Travels in the Riel World

Since I’ve long been an advocate of sabbaticals, I was intrigued to come across this article on the Brazen Careerist website. The piece is titled “10 Ways Generation Y Will Change the Workplace,” and sitting there at number four is - “We’ll Redefine Retirement.” How? Through a series of sabbaticals, or mini-retirements, throughout one’s lifetime.

Retirement is dead. It’s dead for a number of reasons, including the issues with social security and middle class America’s inability to save any money. But Gen Y will figure out how to save money to retire–we’re already demanding 401K’s and excellent benefits. However, we will re-invent retirement by taking multiple mini retirements instead of calling it quits a few years before its time to croak. Maybe in our late twenties we’ll take a few months just to travel the world. Then, as we approach parenthood and our kids grow up, we’ll take a year off to enjoy time with our family. Then we’ll return to work, refreshed and ready to go. When we hit 65, it will be the new 45 and we’ll have a solid 15 to 20 years left before we take our final, very brief, mini retirement. 

I’ve been seeing more press these days being devoted to the concept of taking a sabbatical from work. It’s an idea that particularly interests me, since my wife and I have taken two sabbaticals since getting married in 2001 - experiences that I chronicled in my book, Two Laps Around the World. So I thought I’d catch up on some of these press clippings and cover the topic a bit more frequently in this blog.

First, an article from the New York Times (”Sabbaticals Aren’t just for Academics Anymore”), which was published a while ago but provides a nice overview of the subject.

In an age of job hopping, a perk to reward loyalty — sabbaticals for those with five years or more on the job — is taking on increased importance.

Though the academic world initiated sabbatical programs, they have been embraced by the government and the private sector, including companies as varied as McDonald’s, Nike, Boston Consulting, Goldman Sachs and Silicon Graphics as well as law and accounting firms. Some companies restrict time off to educational forays and charitable projects, while others encourage everything from beachcombing, family time and travel. Leaves can be paid or unpaid and can last weeks or months…

Measuring return on investment is almost impossible, but companies with such plans seem as enthusiastic as any sabbatical taker. They discount fears that those taking leave will use the time to find other employment.

“A lot of times, people think it’s just for the employee, but it is a tremendous advantage that we get as a company,” said Richard Floersch, chief people officer and executive vice president for worldwide human resources at McDonald’s. “It’s re-energizing that lasts more than a day. Depending on what they do while they are gone, they come back even more skilled and talented than when they left.”

And, from a more recent Wall Street Journal story.

With constant travel and 60-hour weeks pushing him close to burnout, the veteran partner at Mercer, a major human-resource consultant, decided he needed a sabbatical.

Mr. Marcus pursued an elaborate self-improvement scheme and sharpened his professional focus during an eight-month break, which ended in November 2006. “I’m a better consultant today because I bring a more balanced perspective to my work,” he says…

A sabbatical can enhance your career, especially if you acquire valuable skills, experience and insights. Extended breaks allow for personal goals, such as travel, study or research…

Sabbaticals are attracting greater attention these days from the nation’s frazzled and disengaged workforce, according to Dan Clements, who co-wrote “Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple.” He took five in 15 years. About 16% of U.S. employers offered unpaid sabbaticals and 4% gave paid ones in 2007, the Society for Human Resource Management reports.

Hmm, stories in the New York Times AND the Wall Street Journal. There can’t be much more of a sign that this trend is getting noticed.

The world of work has evolved considerably in the past decade, and perhaps nowhere is this change more evident than in the mobility of workers, who keep finding new ways to move beyond the traditional office environment. It began when high speed internet access and teleconferencing technology enabled more people to work from home, at least for part of the time. But the ubiquity of laptops and the wireless internet has now irrevocably altered the concept of the office.

Most obviously, it has given workers the freedom to work not only from home, but also from coffee shops and other public locations. This topic was explored in a recent NY Times article that focused on the technology workers and entrepreneurs who gather regularly at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco.

As latte sippers pore over the latest draft of a business plan, bang out a little code or post to a blog, it is not hard to overhear snippets of dialogue with a decidedly capitalist bent: “We could make money off that,” and “Have you talked to them about a deal?”

For the Web 2.0 crowd creating businesses, as well as the post-Web 2.0 crowd looking for businesses to build, Ritual is the place to be. While it has not yet risen to the mythic proportions of Buck’s, the hangout in Woodside, Calif., for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, it is becoming the place to generate ideas, find staff members and troll for companies to finance.

” … when you go into Ritual, it seems they’re either writing code or writing a blog or creating something with a widget that will make money for them this week, and that’s really different from a lot of the other places.” …

Indeed, San Francisco cafes have emerged as the new office of choice for many small start-ups. Atlas Cafe, also in the eclectic Mission District, is one, and Coffee to the People in the Haight is another. But Ritual, located between a heating repair shop and a video store, is perhaps the most popular. … Flickr, the popular photo sharing site, held weekly meetings there before it was bought by Yahoo. And Rubyred Labs, a Web design shop, had its debut party there.

Even more intriguing, though, are some of the ways in which the office has morphed into new forms. One example of this is the movement toward coworking, in which various individuals rent out desks in an office so they can have the camaraderie of coworkers while retaining their independence. This trend was explored recently in a different story.

Contemplating his career path a couple of years ago, a young computer programmer named Brad Neuberg faced a modern predicament. “It seemed I could either have a job, which would give me structure and community,” he said, “or I could be freelance and have freedom and independence. Why couldn’t I have both?”

As someone used to hacking out solutions, Mr. Neuberg took action. He created a word — coworking, eliminating the hyphen — and rented space in a building, starting a movement.

While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas…

Coworking sites are up and running from Argentina to Australia and many places in between, although a wiki site on coworking shows that most are in the United States…The coworkers, armed with Wi-Fi laptops and cellphones, are in some ways offering a techie twist on the age-old practice of artists or writers teaming up to rent studio space…

Coworking comes in many flavors. The Hat Factory in San Francisco is a live-work loft that’s home to three technology workers who open up during the day to other people. Some companies, like Citizen Agency, a San Francisco Internet consulting firm that has done the most to evangelize coworking, have an open-door policy, in which people rent desks but others are free to drop in and use the Wi-Fi or the conference room.

Some companies rent out desks to the nomadic workers, hoping some of their Internet mojo will rub off. Yet others have started coworking spaces as businesses unto themselves, like a community version of the corporate business centers operated by the Regus Group.

Tara Hunt, a co-owner of Citizen Agency, which calls its office Citizen Space, has listed (in a blog, of course) some principles of coworking. They include collaboration, openness, community, sustainability and accessibility. Many of the ideas come from the open-source software movement, in which people share their work freely with little regard for financial gain. Taking a nod from that movement, the people involved in coworking share their experiences and ideas on a Web site, coworking.pbwiki.com.

Now that corporations recognize not only the benefits of international experience but also a real need for managers to have a broad global perspective, a wide array of programs are popping into existence in order to meet these training needs. One of the more interesting programs that I’ve heard about was just profiled in the NY Times. IBM is actually sending budding managers abroad to work as volunteers in various business-related projects.

In July, a team of 8 to 10 I.B.M. employees will travel to Ghana to help tiny businesses make their operations more professional. Another team will help entrepreneurs seek microloans in Turkey, while yet another will create training programs on information technology in Vietnam.

The projects, which were devised by I.B.M.’s citizenship group and are being coordinated through nonprofit organizations, have all the trappings of corporate philanthropy. But that is not why they were created, or how they are being used.

“This is a management development exercise for high-potential people at I.B.M.,” said Randy MacDonald, senior vice president for human resources.

What does I.B.M. hope to gain from sending these employees on volunteer missions abroad? Quite a lot, actually.

“As a development tool, this is a four-for-one,” said Allan R. Cohen, dean of the Olin Graduate School at Babson College, near Boston. “It’s stretching to work in another culture, to work in a nonprofit where the measurement of accomplishment isn’t clear, to take a sabbatical from your everyday routine and to learn to accomplish things when you can’t just bark orders.”

Indeed, Paul Ingram, a management professor at the Columbia Business School, is planning a similar program for this fall, in which executives attending the school’s Senior Executive Program will work with nonprofit groups in New York. Because 80 percent of the students are not from the United States, the New York location is outside their comfort zone.

“The fact that you are an excellent programmer or salesman, or can lead a project in your own area and culture, doesn’t mean you can be a great leader outside of your technical or cultural expertise,” he said.

That is I.B.M.’s logic as well. The company views the Service Corps as a way to learn how well employees work with strangers, in strange lands, on unfamiliar projects.

It is one of our great challenges, particularly for Americans with little vacation time — creating time in our lives to travel.  Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding, has a variety of ideas for individuals who are determined to hit the road.

Short of simply asking for more vacation time, many people negotiate long-term leaves of absence or sabbaticals (paid or unpaid, depending upon the situation) to enable travel.  Others fine-tune their careers so that they are doing seasonal or contract work, which frees them up to travel between work engagements.  Still others will quit a job and then work a long-term travel stint into their life before accepting a new job.

With the advent of new communication technologies it has also become possible to adopt what has been called a “global mobility lifestyle” - which allows you to redesign your work life in such a way that it can mix in with extended travel.

He focused on the latter possibility in a recent interview he conducted with Tim Ferriss, author of the upcoming book, The 4-Hour Workweek.  Some highlights:

What are the biggest misconceptions people have about work, and making time for travel?

The biggest misconception about work is that you have to spend most of your life doing it. 

I’ve spent the last four years traveling through more than 25 countries interviewing people who have automated income or escaped the office, often without quitting their jobs.  Some of them negotiate “working from the home office” while actually trekking in Africa or touring in Europe, satellite phones and Quad-band Treos in hand. Others create simple virtual businesses that enable them to quit the grind and take one-to-three-month “mini-retirements” a few times per year…

Once you control the most valuable currencies in the digital age - mobility and time - $40,000 can get you more luxury lifestyle than a $500,000 per year investment banker who can’t escape the office.

Many people often can’t stop thinking about work minutiae, even when they’re far away from the traditional office setting.  How do you get your mind, and not just your body, out of the office?

In the experience of those I’ve interviewed, it takes two to three months just to unplug from work routines and become aware of how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.  Can you have a two-hour dinner with Spanish friends without getting anxious?  Can you get accustomed to a small town where all businesses take a siesta for two hours in the afternoon? If not, you need to ask: why?

Learn to slow down.  If you create a mobile lifestyle, whether through a remote work arrangement or entrepreneurship, escaping the “too-weak vacation” world is as simple as using a few common technologies and believing it can be done.

I was intrigued by a recent article I came across that described the cafe culture of New York City.  Not the culture that surrounds the crowded Starbucks on every corner, but the life of the European-style cafes where creative professionals gather and network most mornings over coffee or breakfast.

Such are the benefits of belonging to a Manhattan social tribe (or several tribes) whose members regularly languish for an hour or two on weekday mornings at European-style cafes. Drawn from the self-employed ranks of late-rising professions like fashion, art, publicity and Web publishing, these affluent breakfast clubbers avoid Starbucks …

Unlike the “power breakfast,” that well-documented institution that plays out among corporate executives at the Regency and Four Seasons hotels, members of the late-morning breakfast tribe, who gather from 9 to 11, don’t have to put in an early appearance at an office. But don’t be fooled by the casual vibe and the late hour. These breakfast clubbers are not slackers. …

Eventually the caffeine takes effect, and the late-morning breakfast clubbers must move on to start the day. They head to the home office, or the film set, or the design studio.  “Once 11:30 hits, the energy shifts in the city,” Ms. Erickson said.

The article made me reflect on the cafe life in other cities around the world.  In fact, on cafe culture in general. There is an interesting article on wikipedia about the history of the coffeehouse.  If you want to read further, you can also linger over a few other stories that I found, about the cafe culture in such cities as Paris, Vienna, Rome, Buenos Aires and Hanoi.

Just make sure to pour yourself a fresh cup of java or, better yet, read the articles over a wireless connection at your favorite neighborhood cafe.

American workers and employers are beginning to recognize the benefits of having and using vacation time.  Part of this trend is driven by younger workers who value quality of life issues and a balance between work and personal time, according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor. Even so, the U.S. work culture is quite a bit different than that of European countries when it comes to taking time off.

Even if American workers took all of their allotted time off, they would still lag far behind their European counterparts. The average number of paid vacation days for someone in the US who had worked for a year in 2005 was 8.9, says Carroll Lachnit, executive editor of Workforce Management magazine. The statutory minimum vacation in the European Union is 21.3 days a year. The US has no statutory minimum.

Professor Ciulla observed firsthand the differences in attitudes between Europeans and Americans when she attended a recent conference in France hosted by an American company with overseas operations.

“The French refused to come that Friday because it was their bank holiday,” she says. “When the French have a day off, they have a day off, no matter what.”

Anyone who hasn’t been asleep or on a silent retreat for the past month hasn’t been able to avoid the protests and debates over the immigration issue in the U.S., particularly as it relates to immigration from Mexico.  But what is less talked about is traffic that goes in the other direction.  Mexico has long been a destination of choice for some retirees and other expatriates, of course, and Tony Cohan wrote a book a few years ago about his own experiences in that regard.

Now, here is an article that discusses the benefits of being able to telecommute from Mexico.  And a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post goes even further, by suggesting that continued integration of the U.S. and Mexican economies would mean not only Mexicans heading north, but increasing numbers of Americans being drawn to Mexico.

Almost one-quarter of U.S. businesses offer some form of paid or unpaid sabbaticals to their employees, and many companies are finding that it can be a valuable tool for both rewarding loyalty and helping employees to recharge.

I can personally attest that sabbaticals are a great idea. Lisa and I took our first round-the-world trip because she was able to get a sabbatical approved by her employer in Massachusetts. When it was over, she returned to her job and was a happy and productive employee for several more years, finally changing jobs only because she had a chance to move back to her home state.  Our experience was so positive, in fact, that when we found ourselves with another window of opportunity during a cross-country move in 2005, we decided to travel for several more months.  You can read about our 2005 journey in a blog I published during the trip.