work a big part of this time. And we also knew from those studies that people wanted to restructure work; they didn't want to keep working those long hours that Joyce Roche and Rosabeth Kanter talked about. They wanted more flexibility. But a gulf in much of the research was the question of what people would actually want to do through work in this stage of life, what they hoped to accomplish, and most of all whether there was any relationship between what society and the economy needed people to do and what their dream was for work in this stage of life. I think our great fear every time you see an article that's about retiring to your dream job, it almost always features somebody who's opening a B&B and this notion of 78 million Americans rushing headlong into this new phase of life out there opening B&Bs didn't seem like something that would either be good for the society or for the economy. And the question is, is there a great disjuncture between what people are aspiring to through work in this stage of life and what we need?

And of course the great encouraging finding of this study is that in fact a significant segment of the population is looking to do the kind of work that we desperately need human beings to do. In fact, it's work that's never going to be automated and it's work that's going to require people who have an enormous amount of talent. These gulfs are not just projected ones; we're already seeing a vast gap in areas like health care, education, non-profit leadership and those gulfs will probably increase in the future. So there seems to be a fit between what people are wanting to do through work in this stage of life and what we need people to do already in the society. I think that that's one of the important findings.

The second is that the debate over the social contribution of the baby boom generation has focused far too much on the routes that previous generations took-membership in civic organizations and volunteering. I don't in any way want to denigrate those kinds of engagements-they're terribly important. But when all is said and done, it may well be that the great contribution to the greater good of this coming wave of people may be through work, work that's a hybrid between serious engagement that includes income and a social purpose. So that's I think also important in reframing the examination of what the boomers can contribute in this next phase of their lives and their work.

I was also struck by how in addition to the need for continued income, which is certainly there, and a strong sense of idealism, that these two more immediate goals of the power of purpose and of people, were very much in the forefront of people's thinking and reasoning and receptivity to this kind of engagement. So even though they saw much to gain individually and even though at the abstract level there seems to be a real fit between untapped resources and unmet needs in this area-very little confidence that it would be easy to move into these positions as much as it adds up to a win-win situation. And I think people are right that in fact all the dynamism, all the energy, all the momentum around this prospect is coming from the individuals themselves and not from the organizations that might use them, not from the policy sector. And in that way, it's akin to the women's movement. I feel in many ways this juncture is like 1965 in terms of women trying to move into jobs where their talent would add a great a deal, but not being embraced with open arms. I think that the answer is going to be a whole new round of innovation that a number of the other commentators talked about already. We're going to need a new generation of policies, of pathways, of programs that make full use of the talent in this population and direct them in areas where we need those resources. It's a tall order, but then again the history of aging in America is a history of spectacular innovation.

Not that long ago, we didn't have Medicare, we didn't have senior centers, we didn't have an Older Americans Act, we didn't even have retirement communities. We invented those, like Social Security, out of whole cloth and I think we're going to have to summon that same kind of creativity as this new generation rushes forward. If they don't find these kinds of roles that provide meaning and impact, they're going to be at loose ends. The nation will lose out on a great opportunity. If they do, it could be a windfall for society, a source of not only individual renewal but social renewal.

MS. STEFANIE WEISS: Thank you so much, Marc. We're now ready to take questions from those who have been so patiently listening.

OPERATOR: At this time, we will open the floor for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press the star key, followed by the 1 key on your touch-tone phone now. Questions will be taken in the order in which they are received. Please identify yourself by name and media outlet before asking your question. If at any time you would like to remove yourself from the question queue, press star-2. Again, to ask a question, press star-1. Our first question comes from Kristi King of WTOP radio.

MS. KRISTI KING: Good morning. Kristi King, WTOP radio. When you talk about these service-oriented jobs, I heard you mention education and health care. What types of functions do you anticipate these people could fill, will fill?

MS. STEFANIE WEISS: Marc?

MR. MARC FREEDMAN: It's great you asked that question because traditionally we've pushed people in this stage of life into roles which seem more designed to keep the old folks busy, to keep their blood flowing, than to really draw on the talent in the population. And what we feel is that there's been a massive investment in the human capital of the baby boom generation. We couldn't build universities quickly enough in the 60s, and they've acquired all this experience and the question is are we going to put them in jobs that they could have easily done when they were 22 at 62? Are we going to write off all that experience? Or are we going to make full use of it? I think Joyce Roche's commentary offers one glimpse of the way in which we can go beyond the envelope stuffing. There's a wonderful piece that Fortune did a few years ago about retired people from the business world trying to have an impact in the non-profit sector, but running into brick walls, and it was entitled "Candy Striper My Ass." And so I think we're trying to move to a new generation that really draws not only on the good will, but also the human and social capital investments that we've made over the last 40 years.

MS. KRISTI KING: Yeah, but specifically, I heard the phrase "contribute to their community" numbers and numbers of times, and I think that there were seven criteria or something. I mean if you were to make a laundry list of the types of jobs these people would be filling if they could, what would these jobs be?

MR. MARC FREEDMAN: Well, at one point in the survey, we asked people what-and this was not a multiple choice question-we asked people what would be their ideal job in this stage of life, and not surprisingly, retail finished at the top of the list. And that's a sector that's reached out to this population and marketed and recruited them. But right behind were teaching and work in-essentially in the human services. And work in health care was just a little bit further down the list. So those are some ideas, and we already have, for example, vast shortages opening up in areas like teaching, nursing, non-profit leadership.

MS. KRISTI KING: Okay, thank you.

MR. MARC FREEDMAN: Thank you.

OPERATOR: Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press the star key, followed by the 1 key on your touch-tone phone now. Again, star-1 to ask a question. Okay, there are no further questions at this time.

MS. STEFANIE WEISS: Thank you all for coming to this call this morning. If you're looking for other examples of people over 50 who have switched into good work or you have other questions, please give me a call: Stefanie Weiss, Communications Director for Civic Ventures, (202) 478-6151, or call Sean Crowley at (202) 478-6128. We'll be happy to help you. And thanks so much for coming. Have a good day. Bye now.

OPERATOR: This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect.