I try not to get too philosophical in this blog, but I found myself feeling that way when reading about the death this week of Irvine Robbins, one of the founders of the Baskin-Robbins chain of ice cream stores. He died in Rancho Mirage, California, at the ripe old age of 90.

The story of how he named the business he started with his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, is uniquely American. As The New York Times recalled today in an obituary, “Although it was Mr. Robbins who opened the first store, at the intersection of Adams and Palmer Streets in Glendale, California, on December 7, 1945, and it was three years more before he and Mr. Baskin became partners, they took a carefully familial approach to deciding who would come first in the name of what eventually became a vast international enterprise. They flipped a coin.”

More important, in my book, is how the two brothers-in-law managed the company. “They worked closely on everything,” according to Robbins’ daughter, Marsha Veit. “They would come up with ideas for flavors based on what was happening at the time, like Cocoa a Go-Go, when go-go dancers were popular. They would sit in the kitchen tasting, making sure the best ingredients were used.”

Read enough of the obituaries of Irvine Robbins (such as this one in the Los Angeles Times ), and you can’t help but come away with the feeling that his legacy will be about the great innovation and fun-loving spirit he brought to his work. I’m not sure Robbins ever spent a lot of time worrying about that, but it got me to thinking: Do any of us spend much time considering what we will leave behind when our days as managers or executives come to an end?

For example, I spend a lot of time here writing about memorable good, bad and crazy workforce management practices. But on a more personal level, what do I want people to remember about me as a manager?

I don’t have a glib answer for that. What I always say when people ask me about my management style is this: Ask the people I’ve worked with. In fact, I’ve done this in job interviews. I tell the interviewer to phone any company I’ve worked at and simply ask for someone who remembers working with me. I’m confident that whatever they say will be a good reflection on who I am and what I do. If that’s my legacy, it’s one I’m happy with.

So, what is your legacy as a manager? What would you like for people to say about you after you’re gone? I’d love to hear what you have to say—either as a comment at the end of this post or as an e-mail sent to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com. I’ll share the best in a future blog post.

Losing a job is always traumatic, and that’s why stories like this one in the Chicago Tribune—titled “Are you prepared if you lose your job?”—can serve as a good jolt for anyone who thinks that they are immune from the incessant layoffs, buyouts and cutbacks that seem to be a fact of life in the modern American workplace.

What struck me about this article wasn’t the advice it offered, which was pretty straightforward and basic. What got me thinking were some of the statistics listed in the Tribune story, such as “Young workers face the prospect of changing jobs nearly nine times before they reach age 32, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, ” and that in March, “the average length of unemployment for all ages was nearly 17 weeks, [and] workers over 50 face longer job searches.”

I’ve written here before about how stressed out workers are and the very different and modern approach some are taking as they cope with layoffs. Fact is, for all the talk about a “talent shortage” or a “war for talent,” it still is very much a buyer’s market when it comes to getting and keeping a job—especially now as we head into a recession.

The Tribune story makes the point that today’s workers always need to be preparing for the worst and that “there’s little excuse these days for not being ready to kick a job search into high gear at a moment’s notice.” That’s great advice to keep in mind, because no matter whether it is called a layoff, buyout, cutback or “Productivity Transformation Program,” the stability of the job you’re in today is a tenuous illusion at best.

I’ve learned this the hard way, as I’m sure many of you have too. It’s always great to hope for the best, but you’ll be better off and sleep better at night if you also make sure to prepare for the worst, because it generally happens when you least expect it.

I worked in San Francisco during the wild and crazy dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and as crazy as things were then, the strangest thing that happened was having another employee’s paychecks deposited in my bank account—for three months in a row.

While this may sound like a good deal, someone always discovers such discrepancies—and then you have to pay the money back. The funny thing about my situation was that I didn’t figure out I had a lot more money in my bank account (thanks to direct deposit and working insanely long dot-com hours), but neither did the CEO’s administrative assistant—the one who’d had her paychecks diverted to my account. How she paid her bills for the three months I was getting her salary was a mystery I never solved, but the end result is that I had to write a check for more than $5,000 to straighten it all out.

I thought about this when reading this story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a payroll error in January that gave 18 Atlanta city workers some $375,000 in mileage reimbursement. According to the newspaper, the workers “mistakenly got paid $375,000—about $371,000 more than was legitimate—because someone inadvertently coded the mileage reimbursement rate at $40 per mile instead of 40 cents.”

What should workers do when they think they have been overpaid? Morally and ethically, they should fess up and tell someone about it, but as surveys have shown, not all workers are particularly moral or ethical.

 When I was “overpaid,” I didn’t know about it until someone told me. I was spending so much time at work that I just wasn’t focused on how much was in my checking account. When someone did finally tell me, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t figured it out sooner. And I quickly wrote a check to make it right.

That’s not the case in Atlanta, where “auditors found three months later that seven still had not repaid. Today, two still owe the city a total of nearly $40,000. Officials said some employees have been reprimanded but no one has been fired.”

“I was astonished,” city auditor Leslie Ward told the Journal-Constitution. “I don’t know how else to describe it. This seems like it would have to be some violation of employee conduct, ethics or law.”

It may be some or all of the above, but it also may simply reflect our working world in the year 2008, and the lack of any real bond between workers and employers. Yes, this probably could have happened in just about any day and age, but the more workers are made to feel like disposable parts, the less they may feel morally bound to do the right thing.

I don’t fly on Delta or Northwest much these days, so I don’t really have any personal insight into whether the proposed merger of the two airlines makes much business sense. One thing I do know, however, is that making one strong and profitable company out of two struggling ones is near impossible if you don’t get the workforce to buy in.

And, that’s where this one may have a struggle. A story in The Detroit News headlined “Wary workers cloud Delta-Northwest merger” talks about the challenge of merging the workforces of union-dominated Northwest (with about 22,500 union employees out of 32,000 total) with primarily nonunion Delta (where 6,300 pilots and a small number of dispatchers out of 47,000 employees are represented).

The struggle to merge these two old-school airlines into a unified and productive workforce isn’t just about collective bargaining and work rules, but more about the history and culture that is embedded deep in their corporate DNA.

“Delta’s an interesting company in that it’s been able to maintain a decidedly nonunion culture while staying on relatively good terms with its employees,” said Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group, an Evergreen, Colorado-based consulting firm. “Even through bankruptcy, management has succeeded in convincing employees that their best representative is themselves.”

But, The Detroit News points out, “selling that culture to Northwest’s entrenched unions won’t be easy. Even before merger talk began, the Association of Flight Attendants got enough signatures on a petition requesting a unionization vote of 12,000 Delta flight attendants. Neither Delta nor the union has speculated on the outcome of the current election.”

If they can make this merger work, the combined airline would be the largest in the world. “The new Delta,” says The Detroit News, “is expected to employ about 75,000 people after the two companies are fully integrated. [But] employees worry: Will management follow through on promises not to cut jobs or close hubs? If the companies are in such dire financial straits because of fuel prices, will they be looking to cut wages next?”

Those are all good questions, because those are all reasonable worries for workers to have. Delta has promised that no frontline workers will lose their jobs in the merger, but is that realistic given the huge and unrelenting rise in fuel prices?

I question that promise, and so does Joe Tiberi, spokesman for the union that represents 9,500 Northwest baggage handlers. “There’s no way they can combine without massive losses of jobs,” Tiberi told The Detroit News. “We’re also worried about merging our unionized workforce with Delta’s nonunionized workers. We have pensions, but they don’t. We have no guarantee Delta wouldn’t want to get rid of our union.”

It’s hard enough to make one good airline out of two struggling ones when everyone is on board. But it is damn near impossible if you have union squabbling and critical workforce issues to hurdle. The only saving grace here is that Delta’s management seems to be driving this deal, and frankly, Delta’s management seems a lot more sensitive to worker issues than Northwest’s does . That raises the odds of success, but not enough for me gamble my next trip on Delta. I’d be surprised if a lot of other frequent travelers don’t feel the same way.

Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting John McCain has offered up his health care proposal, and as you might imagine, it pushes a market-based system.

“McCain’s health plan centers on eliminating the tax breaks for employers who provide health insurance for their workers—a marked departure from the current system—and giving $5,000 tax credits to families to buy their own insurance,” says The New York Times. “His goal in shifting from employer-based coverage to having people buy their own policies is to encourage competition and choice, and to drive down the costs of health insurance.” But, the Times story adds, “Democrats have argued that McCain’s plan, by not compelling insurance companies to cover people who have trouble getting coverage, would ignore the plight of people with health problems.”

Steve Smith, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, told USA Today that McCain’s plan “would push employers to drop health care coverage they currently provide, put insurance companies in charge, increase costs, and force tens of millions of Americans to fend for coverage on their own with inadequate tax credits.”

McCain is spending a lot of time this week on health care, and it makes sense. This is a critical issue in the presidential campaign. And, McCain clearly seems to be getting out in front of this issue even though he knows that his health care proposal may need to be tweaked and changed as time goes on.

For example, the Times story indicated that “McCain’s speech here implicitly acknowledged some of the shortcomings in his free-market approach. But rather than force insurers to abandon cherry-picking the healthiest patients, McCain proposed that the federal government work with the states to cover those who cannot find insurance on the open market. With federal financial assistance, states would be encouraged to create high-risk pools that would contract with insurers to cover consumers who have been rejected on the open market.”

As I wrote in this blog last week, there is a lot of talk about health care these days, but not too many solutions. Although McCain’s proposal probably raises more questions than it answers, I applaud him for sticking his toe in the water on this one.

And by the way: the two Democratic candidates have very different thoughts on this subject. “Unlike McCain … both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton would both make it illegal for health insurance companies to deny an applicant because of age or health status,” the Times story says. “The two Democratic rivals argue that such regulation is needed to end discrimination against those with pre-existing medical conditions.”

This is just the beginning of the debate over health care by our presidential candidates, and my guess is that it will be a hot-button topic for both parties right down to Election Day.