How should I have been hired? (Part Two)

As we discussed yesterday, I wondered if I should have asked what educational benefits (mentoring being a big one) I would get from my employers some 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Of course, the short answer had to be “Absolutely not!” 

It sure wasn’t unrealistic to want mentoring 30–50 years ago, but it was uncommon and largely infeasible because workplace culture and employer incentives were totally different then, and formal mentoring was “terra incognita”. Employers typically expected new hires to “pay their dues,” learn on the job at the “school of hard knocks”.

Formal mentoring as we know it, only began to be studied and institutionalized in the late 1970s–1980s. It’s only relatively recently that mentoring became a formal organizational practice. As far as I was concerned, the above research and any formal mentoring program began to appear after the time I hit the job market, while academic attention (like Kathy Kram’s work in 1988) helped legitimize mentoring as a workplace development tool. 

Kathy Kram

During my active life, workplace norms were top‑down and transactional. Employers expect employees to learn on the job and through their own mistakes; with structured professional development budgets and talent pipelines being far less common than they are today. Let’s say it was more like “sink or swim!” Job seekers also had far less bargaining power if any! 

Labor markets and hiring practices gave employers more leverage, so negotiating for non‑monetary benefits like mentorship was a rarity and most often than not would have seemed to be incredibly presumptuous. 

Today, things have evolved and are much different, so to console myself, I can only accept that I operated in a system that didn’t prioritize employee development; my choices were rational given the incentives. 

I'll have to reconsider this as an important emotional reframe. Another instance when I was clearly thinking far too ahead of my times!

How should I have been hired? (Part One)

As a kid, I never received much praised from my parents. This wasn’t part of their upbringing and their rather tough Alpine mountain culture. That kind of notice would have to come from my elementary school teacher who spotted my potential as a kid, give me an opportunity to shine and sent me on my way to success.

All this to underscore that when I talked about my favorite boss a few days ago, I should have mentioned one of the few regrets I got from my professional life and the fact that I sold myself, instead of having my prospective employers sold me about working with them and showing me (or not) how they would mentor me and participate to my personal growth while extracting huge benefits in the process. 

That’s right, I’m lamenting about the fact that I gave a lot, was compensated monetarily, but didn’t receive much in terms of professional education and I suspect that I’m far from being the only one in that situation. It’s true too that in most of my job searches I was so eager and desperate to get the position 

I wanted that I would have been afraid to have my employer laugh at me and, in the process, tell me to take a hike in being too demanding and difficult. I was simply not self-confident enough to dare ask for free mentoring. While this makes so much sense today, was this unrealistic to ask 50, 40 or 30 years ago? 

We’ll try to find an answer to that question tomorrow…

A twelve year anniversary!

Throughout our married life, my spouse and I have always stayed in one house less than 12 years, as we’ve moved 12 times together. 

Today, however, marks a family record. We have for the very first time lived at least one dozen years in our home and have no plans yet to move out, as we enjoy our place, its convenience and great location.

So, God willing, we might start setting a new record of living an unprecedented number of years in our beloved abode!

My favorite boss…

Often, my wife asks me: “Over the years and in your different jobs, who was your favorite boss?” I’d answer “Tough question! I don’t really know…” What it meant was that one or another wasn’t bad, but I didn’t learn much from him or her. 

As you know mentoring is an extremely essential benefit of being bossed around, and I must admit that none of my former bosses were good at that. In fact, they wouldn’t have even known how to start mentoring the people working for them. 

They seemed to have hired some kind of expertise and were to happy to extract some productivity out of them without having to spend time coaching or guiding them well towards reaching important company goals. 

This pretty reflected how I felt about the subject and my lackluster way of addressing my spouse’s question. Deep inside, I kind of knew that there was a more obvious response to it, but I just couldn’t see it and express it. That was until just a couple of days ago it hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized that through my entire career my best boss had simply been me. 

That may sound pretentious, but please, read on. In a huge way when I was managing my own ski industry distribution company in the 80s and 90s and to a lesser degree when I was a ski instructor in Avoriaz, France, I felt that having me as a boss was swell. In those days, I was in charge, I had full mastery of my destiny and was less disappointed in myself than I would be with all my other bosses on the many occasions I’d venture on the other side of the fence. 

On my own, I would define my goals, refine and modify them as needed, and evolve by espousing the circumstances and the terrain. When needed, I would also become my own coach, improve on that very special skill and refine it as well. I was fulfilled, happy and in control of my conditions and my fate. This wouldn’t come even close to my relationship of dependency from a boss who would not measure to my expectations. 

What a quantum difference!

Trump and the idea of “regime change”…

Since the beginning of the Iran war, Trump has been vacillating about the many reasons he joined forces with Bibi Netanyahu to inflict pain on the Iranian regime and its people. 

After giving us a bunch of reasons, our president and his administration have drifted towards the need for “regime change”, a very tall order when you think that the Mullahs are deeply planted in the governance of their country.

In actuality, Trump and his staff should have conducted a better job of preparing the terrain, but to their credit, they had no idea where they were getting into. This is typically what happens when one is, at the same time, lazy, impatient, lying and hypocritical. 

So here we go, we will be serving regime change that’s always a dangerous and uncertain bet. The only fair question left is where this change is going to happen first, in Iran or in the United States?

Blaming the symptom or the cause? (Part Three)

With today’s world population over 8.3 billion and expected to grow to 9.8 billion in 2050 and then peak from 10.3 to 11.2 billion between 2080 and 2100, its growth rate would have to steadily decline in order to reach these, thanks to global fertility rates dropping almost everywhere. Many countries are now worried about shrinking workforce, aging populations and economic contraction which would suggest that partially, the future environmental challenge will not totally be “too many people,” but partly how the existing population chooses to live or survive depending on its material “progress”. 

Well, AI will come to the rescue and replace a vanishing labor force. We also all know that the subject of population is fraught with delicate issues and has a dangerous history. This in fact is one of the biggest reasons why institutions like government and NGOs avoid openly breaching that taboo subject. Blaming overpopulation has historically been used to justify racist policies, forced sterilization, anti‑immigrant rhetoric that target specific regions or ethnic groups. 

Because of this, scientists and policymakers, with the notable exception of Trump and his supporters, tread very carefully. They focus on systems rather than people and claim that if the world suddenly had 2 billion fewer people but was still burning fossil fuels, deforesting like crazy, continuing over-fishing and still using industrial agriculture the planet would still be in trouble. Situation shows that beyond the well-meaning declarations and broad pledges, very little that’s been seriously done in that direction as we seem woefully incapable of meeting our short-term goals. 

Of course, if we humanity was serious about changing energy systems, land use, and consumption patterns — even with the current population — the planet might recover with an intensity proportional to the kind of sacrifices no one is willing to make. Without exceptions, sacrifices hurt and are hard to make, particularly in our comfortable, cocooned society. 

We need an accident or a crash in order to be forced to change or accept the seemingly unfair governmental restrictions, like we did during Covid-19. This explains why the focus is on the “symptoms” because they’re actually the mechanisms of environmental damage. 

With a “comfortable” developed world unwilling to give up any element of its comfort, the proposed remedial efforts are for naught and I still believe that we’ll need to crash into the wall of an inhabitable planet to realize that we might have irremediably damaged it.

Blaming the symptom or the cause? (Part Two)

Demographers are telling us that the global population may peak around 2050–2100, and growth rates are already falling in most regions. According to the United Nations, the world population is projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050 and then rise toward a peak of 10.3 to 11.2 billion between 2080 and 2100, depending on fertility. 

This is supposed to mean that the future environmental trajectory will depend more on how people live than on how many people exist and that energy transitions, land management, and consumption patterns should matter more than raw population numbers, but will they? This would require getting away from fossil fuel dependence, industrial agriculture, deforestation, urban sprawl and wasteful production systems that are all the dominant causes of warming and biodiversity loss. 

This, in my view, remains a huge question mark. It remains obvious that population increase puts pressure on land use, water demand and habitat pressure. At this moment, it’s fairly easy to claim that one billion additional low‑consumption people have far less impact than a few million high‑consumption people, but who can guarantee that with time, a low poor people’s per‑capita footprint is not going to catch up as their economic situation improves? 

Society is extremely dynamic and with information circulating like never before the “bad example” of runaway consumption we display isn’t going to influence the poor in the good direction. Sure, if the population is a multiplier, it’s hard to put most of the burden on the symptoms. 

These are viewed as the “drivers”, our fossil‑fuel energy systems, our industrial agriculture, deforestation, mining and extraction, consumption patterns and waste systems. All are seen as the lower hanging fruits. Clearly, a growing population makes these drivers bigger, but if it’s not creating them, it’s a bit cavalier to speculate that it can’t amplify them. 

If we removed the drivers but kept the population the same, the impact would drop dramatically but it doesn’t as for instance the Trump administration is no longer motivated to fixing the drivers and the European Union has other priorities against a predatory Russia. We also know that the biggest environmental damage comes from a small fraction of people in the planet’s wealthiest nations. For example, the top 10% of global consumers produce nearly half of all emissions while the poorest 50% produce less than 10%. 

Countries with declining populations (Japan, Italy, Germany) have very high environmental footprints and conversely, countries with fast‑growing populations (many in Africa) have very low footprints. Still if given the opportunity through economic development these same countries would emulate their richer “models”! In the next blog, we’ll explore how a slowing world population might help, so please, stay with me!