It’s the end of June, the sun is out in London, and I’m determined to gear into the more languid rhythms of summer. So far, I’m failing. You?
Not entirely, of course. I’m sitting barefoot and feet up in the garden listening to the most incredible chomping sound coming from the flower bed nearest me. I have no idea what it is, but it’s got some powerful jaws and noisy teeth. In front of me, a wall of jasmine in flower is wafting its heady aromas and wiggling its glamorous bridal blossoms under my appreciative nose. The roses are out, the birds are singing and I have abandoned the news reports alternatively screaming about Biden, Le Pen and the elections that will end the world as we know it. An admiring nod to TIME magazine for a brilliant cover, though.
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And to Heather Cox Richardson, who keeps her historically-contexting cool at all times:
A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register. And, since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought.
Ironically, I was out and about this week at several conferences about age. And as I was reading about the US debate, I thought of Lisa Edgar’s data that she shared with us in Lisbon last week about the ‘75 moment.’ That, on average, people start bumping into physical and/ or cognitive issues around that age. Which also confirms my 4-Quarter model. There is a real difference between Q3 (50-75) and Q4 (75-100), and ignoring it may not serve you. Or, in this case, the wider world. But what do you do about an election between two Q4ers? One who can’t tell the truth to save his life and the other who may not be able to convince an ageist electorate that he’s sane.
Sadly, Marine LePen is just starting into her potentially most impactful decades, at 55, and Putin has a few years left of Q3 to make mischief with whatever happens, anywhere. I was (almost) able to vote in the French elections (did I tell you I am half French?) by internet this week, which is pretty cool - and may open up unexpected new election impacts if the young start voting en masse with an accessible couple of democratic clicks. Except that in France, it’s the young (who Politico calls the ‘foreigners-out’ generation) who seemed to be veering rightward, led by 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, president of the Le Pen’s National Rally. Vote is today, hang onto your hats.
I also managed to send in my postal vote for the UK elections July 4th, which seems to be one of the calmer votes going down (at least relatively speaking). Unless, of course, you’re sad to see the end of this hapless Tory party’s disastrous 14 years in power. Nice article in the FT by Janan Ganesh on the relative sanity of the UK election, especially given what’s going on elsewhere, What Britain Gets Right. Maybe the histrionics are behind us here? They may have even taught us something.
And to round off my national and cultural affiliations, did you know that it’s Canada Day July 1st? Am off to Trafalgar Square for some celebrations later this afternoon if the sun decides to poke her head out. But only after I run off to vote in those French elections. I spent a couple of hours trying to get my online vote in, but frustratingly failed at the very last ‘submit’ button. So, given the stakes, am off to make sure my vote gets into the ballot box.
The Energy of AI and Inter-Generational Heat Stroke
Sometimes it’s the confluence of news titles in a single Sunday edition of a paper that really hits home. So the headlines in this weekend’s Financial Times. First, the 30% increase in Microsoft’s emissions since 2020 because of AI (and Steve Gates assuring us that generative AI will allow us to catch this up quickly). Then Europe’s biggest renewables company, Norway’s Statkraft, led by CEO Birgitte Vartdal, cutting investments in wind and solar because it can’t make the numbers viable. And finally a long piece on how companies are backing away from green targets as they realise how much harder they are to achieve than they thought.
So here’s the resulting impact on future generations, which I mull over as a second grand-daughter is busy preparing her arrival into the world:
Will AI save us? Is it worth all the energy we’re beaming into its fast-expanding capabilities? I’m reading a book by U. of Chicago Innovation Professor Ethan Mollick, called Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI. It’s a well-written and entertaining/ hair-raising tale of what’s coming. It starts by a guarantee that if you get to know your AI, you’ll have at least three sleepless nights.
Here’s an excerpt that gives you a flavour:
AI doesn’t act like software, but it does act like a human being… treat AI as if it were human because, in many ways, it behaves like one…AI excels at tasks that are intensely human. It can write, analyze, code, and chat. It can play the role of marketer or consultant, increasing productivity by outsourcing mundane tasks. However, it struggles with tasks that machines typically excel at, such as repeating a process consistently or performing complex complex calculations without assistance. AI systems also make mistakes, tell lies, and hallucinate answers, just like humans.
Thankfully, I’m off for a holiday week on the west coast of Ireland. Except that there’s an Aer Lingus strike, so we weren’t able to leave Saturday as planned (they aren’t flying on weekends), leaving me extra time to lose myself in multiple countries’ election coverage.
Enough. Tomorrow, I’ll hopefully be walking by the sea celebrating my husband’s upcoming 70th birthday (!) with several of his old buddies from university, one of whom has recently passed that milestone. Given the weather forecast for Ireland this week, I should have lots of time to finish my book.
Conferences, Conferences
I’ll be testing my septuagenarians on a cool new app I heard about at the Silver Marketing Summit I spoke at this week (on a panel about Late Love & Sex, which was a gas). It’s called eargym and CEO Amanda Philpott won the audience’s vote for most investable project. I highly recommend downloading this and testing your hearing, especially if you’re in Q3 (or your partner is). There is a clear link between losing your hearing and losing bits of your mind. It’s like your brain starts shutting down the pieces your ears are no longer using or accessing. So while most people wait until they really can’t hear a word you’re saying before they go get equipped with the dreaded hearing aids, you really want to get them as soon as you detect any trouble. That avoids it getting worse and your precious grey matter leaking out along with your hearing.
Thursday, I gave the keynote at the Women in Travel Conference. There are two audiences particularly impacted by my 4-Quarter Life theme. The people who are just heading into Q3 and are convinced that life is over and that they are on a steep downward slope towards old age and irrelevance. And the women in their 30s who are dying of the impossible juggling act between family and work and (too often) blaming themselves for not being able to keep up.
My twin messages go across a storm with both audiences. That Q3ers want to lean in and gear up for some of the best and most impactful decades of their lives. And that Q2ers want to relax and pace themselves differently for the marathon of our new longer lives and careers (and ignore what everyone around is saying about career management). Here’s a longer piece I co-wrote about why and how, if you need to convince someone or yourself…
Why Women (Still) Aren’t ‘Diverse’
I also ended the week thinking that both these conferences were making a similar, fundamental framing error of their central subjects. The ‘silver’ marketing conference was approaching the Q3 market as a niche play, and the Women in Travel Conference was framing women as a DEI dimension, one ‘marginalised’ minority among others. This is a costly under-estimation of the mega-phenomenons now hitting our fast-ageing and gender-balancing world. In both cases, the evolution we’ll want to be pushing over the next few years is to see the Q3 market as a new global mega-trend, affecting every company and every business from two sides - as talent and as market.
And that gender and age overlap in redefining the Q3 consumer and employee. Especially in travel, where women make most of the decisions and where Q3ers have most of the time and money to travel. If companies are still treating women (or Q3ers) as one diversity dimension among many, they will never get the best out of them - or for them. Believe me, I’ve been there.
My work over the past couple of decades has been getting gender and generational agendas onto the ExCo agenda to avoid it getting under-estimated and undermined by being bundled with important but less business-impacting issues. I’m a big supporter of diversities of all kinds. But gender ain’t a diversity dimension. It concerns everyone. Age even more. How you frame these issues predicts 80% of your ability to get an impactful plan in place.
But hey, now I’m off on holiday. Ireland awaits. More anon. You’ve been warned.
Hope you get a chance to slow down for real. Soon.
Read More?
If you want more content details of last week’s Longevity Leadership Programme in Lisbon, I wrote it up for FORBES here.
If you need some good summer fiction, my son got me hooked on Tana French’s wonderful thrillers set in Ireland. I don’t usually read this kinda stuff, but these are so brilliantly written and give such a spell-binding vision into the dark side of Irish culture that given our travel plans I couldn’t resist. (The weather should give me time to read her entire oeuvre). But careful, they are the kind of page turners that keep you reading way past bedtime… but if you’re already sleepless with AI or electoral panicking, these are a great antidote. Read them in order, The Spreader, then The Hunter.
Enjoy the 'west coast' Avivah. It is a wonderful part of the world - regardless of the weather!
Avivah, relative to your "costly misframing" comment, consider this: unaffiliated voters are the largest "party" in America. Will they (we) rise up?