November 25, 2009

What I Did Before Everything Became so Important

During a recent casual conversation about the weekend, a friend asked me, “What did you do on Sunday?”

I thought through my activities that day – doing volunteer work for Students Run Philly Style at the Philadelphia Marathon, driving to the beach, reading the Sunday editions of the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer cover-to-cover, and even taking a nap – and responded, “All the stuff I used to do before everything became so important.”

In essence, I reverted back to behaviors that created joy on a Sunday in the ‘90s -- before the first decade of the 21st century brought the Internet, the Blackberry and related technologies that imparted an overlay of urgency to every activity, regardless of true significance.

I suspect a similar regression will take hold as 2009 moves toward closure and business leaders reflect on “what they did” over the past year and decade. Did they lose sight of core priorities as speed and transparency of information made everything become so important? Looking backward may help clarify activities that matter most for the new year and new decade that beckon.

November 16, 2009

Of “Gigs” and “Odd Jobs”

With the unemployment rate now exceeding 10 percent, it is clear that many businesses remain reluctant to hire full-time employees. But the American worker’s DNA is hard-coded with innovation, which makes me wonder -- how many of the 8-plus million of those who have lost jobs since the recession began in December 2007 have now turned to work opportunities in the “underground economy,” pursuing “gigs” and “odd jobs” that yield pay “under the table”? 

My hunch is that there are a lot more active workers in the underground economy segment than is readily apparent or acknowledged. That hunch is supported by the growing frequency of related anecdotes from friends, business associates and job seekers – stories of younger people working in restaurants and getting other cash gigs to pay the rent, and older men in their fifties now doing neighborhood odd jobs. These types of job arrangements are not unfamiliar; what’s new is they have become an integral part of workers’ longer-term survival plans.

What is your sense of the growth of the underground economy? And will the rising numbers of longer-term paying “gigs” and “odd jobs” and people doing “what they love” make talent harder to access when businesses return to hiring full-time employees?