Ugh, baby boomers, retirement, selling the business … ouch. Strikes me like “lions, tigers, and bears,” in the Wizard of Oz. Scary.

I’m 61. It was my choice to change my job more than two years ago, so that now instead of managing my company with 45 employees I’m writing, speaking, blogging, and teaching. And I thank God that I had that choice. The company’s better off with a new management team, and I’m better off with a new job. But I worry about the rest of us. Retirement scares the hell out of me.

One of my closest friends retired two years ago. Now he’s bored out of his mind, looking for things to do, and not happy about it.

I’ve seen some successful retirements: it seems to work when they jump from one thing to another, something they like, something they’ve always wanted to do. Golf and fishing, or the equivalent, are rarely enough.

One variable that I’m sure matters is liking what you do. As my good friend now retired used to talk about it with relish, just 3-4 years ago, it always sounded great to him, but horrible to me. And, no surprise, he was tired of his work, but had nowhere else obvious to go. I was getting tired of the managing, but I did have somewhere I wanted, badly to go: the writing, speaking, etc. I still love the company I started, just not the day-to-day management of it. I liken my new job here to the concept of a safe harbor. It’s different, it’s easily separable from what I did for years, but it’s still the same company, same industry. And it also keeps me away from meddling with the new management, which (I’m pretty sure) is a relief to them.

Apparently I’m not the only one. I just read Steve King’s Greying of the Workforce post on Small Business Labs. Lots of grey-haired folks are staying on longer. And that’s because they want to, not because they have to.

And then there’s this, which turned up last week in Why Retirement is Bad For You, on Forbes.com

Studies show that men who retired from corporate jobs, donned their gold watches and lazed about at a resort lived measurably shorter lives than those who sought productive work (e.g., volunteering for organizations like SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives). In fact, plenty of retirees who traded productive work for sunshine and early-bird dinners dropped dead surprisingly soon after making the transition.

That seems like a variation on the same theme. Those older people in the work force are probably way better off for it, at least if they figure out how to be in jobs they like. Maybe that’s the best answer to an aging population?

I didn’t want to add another Ted Kennedy tribute to the world today, but Dan Levine (schoolmarketer in twitter) tipped me off to Ted Kennedy, Low Potential Leader by Sarah Green on a Harvard Business School blog; and I couldn’t resist passing it on. Especially this last paragraph:

So for me, today, Ted Kennedy’s life is a reminder that much can be achieved by late bloomers; that you don’t have to have your career all figured out by the time you’re 25, 35, or even 45. It’s a reminder to look beyond your little cadre of overachieving stars for the person who doesn’t have it all together. Don’t count him or her out. There’s always time.

Here’s more from that post, good background. I shouldn’t have needed reminding, because I’m old enough to have lived through all this, but still …

He’d taken six years to graduate from college (getting banished for two after he tried to cheat on a test) and been strongly discouraged by his family to run for the Senate in 1962. They didn’t think their black sheep could win. In 1969, he left a party with Mary Jo Kopechne and drove into a lake, an accident that resulted in her death. In 1979 while running for the Presidential nomination, he couldn’t answer a softball question about why he wanted to be president. He didn’t even make it out of the primaries. His youth — and I use that term elastically — was marred by drinking and womanizing. In 1981 he and his first wife announced their divorce.

And yet, ultimately, Edward M. Kennedy did become a leader. As a strategist and negotiator, he was the Senate’s “happy warrior.” In a body notorious for gridlock, he got things done. As a mentor, he was generous with his time and influence; and the more generous he was, the more that influence grew. Historians will argue about whether he was one of the most powerful senators of all time — or the most powerful senator of all time.

(Image by marysuephotoeth via Flickr)

Ah yes, the good old days. How quickly time passes. My youngest graduated from college last weekend. She can barely remember life before cellphones, and can’t remember life before personal computers or VCRs, because both of those were born before she was.

A graduation is a milestone event, and milestone events generate this kind of thinking. How much the world has changed, and how quickly. When I graduated from college in 1970:

1. The university had a computer in a basement that took up the space of an SUV and had way less power than an iPhone does now. Computer science students programmed it with perforated cards.
2. The dorms had one phone per floor. Long distance calling costs were significant. I was in the Midwest, so I’d call my parents in California once every couple of months.
3. We wrote letters. We read letters.
4. We used typewriters for every college essay, paper, and assignment. We’d often retype an entire page to correct an error. Sometimes we’d reword things to make the pages end or begin with the correct word so we could insert an additional page.
5. Four-function calculators existed, but nobody we knew had one. You could have bought a new low-end car for the price of two four-function calculators.
6. I did my sophomore year abroad, and the university sent us from New York to Europe on an ocean liner. That was cheaper than flying.
7. We wrote checks when we had to, used cash most of the time, and we got the cash from the bank teller window, not an ATM.
8. Credit cards were rare. Our parents had them.
9. Television was broadcast over the air. We watched in real time or not at all. We had 5 or 10 channels to choose from.
10. When we were driving we listened to the radio, or cassette tapes.

And that’s just technology, or a smattering of technology.  When I think of social evolution, and environmental deterioration, the end of the cold war, the rise of terrorism, polar ice caps … like we used to say: “far out, man.”

True confession: I love writing. I love short sentences, strong words, making myself understood.

I think most, if not all, good bloggers like writing. Video people do vlogs and YouTube, poets go to Twitter (say, what?), but bloggers are writers. Almost all of my favorite blogs — I’ve got the blogroll on this blog, rightmost column, near the bottom — are written by people who care about writing. Not that they don’t care just as much about business, their main content area; but they’re writers.

Yes, I’ve done all the startups in my bio; yes, I have the MBA degree; and yes, I built Palo Alto Software. But if I could have made a decent living just writing, I would have.

Flashback: 1970, I was 22, wanted to write, studied literature. I was in a PhD program in comparative literature, briefly; ended up with MA in Journalism. UPI, McGraw-Hill, Mexico City, and whoosh, the 1970s all gone.

Flashback: 1979, journalist, bored filling space between ads, enrolled in Stanford University business school. Then I fell in love with business planning, helped to start Borland International, founded Palo Alto Software, founded bplans.com. And grew it, slowly for years, no outside investment. Tough times, good times.

And suddenly it was 2007, 40+ employees and a great management team, me struggling with changed technology, and I changed jobs. And started blogging. That change was Part 1 of this series.

So what helps me a lot is that I like writing. As a journalist I wrote a lot for many different publications. I also wrote published fiction (not very good, by the way, not worth citing, but they paid me) (and I’m not including market research that was wrong, either) and a full-length novel that got some second looks, but never got published.

So now, you can see how much blogging I do by looking at the sidebar here on the right. You can’t see that I’m also writing a lot on a family site, a personal site, and even an anonymous pure writing site.

If you’re going to be blogging a lot, you have to like writing.

A nice person almost apologized to me for not having her business on Facebook. I said: “but why?”

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest of that “social media stuff” may or may not be good business. But not just for its own sake. It has to be part of a strategy.

Otherwise, it may or may not be fun, depending on who you are and what you like to do; but it’s not good business without a related plan for how it’s supposed to help. Does it generate leads? Page views? Validation? Or is it just a rationalization for spending time doing something you like, like keeping up with friends, being clever.

My blogging has a business strategy. I don’t sell anything, but I do talk about business planning and business management. It relates to my books, my software authorship, and the company I founded. It generates page views in the Bplans.com domain. It validates.

So it’s fun, but it’s good business too. In this case, at least. It relates directly to validation of product, to page views, and to marketing objectives.

What is it for you? What’s the business objective? How to you measure achievement of that objective? Do you have metrics to review? Do you remember to review them?

Benjamin Floyd of Read Click Done asked me after yesterday’s post: “how do you do it?” Two books, 1400 or so posts, 1300 or so tweets in the last two years. “Where do you find the time.”

Fair question. Reminds me of Bob Sutton’s Really, I Write it Myself. So do I. Bob thanks his editors, and so do I. But yeah, I write it all myself. (Well, there was that one guest post on angel funding, but it was the only exception.)

It’s a full-time job

To all the real business people feeling insufficient because experts say they’re supposed to be doing all this as a sideline, I say: relax. That’s a myth. A post now and then and some tweets here and there, maybe; but this blogging I do is a full-time job.

I go to the office every day, and I’m there all day except meetings (and traveling, and teaching, and speaking gigs, and angel investment, but that detracts from my point, so forget I said it).

I’m often writing at night too. And on weekends.

I also use scheduling. For example, I’m on vacation with family today, so I wrote this last Saturday, to be posted today.

Repeat: it’s a full-time job. It doesn’t just happen.

It’s no coincidence that my new life blogging and writing and speaking and teaching, and tweeting too for the last few months, was a delightful baby-boomer late 50s career change. While I’m still employed full time by Palo Alto Software, the company I founded, I don’t run it. Nobody reports to me. As I said in yesterday’s part 1, my business card says “President” but it should say Chief Blogging Officer.

Two years ago this month I started blogging. Just a couple weeks after naming Sabrina Parsons CEO of Palo Alto Software. I remained president, but switched my job to blogging, writing, speaking, and teaching. I guess I should have changed my title to CBO, for chief blogging officer.

I didn’t understand at first …

“I’m a business plan expert,” I said, naively. “I write how-to stuff. It doesn’t work on blogs. It’s static.”

Sabrina, however, insisted.

Set up your Google reader. Start reading Anita Campbell, John Jantsch, Guy Kawasaki, Pam Slim. You’ll figure it out.

What happened? On the day of that conversation I’d posted seven times on my one main blog Planning Startups Stories. As of today I’ve posted 700 posts on that one, plus 460 posts on Up and Running, my blog at Entrepreneur.com, plus 43 on Huffington Post, a couple dozen on Small Business Trends, about a dozen on USNews, and 140 on Planning Demystified. And come to think of it, I’m also posting on Business in General, Email Fail, and some others.

I read a lot of great blogs. Those four above, Steve King’s Small Business Labs, Seth Godin, Bob Sutton. Oh. I just checked. Several hundred links on my Google reader. Better stop listing. I owe thanks to so many others.

I think I get LinkedIn now. I’ve been answering questions in LinkedIn too … I’ve got a good ranking in the business plan category there. I’m connected with people I know and like.

Lately I’m loving Twitter. I’ve tweeted more than 1,200 times. I love keeping up with friends and favorite bloggers, the news in general, a few celebrities, and, my favorite benefit of Twitter, links to Web things that interested the people I follow. My Twitter friends keep me up to date. I love it. I don’t do Twitter clutter: no tweets about what’s for lunch, going home, ball games or weather; I do tweets about links, issues, articles, people, news.

I’m still struggling with Facebook, trying to figure out how to resolve the inherent conflict between use for business, keeping track with business-related contacts, and use for personal, photos from the kids and grandkids, keeping up with cousins and nieces and nephews. I’m a split personality in Facebook.

So for the record, they were right, I was wrong. I did have blogging in me. “And,” they added (flashing back to that conversation two years ago), “your blogging will be good for our company.” They were right about that, too.

I don’t think anybody (certainly not I) realized how much I’d enjoy writing again. Maybe it’s that 30-some years ago, before I got the MBA degree and got into business, I was a journalist. I was a foreign correspondent in Mexico City. I was night editor for United Press International (UPI) there, then I was a McGraw-Hill World News (think Business Week) stringer there, and I freelanced a lot too.

Not that journalism is the same as writing. In my case, I also wrote fiction, got a short story published, wrote a novel that got some second looks, but never got published (no loss, it wasn’t that good). My BA degree was in literature, and I got an MA in journalism too, just before going to Mexico for years, and long before coming back to the U.S. to get the MBA degree.

So let me say that I love it. It’s been great for me. But it’s also been very good for business, too, which is really cool. But that’s another post, scheduled for tomorrow.

I love twitter. What blogging is to email, Twitter is to instant messaging (IM) … and then some. You can follow me on Twitter as Timberry. I’m like a fish with a shiny new thing. And, with due respect to the MSNBC line (if you don’t get it, you’re too old) — I’m 61. But that’s nothing: my 89-year-old dad is on Twitter too.

Consider this picture of Twitter usage published earlier this month on TechCrunch:

Something’s happening there.

1: Vocabulary

But first, some vocabulary (just to get it straight): Twitter is web publishing in 140-character snippets. A tweet is one of those snippets. To tweet means typing those snippets into Twitter. To follow is what you do (takes a click) to get access to somebody’s tweets. A follower is somebody who follows you. To retweet means to take somebody else’s tweet and tweet it again, giving them credit, to your followers. Your followers can also be called tweeps, or sometimes tweeple.

Is it all too cute? Avoid the now-famous Stephen Colbert gaffe with the wrong verb.

2: I Hate Twitter

About Twitter backlash. The Daily Show take on it, Samantha Bee ignoring the interview while peering into a cellphone keyboard, was hilarious. The Twitter Facebook users accuse it of twitterizing itself.  The Google search for “twitter bashing” turns up half a million hits. “I hate Twitter” is good for more than 18 million.

So here are some good reasons to hate Twitter:

1. Twitter clutter. The “I’m having dinner now” or “I’m going home now” inanities. I did that too when I started, as if I were telling family members “arrived in Denver airport.” I get it now: Nobody cares what you’re doing. Tweet something interesting, or nothing at all (note to self: and don’t try to make cute contractions for Twitter clutter. Doesn’t work.)
2. Twitter selling. Ads are ads, even at 140 characters per tweet. Infomercial I don’t mind, when there’s actual info — happens a lot — but there is selling going on. (The good news, though, is that you only get that once. Don’t like it? Stop following. A lot like changing the channel. If you don’t follow them, they don’t bother you).
3. Tweeting at meals, in conversations, or at meetings or movies or events is really annoying.
4. Tweeting while driving is at best stupid, at worst, manslaughter.
5. People collect followers. The more, the better. The Twitter version of counting friends in Facebook. Now we have some Web applications designed to get you more followers. Ugh. People measure themselves and compete on number of followers.
6. It’s really distracting. It gets in the way of getting things done (of course, that’s actually a good thing disguised as bad; the same would be true of everything fun or interesting except work).
7. I hate it that Steven Wright, the comedian, master of the one liner, isn’t on Twitter (that’s a good thing too, because maybe he’ll start.)

3: I Love Twitter

Consider this an enthusiastic hooray for relationships in 140-character snippets. Crazy as this sounds, ironic indeed, but some of my Twitter friends feel like real friends to me. When they tweet their latest blog posts, I go, I read, I comment. When I tweet my latest blog posts, they go, read, and comment. They recommend me to others. I recommend them. I ask for recommendations, they respond. Sometimes it’s just “I liked your last blog post” and sometimes it’s “does anybody know a restaurant in Portland that does Thanksgiving dinner?”

I blog a lot these days. I care about other people in the same general topic areas. It’s nice to follow them on Twitter.

So, then here are some good reasons to love Twitter:

1. Keeping up with some professional relationships. I know that seems incredible, more so if you knew me. I’m kind of a hermit. I hate cocktail parties. But I like keeping up with people in Twitter.
2. Fascinating real-time constantly scrolling updates on interesting new blog posts, news, issues. I follow some people whom I respect, and they point out interesting ideas, posts, etc. I work in tweetdeck, and it’s like having a scrolling world of interesting little tidbits.
3. Writing. Sometimes good writing. Good tweets are amazing. See number 5, below.
4. Publishing. Think of it as publishing short snippets to people who want to read them.
5. Someone’s tweets get repetitive, or become sales pitches, or just Twitter clutter? Unfollow them. It’s as satisfying as changing the channel.
6. Taking responsibility: people with real names and real pictures. You can’t delete a tweet.
7. Maybe Steven Wright will get on Twitter in the future.

4: Twitter in Business

Seems like almost everybody on Twitter is a social media marketing expert offering to show the rare non-social-media-marketing experts how to make money on Twitter. Seems that Twitter can be good for people in the expert business. But is it good for business? Or, the question of the last month or so, are you an idiot if you’re in business and not in Twitter?

Twitter is no more good or bad for business than telephones, letters, conversations, or pies in the face. The medium isn’t the message; the message is the message. I have lots of twitter friends who are straight, like it, keep in touch with it, and — lo and behold — that’s good for their business. But is being in Twitter good for business? Nope.

I can’t figure out Twitter and relationships. It’s oxymoronic, and, sometimes, just plain moronic. But it brings me closer to blogging and Web people I like and respect. Paradox, I suppose.

5. A Few Good Tweets

At its best, it really is writing, and a new kind of self publishing. For evidence, I call on David Petheric (clarocada on Twitter) and his post Top Tweets of 2008 on DigitalBiographer.com. He gets the credit for the collection, and I’m choosing just a few:

• brandmilitia: Sometimes the fastest way to screw up a company’s social media strategy is by letting the marketing department run it.
• chrisbrogan: Just made a VC choke somehow on my speaker’s fee. Tough times for startups in 09, kids.
• copyblogger: I’ve got to go on a carriage ride through Highland Park tonight with 4 kids and 3 lawyers. This is why God gave us scotch.
• boris: “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” — Jorge Luis Borges
• SaraD: Accidental Death & Dismembership Insurance. I passed on that. I choose Membership.
• mathie: I need a pair of headphones. Or a shotgun and at least 5 cartridges. Or an office of my own.

There: see what I mean? Good stuff. It reminds me of something that came over the teletype 38 years ago when I was on the night desk at UPI in Mexico City. Rumor had it he put this onto the service and walked out for good. His tweet, 38 years ahead of its time, was:

“Too much work, too little money. I quit.”

And, what the heck, my favorite tweet from my 900-some tweets:

Gray cold comfort. Clouds pressing the forested hills downwards, covering the tops. Ghosts of holidays past. Western Oregon in November.

I felt poetic that day.

Conclusion: a quote from an NBC web story about twitter:

The nicest thing about Twitter might be that it’s a grassroots medium nobody has quite figured out a way to make money off of yet. Not even the guys who created it.

My thanks to Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen for posting about this brilliant two-minute video, from youtube, that speaks for itself. It has a real twist to it.

If by any chance you don’t see that here, you can click this link to go to the original on youtube. 

In 30-some years of professional business planning, I've developed a few theories on what works, and what doesn't, when it comes to trying to get something done. Usually I'm talking about business planning, and how to make plans become actions, how to make planning a long-term management improvement, rather than some pieces of paper that don't mean very much stuffed in a drawer somewhere. So today, applying some of my planning fundamentals to New Year's Resolutions, I've developed this list of three points that I hope can help us all — certainly me included — with those resolutions.

1. Choose Your Target Well

Obvious? Good. It should be. Change what you do, not who you are. Change habits, not attributes. Change behavior.

Make sure you're focusing on things you can control. You and only you. In budgeting we talk about discretionary vs. non-discretionary spending. That works for life too; discretionary behavior, things you can control. You know the difference.

2. Make it Concrete, Specific, and Measurable

Avoid generalities. For example, not just "lose weight," but rather stop drinking soft drinks between meals, or stop eating after 8 p.m., or stop having the donut with the morning coffee. Not just "more exercise," but what days, how much, what routines, how long.

Try this test: Ask yourself how you'll know, two weeks, a month, three months from now, if you kept your resolution.

Break your habits or behaviors down into specifics. Break them into pieces you can follow. Are you too quick to get angry with your kids? Break that down into something you can control, like maybe two full minutes of quiet time per day with each kid. Yes or no, did you have that time together. One time per day your kid gets a moment to talk to you, without rushing. Break it down into something you can track. (I'm father of five, I know the value of setting a moment aside from the chaos, and how hard it is to do sometimes.)

3. Set Specific Review Tactics

Wow, this sounds really nerdy and list-making annoying, doesn't it? Scares me. Maybe that's why I'm not so good at resolution keeping (do what I say, not what I do). But I said I'm taking this from my business planning practice, and in business planning if you don't schedule your plan review in advance you've diminished your chances of implementation by half or more. So in New Year's Resolutions, set up your reviews.

That would mean, hmmm, maybe you're going to promise to record success, or failures, to do your specific measurable actions, such as sending an email to yourself every day you run that mile or skip the muffin, or maybe an email every day you don't run the mile or don't skip the muffin.

That would mean maybe you remind yourself to look at the results the third Thursday of every month, or every Saturday morning; did you stop the after-dinner snack, do you weigh less. Or did you stop and get that special daily minute or two with your kid?

A Final Note

It's slightly embarrassing: I don't claim any real expertise with the kind of life-changing stuff that New Year's Resolutions ought to be made of. Giving advice in this realm is scary and probably presumptuous, so I have to apologize. But I've watched this kind of thing for years in business planning, and I think these three rules might help.

Now I'm going to try to practice what I preach. 

(Note: I am reposting this here for my readers; I posted it on Small Business Trends about an hour earlier. Tim.)