Polarization of various forms is upon us:  great wealth and scarcity, fast and slow paced life options, info overload and info indigestion.  Based on currently emerging trends, these forms of polarization of society: weather, behavior, work and play, will create new ideas, opportunities for businesses, choices for people and clues to how society may evolve in the 21^st century.  

What is this Family Thing?

Alone? Create Your Own!

EMERGING TRENDS:

The concept of family continues to mutate rapidly and radically first from the notion of  tribes to multi-generational to nuclear family. In the last two decades alone, the single parents, the teenage mother, the gay parent, the surrogate mother, and many other options for “family” unheard of even 25 years ago have crept into social acceptance.  

While the legal, social, and economic ramifications of many of these are still in flux; a whole new concept is fast emerging. Creating your “adult family”. You choose the people who you want to be your family, and define the ground rules, traditions, and customs for the family. Two factors are influencing this.

First the need of the aging boomers for an immediate, intergenerational family in light of the fact that today in the age of choices, we travel and grow so far apart from our biological families that we often have more in common with total strangers in “chat rooms”.  And at the same time in urban areas there is an increasing social acceptance of vast deviations from what previously constituted family and community. 

Starbucks lounge has become the defacto daily quick fix for a sense of both family and community. Hardly satisfying, but it’s a trend looking for other places to stick to and congeal.  

One critical social need that will drive this as the baby boomers age, is a great fear of dying alone and all forms of “families” will emerge to fill the void. Boomers are defined by their need to create their own destiny and as they age, “unfinished family business” will be a persistent theme that many who will have spent their adult years “achieving” will want to try to address before they move on to the next galaxy. Opportunities abound.

NEXT OPPORTUNITIES:

If you are a healthy, creative, sociable person, with a unique personal story to tell, you will be in high demand to be part of such families. And if you happen to have a useful skill to contribute, then all the better. A person may be a member of more than one family at one time. People will create many rituals that are new and unique and many retail/service/professional opportunities will be created to fill the new family traditions and life styles.

A mundane example could well be architects finding an increased demand for the 60′s concept of co-housing that will mutate into many forms depending on the “chosen” family structure and needs of the “created family”.

Live in place dying.  What’s coming to a city near you is high rise housing that combines independent living, assisted living, and nursing facilities all in one building in the middle of downtown, not out in some place bucolic.  Harvard, MIT and Mass General Hospital are collaborating to produce ” a multi-general residential community of a diverse group of people with an affinity for university life.”  University affiliated multi-generational housing is just the tip of this iceberg.

Similarly, many new rituals of death and dying will evolve as these families of individuals decide what would be meaningful to them. Scattering ashes in the backyard is passe, having them sprinkled among the stars in outer space can soon be arranged. Services that cater to helping you create and desolve your self created family, like bridal and wedding consulting services, will flourish as a niche in the next 20 years. Like the resurgence of middle aged novices entering religious orders, many will find family in existing religious and other communities. Start your own family around a common interest or theme and see them flock.

Some families may even want to “stay together” in some form after they die, while others may want to be transformed into interactive avatars on the web. The reality is that in this age of personal evolution and change more of us will grow emotionally distant from and live and die physically away from our biological families.  Personal coaches and other forms of personal guides will also proliferate as surrogates for traditional family support systems of the past.  

And therefore the need for an immediate family that is based on the specific “support system” that is meaningful to your specific personal identity will create concepts about “family” that might remain outside the legal system for a while before they get lumped under “domestic partnerships,” or some other jargony title for social and political convenience. In the meantime, think way outside that box on your neck and find your service niche that caters to these contemporary forms of families. 

According to the Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College these boomers in the US will be inheriting in the ball park of $11 to $17 trillion dollars worth in estates from their parents in the next two decades. They will spend it all on themselves, and that too mostly on preserving their idea of youthfulness in any way that they can.  Feeling young is the cornerstone of this generation’s identity.

Don’t just stand there , go create that family you care to live with and die for.   

Let your imagination run.

Create the future and smell the rose, its your move!

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN?

COMPELLING VISIONS WILL ATTRACT COMPELLING TALENT.

EMERGING TRENDS:

As the line between work and non-work becomes increasingly blurred especially for the entrepreneur/consultants and those working in the information based new economy, companies that have a clear, compelling mission and a culture that fosters innovation, rewards leadership, and values interaction will prevail in attracting and retaining the best talent. Talent, not money, will be the scare commodity of the 21^st century. Retaining the best talent is and will be a must for most companies to remain at the cutting edge; the mediocre can be farmed out to the back offices in Bulgaria and Bangalore for now. And money alone will not lure the lone ranger of the wild wild web. She will want three things: to be recognized as an individual, to be part of a mission that will change the world, and most of all, the independence to be creative and think completely without restraint, even freedom to reinvent the wheel just for the heck of perfecting it her way!

Constant change in organizational structure, flattening hierarchy, moving deadlines, fluctuating size, malleable configuration and even radical shifts in company mission will make the workplace extremely chaotic by 20^th century standards. But those who thrive on creative chaos and can build and create the next new idea, the next new thing to move ideas even faster, make nanotechnology more ubiquitous, or find a quicker, easier way to get information off the web, will survive past the age of 30; the rest will burn out or find more stable jobs in the old economy (maybe?). The New Economy will demand 250% of you 24/7, but the rewards can be magnificent if you have the wherewithal or a personal coach to help you keep your head on your shoulder, and stay away from the ugly smell of (lBO) Internet Burn Out that will be all around us in 10 years, the chic but real illness that will plague the emerging technologies based sectors of the New Economy.

NEXT OPPORTUNITY:

Balancing work and personal life will become increasingly difficult, yet increasingly more important as the 20 something becomes 30 something with 2 kids, a $2 million condo or town house, 3 vacation homes, and a BMW SUV with no time to juggle it all. Is this all there is to life!! There must be more to life! Will these questions be asked more often by 20 year olds than by 50 year olds during their mid-life crises?

What are the opportunities you ask? Smart Companies will provide in-house personal coaches for their star executives and high priced talents so they do not burn out and can have it all. Smart Companies will also encourage the blurring of work and personal life for those stars who they must keep to maintain product edge and market cap. Perks like stock options are passé; Bonuses will become increasingly more innovative and personal than simple money.  The new bonuses will be customized and may include annual extreme sports packages, a personal coach, a house in Nevas to work from for half the year, a live-in robot or whatever the new life style demand. The exact package will be the star’s pick! If you see yourself offering one of these services, you could be someone’s bonus, one of those perk s; go and market it to the Smart Companies.  And if you are one of the company stars, then the sky is your limit when imagining your must-have bonuses. Mix and match the many aspects of who you are with your immediate and long term needs.

If you are one of the star talents of today, then avoiding burnout by 30 is your primary concern. Being a strategic coach, futurist and wise guy myself, I’d make sure that the best personal coach is part of your personalized benefits package. The Smart Companies such as IBM, Razorfish, Cisco, Toyota, and Southwest, for example, offer many of these to their employees to engender loyalty. Some send a third of the company on a Caribbean cruise each year. Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic personally entertains a cross section of his best employees at his private island resort in the Caribbean each year.

Many companies have wine and soft ball clubs to maintain and motivate group cohesion. That’s not what this is about. This is about finding your inner star. And stars will always need more than just perks to stay and the best things to offer a star employee are a lot of freedom and plenty of challenge, along with the perks package of their imagination.  Because quitting to join the next big thing has become so fashionable, the young and talented strive for “portfolio careers” not “dream jobs”. For the star talent the trend is Freeagent.com. Expose your star potential and offer it up to the highest bidder!

Let your imagination run.

Create the future and smell the roses, it’s your move!