Old, Smart, Productive Old. Smart.

Old, Smart, Productive

OLD. SMART. PRODUCTIVE" talks about how people can be productive at work into their 70's and 80's. This is contrary to the popular concept that people's work performance decline after they are 50. One of the most important concepts in this article is that work productivity involves the concept of practical intelligence. Practical intelligence is the ability to solve ill-defined business problems using rules of thumb that can't be put down on paper. Example: how to deal with a difficult boss. A study of 200 banking executives found that the ones who exhibited the highest "practical intelligence" were as likely to be old as young -- and the older among them excelled even though their scores on traditional intelligence tests were no better than average for their age. "Practical intelligence stays with you," says Colonia-Willner. "You don't lose it when you get older."

The rap that older workers are inflexible and uncreative is also overstated. Research by economists David W. Galenson of the University of Chicago and Bruce A. Weinberg of Ohio State University finds that the innovations of older people are more likely to be "experimental," vs. The break-the-mold "conceptual" innovations of younger types. The conceptual types tend to have a bolt from the blue, whereas the experimenters build new ideas from a lifetime of observation, trial, and error. Among the "experimental" innovators who produced some of their best work later in life: painters Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne, author Fyodor Dostoevsky, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright

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Do you agree or disagree with some of the claims and opinions expressed in the article?

The graying of the American workforce is an area involving many issues. What more can be done to tap the productivity potential of older workers? According to this article, more flexibility need to be introduced into pay and retirement systems in order create more options as workers age. Another possibility is to allow companies to convert traditional defined-benefit pensions, which encourage retirement as early as age 55, to cash-balance plans, which have no built-in incentives to retire. Perhaps the most controversial idea is to break the typical link between pay and seniority. As more people work into their late 60s and 70s, pay should be adjusted to match how much people work and what they accomplish on the job.

Basing pay on performance is a controversial idea because what the criterions of performance for most hi-level professional jobs that older workers are performing are ambiguous at best. How does one determine success at a professional job? Unlike a manual job, where productivity can be measured in, for example, widgets per hour, professional job performance involve intangible factors such as interpersonal relations and communication skills. In many cases, performance may be defined solely in terms of what your boss thinks of your work performance. This raises issues of fairness and equity. Seniority provides an objective standard.

Another issue is raising the retirement age to 70. There are many people who may not want to work and/or are physically unable to work on a fulltime basis until 70. Raising the retirement age does not take into account these people. What is definitely needed is liberalization of the disability standards so that people who are unable to work can start collecting their Social Security benefits at an earlier age.