{"id":25,"date":"2015-03-23T04:04:03","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T04:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kathrynberlabooks.wordpress.com\/?p=25"},"modified":"2015-03-23T04:04:03","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T04:04:03","slug":"watch-out-the-world-is-changing-originally-published-november-6-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/2015\/03\/23\/watch-out-the-world-is-changing-originally-published-november-6-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch Out the World is Changing (originally published November 6, 2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"imagesZ0M4R65Z\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nIf you keep your eyes and ears open, occasionally you\u2019ll be in the right place at the right time to watch the world change.\u00a0 Sometimes it will be obvious and at other times you\u2019ll only realize it years later and wonder how you missed it when it happened. \u00a0The shift in racial and sexual equality was obvious to me in the 1960\u2019s.\u00a0 The fall of the Iron Curtain and its resulting pro-democracy movements were obvious to me in the 1980\u2019s.<\/p>\n

But the true meaning of the change that I was immersed in for 12 years beginning in 1976, escaped my notice altogether until years later when I had time to ponder its significance.<\/p>\n

I was living in Berkeley and in need of a job.\u00a0 My best friend and roommate pulled some strings and before I knew it, I was working for the much-despised Bank of America.<\/p>\n

And although we were a unique group of young, hip Berkeley employees, we worked for an institution which was symbolic of the times.\u00a0 Still very much a reflection of our parents\u2019 generation, the man in the gray flannel suit would have felt right at home.<\/p>\n

The unspoken understanding was that if you were white, male and patient, and didn\u2019t do anything to embarrass yourself or the bank, you would receive regular promotions and eventually be rewarded with a branch managership.\u00a0 After that, the women would take care of running things and you could attend the requisite \u201cbusiness development\u201d two-martini lunches until it was time to retire.\u00a0 Simple.
\nThe rules were the rules and there was not much need to think outside the box.<\/p>\n

My first indication of change was when a new manager arrived at our branch.\u00a0 Yes, he was white and yes he was male, but he was young and sort of Kennedy-esque.<\/p>\n

One day a customer wanted to buy only part of a bundle of Japanese yen that another customer had sold us earlier that same day.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan\u2019t do it,\u201d\u00a0 I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to buy the whole bundle,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to talk to your manager,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy can\u2019t we do this?\u201d my manager asked me.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I was told we couldn\u2019t,\u201d I replied.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo it,\u201d my manager said.<\/p>\n

The customer smirked and I learned two important lessons that day.\u00a0 Question the logic behind everything you do and always be open to change.<\/p>\n

From then on, things started to change quickly.\u00a0 The defined benefit pension plan that we so dearly treasured was scrapped.\u00a0 In its place came the 401k plan.\u00a0 What this meant in the real world was that we could no longer count on a retirement annuity of X dollars per month.\u00a0 We had stepped into the territory of the unknowable.\u00a0 We were now expected to contribute to our retirement plan and we were expected to share in the bank\u2019s investment risk.\u00a0 We might do really well in our retirement\u2026 and we might not.<\/p>\n

Then came the layoffs and the first to be laid off were the middle management white men who could hardly believe that the sacred trust, the unspoken agreement which allowed them to sleep easy at night had been invalidated.\u00a0 Just like that.<\/p>\n

When financial regulatory walls came tumbling down, I saw the writing on the wall and entered a credit training program.\u00a0 When that didn\u2019t seem to be enough, I tried to make myself more valuable to the bank by becoming a Certified Financial Planner.\u00a0 And still the changes kept coming.<\/p>\n

We went from an institution of checking and passbook savings accounts to money market accounts and beyond.
\nWe went from car loans and carefully plotted mortgages to unsecured lines of credit and badgering appraisers in our quest to make more and more loans.\u00a0 To help us be more productive we got FAX machines, email and Lotus 1-2-3.<\/p>\n

And soon we realized that we weren\u2019t bankers anymore, we were sales people.\u00a0 And if we weren\u2019t, we\u2019d better get out of the way because this was the future.\u00a0 A sales person could be easily trained as to the \u2018ins and outs\u2019 of banking specifics but a banker could only be trained to the extent that her personality could take her in the art of selling.\u00a0 No sooner was the bar set, then it was raised again.<\/p>\n

I learned two things about myself during this time\u2013 I was pretty good at sales\u2026.and I hated selling.<\/p>\n

Since the bank was looking for attrition, nobody shed a tear when I left in 1988, except maybe me.\u00a0 My long-term love\/hate relationship with the employer where I had grown up came to an end.\u00a0 I received a pen and pencil set and, I think about 3 months salary.<\/p>\n

Good bye to an era.\u00a0 I would take my chances with my husband as he established his own business.<\/p>\n

Now I look back and realize this was where the middle class was heading.\u00a0 We were becoming an endangered species nearly 25 years before the rest of the country would face the same changes. \u00a0Bank of America and other corporations like it were only on the cutting edge, that\u2019s all.\u00a0 They were visionaries in their own sad way.<\/p>\n

About 5 years ago Thomas Friedman told us that the world was flat and we applauded him.\u00a0 That is until we came to recognize what a flat world really meant for America.\u00a0 While I was coming to grips with a world that was changing so quickly around me it made my head spin, many lower-income\u00a0folks in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) were coming to terms with new possibilities that never existed for their parents.<\/p>\n

As children they might have\u00a0imagined they would live within the same dome of financial hopelessness that constrained their parents and\u00a0grandparents before them.<\/p>\n

When they saw\u00a0a door with\u00a0the sign that said \u201cThis Way to the Middle Class\u201d, they pushed the door open and walked through to the other side.\u00a0 And why not?\u00a0 What consensus ever existed in the world community that determined America should stay on top to the detriment of all others?\u00a0 This was their time now.<\/p>\n

35 years ago I was a young woman sitting on a giant seesaw staring down the long plank at a Chinese woman about my age sitting on the other end.\u00a0 She was holding a 50 pound sack of sand and was weighted to the ground.\u00a0 I was high in the sky enjoying the view from my lofty position, my legs waggling freely in the air.\u00a0 And then one day she divided her sandbag and handed half of it to me.<\/p>\n

In this great upheaval, nobody is safe and nothing can be taken for granted.<\/p>\n

The only certainty is that change is here to stay.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you keep your eyes and ears open, occasionally you\u2019ll be in the right place at the right time to watch the world change.\u00a0 Sometimes it will be obvious and at other times you\u2019ll only realize it years later and wonder how you missed it when it happened. \u00a0The shift in racial and sexual equality…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,5,6,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynberlabooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}