While GE isn’t faring so well these days– as the credit tsunami sweeps the world– its organizational structure addresses this type of structural diversification in corporate form. The thinking is that as nuclear power softens, wind power picks up and light bulbs turn on and off. What’s critical is that there are enough projects going on, with enough diversification, so that there are multiple contingencies with multiple flows of gratification— for GE, cash flow and for the individual, self-esteem maintenance and resilience.

Individuals’ successful self-management, especially in a downturn, require the same kind of thinking. The pottery- throwing television executive who enjoys (and seems to be successful in ) his FOREX trading, while delighting in the stories his recent college graduate children bring from the globalizing workplace, is capable of drawing upon more personally meaningful spheres of productivity than the banker, whose sole love until downsizing had been derivative trading. In the downturn, the television executive retains a broader range of activity options, regardless of their immediate utility in generating income.

Emotional Asset Diversification is a self-directed insurance policy for life’s psychologically gloomy economic periods. It allows self-definition to operate across many personally meaningful categories of work, despite temporary shortfalls in earnings.

Now, my blogging chums have given me tips on traffic, which, after all, is what I want- if this thing is to be read: its about the getting of attention, right? Or is it? William Saroyan conveyed the idea in “The Time of Your Life” that there would be no anger in the world if every aspiring writer could get published. Blogging has accomplished that. The ether is filled with words, ideas, information, and no time to read it. And of course, often, the lingering question of what is worthwhile to read. 

So the silence has allowed me to “try on” a generational divide, to reflect upon an approach to media very different than anything I’ve known before. And its begun to inform my thinking on intergenerational difference and misperceptions.

The management and psychology literatures mourn the passing of the watercooler as providing a sense of place- an oasis for connection: Its true: we’ve experienced an historical shift. Hierarchical organizations evolve to flexible, adaptable smaller functional teams and groups. We can work globally with anyone; we have become portable.

Just as Taylorism stripped craft, a century ago, of integrity, and substituted specific movements for comprehensive skills, we’ve evolved: the waning of the “psychological contract” between worker and management, has meant that the worker must look out for herself.

But when she does, the Baby Boom or GenX manager criticizes her for being “Y” , so narcissistic. Narcissistic? Christopher Lasch wrote the manifesto on it in the 70’s: and the murderously envious judgment is (from BB and X to Y) is that Y is more successfully like the Boom than the Boom ever was!

However, what the BB doesn’t get is that interconnectedness via IT is a potent surrogate for the watercooler. Neither is a better spot; each is time-bound. For those of us who’ve known the watercooler and who’ve been comfortable there, its passing may be missed. Especially if being a blogger recapitulates the loneliness of a summertime lemonade stand on an untraveled road.

Still…… here I am, trying out the present (if not modernity) with nary a hit: and I “get” the feeling of antiquity of my clients, sending their vitae into the void: and achieving no response. And how many times, trying to swim with currents that Gen X and Y understand, Boomers have proudly told one another that they are “on” Linkedin: Now the question becomes, what to do with it?