Danger in the Comfort Zone

12

The Borderless Economy

In the last few months I’ve had three conversations that I never imagined I’d have. The first was with a man whom I’d met about a year ago when he was the executive vice-president for human resources of one of the Fortune 100 companies. Although he had personally engineered massive downsizings in his own company, he was bitter and bewildered as he told me he’d been laid off in a restructuring and forced out in an involuntary “voluntary” early retirement. He called me because he was networking, trying to use even our slight acquaintance to find a job. One year ago, he was a man at the top of his ladder, totally unprepared to be judged and jobless.

My second conversation was with an old friend, a man who had been a professor ...