Connecting generations

I am not sure where this is originally from.  It was sent to me in one of those email type chains.  I have Claire’s books, and rate them highly, and appreciated this summary of what she has written on the new generation of employees, Gen Y.
This article is an excerpt from Connecting Generations: The Sourcebook by Claire Raines.

I get questions every month from businesspeople looking for something about the newest generation of workers. They’d like an updated version of Twentysomething or Beyond Generation X, books I wrote in 1991 and 1996. Along with Bruce Tulgan’s Managing Generation XX, they’re the classics on managing and motivating young employees. The thing is, the young employees we were talking about in those three books are well established in the workplace today, and the next generation is showing up with a whole new perspective, a different set of values, a distinctive work ethic. They’re as different from Generation X as they can be. By and large, it’s the Gen-Xers who are managing them, and who are looking for help in understanding just what the Millennials are all about. Thus this article. I think you’ll find a fairly comprehensive treatment of Millennial employees.
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What the Other Generations Think About You

If companies really want to survive in the new economy, they must accommodate the generational differences in their people. That means “in with the old, the new, and everyone in between.”

Nothing gets people’s attention faster than telling them how they are perceived by others.

Looking at their workforce through a “generational lens” shows managers how other people see them and how they appear to their coworkers.

The fastest way to get rid of erroneous notions between different generations is to expose them to the light of day. They usually fade away at that point and a more constructive conversation about the strengths of each generation can begin.

How do each of the generations see each other?

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Across THE GREAT DIVIDE

“Baby Boomer and Generation X workers must bridge the generation gap, learning to manage, and be managed by, each other”. By Catherine S. McGowan. Available here.

This feature was originally featured in the 3rd Quarter 2000 issue of Today’s Engineer. Engineers are being heavily hit by generational issues. There is a perception (which maybe reality) that engineers are old, white men, and that the industry is not open to young people, women and non-whites. This perception may not be entirely accurate in reality, but it is certainly the perception. And the reality is that in most countries in the world, and across most engineering discplines, the average age of the profession has been increasing dramatically over the past 10 years or so. My understanding is that most engineering disciplines in South Africa, Australia and UK (at least) have average ages of nearly 50 years old!

The same is true of other professions (except lawyers, for whom TV drama has been fantastic in the past 2 decades, and accountants, who are seen as a the quick route to the top ranks of management).

It is therefore critical to understand generational issues in these professions.

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A boomer Bust?

What will it mean when boomers start to retire? What will the impact be when the boomers liquidate their assets that sit on Stock Exchanges around the world and use this to fund their retirement over the next 5 – 10 years? The systemic effect is massive, and frightening at the same time. People are living longer and re-tyrement is one option, but how will the world cope with this. For some interesting comments, take a look at the Business Week article here.

The Family Contract at McDonalds

McDonald’s UK has started an innovative staffing option in some of its franchises. They call it the Family Contract (read the press release here). Simply put, they allow family members to be interchangeable as staff, without prior approval or discussions with management. Its an attempt to deal with absenteeism, by allowing any immediate family member to stand in for a staff member who needs to be absent for any reason.

There are some good reasons that this will work, including: shared values, common worldview and shared economic interest of the family members, as well as the fact that people chat about work while at home (making a nonsense of work-life separation).

I wonder of this can be used beyond the frontline type staff?

Even in Biblical times …

Broken Windows – The Death of Passion

Removing the obstacles to working and living creatively, productively and energetically.

On December 1 1955 a forty two year old African American woman was ordered to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to white passengers. When she had paid for her ticket, her seat was not in the “whites only� section of the bus, but as the bus had filled with white passengers, the driver had moved the demarcation sign further back, placing her squarely outside of the rows of seats reserved for “people of colour.� Then he told her, and four other people, to move. Three of them obeyed, but Rosa Parks refused. After a warning the driver called the police and Parks was arrested. This small act of defiance resulted in a human rights movement that changed the face of the United States and impacted the whole world. And it sounded a call to a young minister, who was relatively new in town, named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The driver’s request was not new. Many black passengers, including Rosa Parks, had heard similar orders in the past and complied. But that day something changed. For a long time Parks had believed that segregation was both unjust and destructive. She was involved with organisations working to get laws and practices changed. But, somehow that day her belief moved to a new place. She started about these issues in a deeper, more intense way, and it motivated her to a new, effective action. In a word, this quiet, timid woman discovered . (Read more about the challenging and fascinating story of Rosa Parks at Wikipedia here.)

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How older people think

While the marketing industry is still intent on understanding how young people think, there are indications that it is beginning to look ahead to when the average consumer is considerably older than she is today. This includes looking at the mental abilities of older consumers and how they make decisions. While many assume that older adults show marked declines in cognitive functions, these changes do not impact on everyday life as much as many expect.

Not all adults decline equally in brain functions, such as working memory. “Successful agers” perform nearly as well as young people in many areas, because of the neural integrity of the frontal-parietal brain. Long-term memory declines with age, starting after the third decade, and particularly memory for the source of information (eg, the newspaper or her sister). Semantic memory (for facts and knowledge) tends to persist longer than episodic memory (event-based) and information that is highly practiced, such as playing the piano, is also better preserved with aging.

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Two great questions for leaders anywhere

Eric Hoffer was quoted as saying, “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists”. It reminds me of something that I once read that was attributed to Peter Drucker: There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

So as I consider these I find myself asking, ‘what is that I am REALLY learning?’ and ‘am I doing things that are keeping me from what it is I need to be learning?’
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My blog is my sword

My brother phoned me the other day. I was on leave with my family but what he had to say just couldn’t wait. In a rushed and high-pitched tone he told me he just ‘did’ his first blog. I’ve not seen that kind of excitement around a blog since… well ever. And the reason it’d been such a moment for him, wasn’t because of great writting, or interesting citizen-media. It was because he’d been phoned that afternoon to let him know he’d won a truck load of money. All he had to do, was drive 30 minutes out of town to go and pick up his prize. Clearly the common-sense part of his mind was completely over-ridden by his need to win a truck-load of cash, because he almost went.

What stopped him was Google.
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Team Building on Steroids

On the whole I’m not a big fan of team building. I think that it’s lost it’s way during it’s life time and meandered into events that were more about the experience than the team. Enter the ‘Spy Game‘. I can’t tell you much about it. I can’t give it a rating or advise you on whether or not it’ll add value to your team. But having read about it, it’s the kind of experience I’d like to participate in. If not just to experience the inventiveness of those who put it together.

I couldn’t find a link to a site about it directly, but I did check the ‘Go Game‘ out, which is apparently it’s baby brother.

Japan – Cherry Blossoms

If you noticed a post a week or two ago (Where in the world is Wally) then you’ll know that I had a brief trip to Japan last week. In fact it was so brief that I spent more time travelling there and back than I did in Japan. The flight was around 26 hours going there and 28 hours coming back. Wild.

I had some thoughts around my experience and observations while I was there. This then, is the begining of a multi-thread post on those thoughts.

As part of my preperation I contacted all the people I knew who’d been to Japan (or thought of going to Japan) to ask them what I should know before I go. I also visited my local book store and picked up two books on Japan. Both written for travellers to Japan from a different culture. Amazingly I managed to find someone who had a contact in the South African embassy in Tokyo. I figured it couldn’t hurt to have the name and number of a person like that. You never know the amount of trouble you’re capable of getting into, and having the name of someone who has influence to get you out can never hurt. Ever.

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There must be a rationale behind out-sourcing …

it’s just that I cannot understand, nor see it, right now.

I’ve just come out of a forced 2-week sabbatical as a result of my system-board kicking the bucket on my Hewlett-Packard notebook. 14 days it has taken for HP, nay I lie, ICSS to fix it for me. HP, like many companies, outsources servicing and repairs to 3rd parties.

Clearly there must be a financial and logistical reason for this … but at what cost to the comsumer? I believe that the motivation to actually care for a customers problem is distilled in the process of outsourcing core functions such as servicing and repairs.

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Effort

I’m sitting at a coffee station at one of my clients’ head office, catching up on emails before I present in 10 min.  I would’ve been half an hour early but I waited 20 minutes outside the gate for the visitor parkade to empty out.  There is a dire shortage of parking space at the office, causing a backlog of frustrated customers and vendors at the entrance.  Not ideal.  What surprised me though, is that it is clearly not a new problem.  They even have a nice stand-alone metallic sign that explains “Customer Parking Full”.  Nice.

Why do we go to so much effort to explain a problem when we could try find ways to solve it?

I find it incredible that they’ve gone to great lengths to help their employees make efficient use the coffee vending machine by means of a colour-coded flowchart (see image), but parking remains a head ache.

Where do you concentrate your efforts?  How often do we try to neutralise problems instead of solving them?

Download the whole internet?

I am sure many of us have wished at times that we could have the “whole Internet” on our hard drives. Of course we know its impossible, the Internet in 2003 weighed in at approx 90 million gigs, a little more than most hard drives. So, to solve this problem, a company called webaroo has come up with a solution. The solution keeps a snapshot of useful info on your hard disk so that you can still search for info even offline. Obviously you wont get as many results as Google, but how many of us actually go to page 49 on a Google search anyway. An interesting service, so take a look at webaroo or to read more, read the New Scientis article here

Australia’s Ageing Workforce

“The ageing of Australia’s population is a well known phenomenon. It has been particularly apparent since the 1960s and is attributed to falling mortality and fertility rates combined with the effect of a baby boom generation as it moves into the older age brackets. For similar reasons the workforce has also been ageing, but over the past two decades the workforce (and especially the full-time workforce) has been ageing at a rate faster than the general population.”

The implications of this rapid ageing are discussed in a short 2 page government release on the issue, that highlights the demographic problems. Download the PDF release here. Or see some additional demographic data, and some work I recently did in Australia with TEC groups here.

The Mercury today is highlighting some of the problems for the government:

“A CRITICAL skills shortage in local government has prompted an unprecedented recruitment drive. Faced with an ageing workforce, councils around Tasmania are concerned the situation could become dire unless young talent is added to the ranks. The skills shortage is hitting the key areas of town/urban planning, environmental health, engineering and building surveying. The Local Government Association of Tasmania is the first in Australia to embark on a recruitment drive.”

Read more on this report here.

The Connection Economy and the Death of Advertising

Regular readers of this blog will know we try and track uses of the term, “Connection Economy”. For us, its a key term that describes the emerging reality of the 21st century. Its a world in which WHAT you sell is becoming less and less important (since its the same stuff as that which your competitors sell, anyway), and WHO you are and HOW you sell are increasingly becoming your only means of sustaining a competitve advantage.

I recently stumbled onto a blog site, by Ray Podder, looking at branding and advertising, in which some of the implications of being technologically interconnected are fleshed out. You may want to amble over there and check it out: GROWblog.

A quote from the latest post:

Along with all the instant communication the connection economy affords us, it has also divorced us from sharing a common context. To compensate we join social networks but still feel disconnected. We communicate more than ever but feel less and less understood as we slice our shared meanings thinner and thinner across an wider audience. Is it any wonder advertisers feel the same way? If we don’t feel like we’re connecting to anyone in a meaningful way, how will companies who’ve only engaged us in a relationship of convenience? Yes, if you think a relationship with a brand is anything more than that, you’re kidding yourself!

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Nancy Kline presented Coaching in a Thinking Environment

Not having heard of, or listened to, Nancy Kline before, I approached the prospect of this one hour lecture with two things in mind – firstly to try to understand the context and content of her worldview, and how it fitted in with mine, and secondly to critically evaluate the new knowledge in terms of my current knowledge set, with a view to either expanding the latter, or marginalizing the former.

It seems Ms Kline has developed a framework for leadership called The Thinking Environment (it seems to have little TM signs next to it, kind of implying that it has been bottled as a product of sorts). The basic observation of this framework is “The quality of everything people do depends on the quality of the thinking that they do first�. This leads to a question (once again, as per the framework), “How do we help each other think for themselves, with rigour, imagination and courage?�

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Enviromental Advocacy is a good cause for retirees

I found an interesting article about people with skills, vision and passion ready to use their skills to help change society. To quote from the back of David Bornstein’s book called How to change the World we are challenged by ” What business entrepreneurs are to the economy, social entrepreneurs are to social change. They are, the driven creative individuals who question the staus quo, exploit new opportunities, refuse to give up and remake the world a better place. Read the article here.

I believe in all sphers of life we are going to see these passionate boomers using their skills and talents to bring about change to society. Social clubs, churches and organisations will have an overflow of willing skilled individuals wanting to stay involved and making a difference.

Diversity lessons in Canada

All around the world, it is becoming clear that a diverse work environment is a helpful environment for fostering innovation, global awareness, emotionally healthy workplaces, creativity, resilience and tolerance. Its becoming clear that diversity is an essential ingredient for sustainable competitive advantage.

That means that companies established within countries and communities that have natural diversity have a distinct advantage. Multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-faith countries have an advantage over those countries where diversity has simply been boiled down to gender and age issues. But regardless of the natural environment, every company has the ability to generate all sorts of diversity – internally and externally.

A report in The Toronto Star, 1 April 06, looks at how Canadian consultants are getting in on the act, and helping companies with this pressing issue. Read it here. The major points are summarised below.

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Peer Pressure

When we think of peer pressure, we often think of teenagers. This is the lifestage when peer pressure is apparently most obvious. But anyone who has kids at school will know that Parent Peer Pressure is just as pervasive and potentially destructive amongst adults. The pressure to conform to other people’s standards raises its heads throughout our lives, in private and professional areas of our lives, and even in our parenting.

An author, Roselind Wiseman, has written about the phenomenon of parenting pressure in a new book, Queen Bees and Kingpin Dads (get it at kalahari.net or Amazon.com).

You can read an interview with the author here.

6 Jobs that wont exist in 10 years time

One of the scarier predictions for someone in a life-long career could easily be Tom Peters suggesting that 90% of white collar jobs wont exist in 2010. Here are Six jobs that Wont exist in 2016:

1) Gatekeepers
2) Bloggers
3) Amateur Ad Makers
4) Car Mechanics
5) US high-tech jobs
6) Indian call-center operators

4 Predictions abut the future of work

FastCompany has an article in their March issue, ‘Fealress Predicitons (and what to do about them)’. These are their 4 predicitons about the future of work:

1) No Benefits, Better Jobs
2) Blue Collar Gets Sexy
3) Everything Global is Local
4) One-Stop Shopping Will Come to Job Hunting

The 4th prediction got my attention. Some great advancements on their way in the ‘job-matching and placement’ industry. Sites like SimplyHired.com who help prospective workers find out, through networking sites like Linked-In, who in your network is already working in the company. What about maps from Google that help you see at a glance what long the drive will be from home to the company? Annual weather forcasts, etc, etc. Now we’re really wrapping around the worker.

Apple Turns 30

I found a fairly decent and short reflection on ZD-Net around Apple turning 30 years old. It takes a very brief look at Apple and Steve Jobs’ influence, and non-influence over the 30 years.

“I think Apple would be more of an ordinary company without him–it would be much less audacious, daring and artistic,” Hertzfeld said.

One day I’d like to find something read about the rest of the Apple people. Surely it’s not been a Steve Jobs lone crusade? There must have been others?

Apple is one of those stories that inspires us. Mostly for me because it’s a story of resilience. A company that seemed down and out, that got back up again. Not only did it get back up, but it stepped smack into the domain of the entertainment world and has, along with all the downloaders out there, forced the industry to re-look at it’s business model.

In a sign of just how dramatically Apple’s fortunes have improved, the company’s music business has become the subject of antitrust concerns because of its overwhelmingly dominant position.

And it’s a story that doesn’t end there. From somewhere to nowhere back to somewhere… where to now? We watch, we listen, we learn…….

And while the iPod continues to dominate, rivals hope to head off Apple at the next technology pass. The company’s hold on the music player market appears to be strong, though others see a potential opening as music gets more closely wedded to the cell phone or perhaps to some other kind of handheld computing or entertainment device.

Where is the innovation

So many companies talk about innovation, and yet at their annual reviews have to grudgingly admit that once again they’ve failed to meet expectations in this area. Most companies have innovation as a core value these days. Yet, they don’t create an environment that will foster it (in our opinion, this includes, at a minimum, a culture of diversity, and a culture of acceptance of (even rewarding of) and learning from failure).

I discovered more evidence of the lack of innovation in the Business 2.0 magazine, Jan/Feb 06 edition (purchased in Australia, but I think its the global edition).

The edition featured to “Best of” for the year past. They listed the following:
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Where in the world is Wally?

When we brought TomorrowToday.biz to life, we agreed to see ourselves as an international business. We knew there was no reason on the planet that a company grown out of South Africa couldn’t add value to organisations all over the world. Every now and then we have moments like this week, when we step back briefly and stand a little amazed that we’re doing it…

Toward the end of this week, Keith will be in Shanghai, China; Graeme in Melborne, Australia; and Barrie in Tokyo, Japan. Add to that the 35 odd people in South Africa, the UK and Hawaii, and it’s week worth smiling at : ) ‘Keep Walking’

Best of FireFox Extensions

If you’re a FireFox browser user then you might be interested in this list of ‘top rated extensions’ from C-Net. If you’re anything like me, then you end up with a fair amount of extensions loaded, you don’t know if they’re useful, and you haven’t a clue if there are some doing what others are doing, and hence wasting resource on your machine.

Here’s a handy list of ‘must haves’ to consider.

Managing Talent Differently

The talent challenge is for real. And it isn’t just the frontline Indian software firms that are realising this. Increasingly, the global IT majors setting up shop in India are sensing the need to find new ways to attract and retain talent. There’s also the need to quickly build new capabilities and skills. In October 2004, a conference in Chennai, addressed these issues. On the sidelines of the summit, Businessworld (India) and Nasscom brought together six experts to debate issues related to talent management. The panelists were Subroto Bagchi, co-founder and COO, MindTree Consulting, Hema Ravichander, senior vice-president (HR), Infosys Technologies, Ajit Rangnekar, the deputy dean of the Indian School of Business, Ray Kloss, Peoplesoft’s director, product and industry marketing (Japan & Asia Pacific), Martin Appel, the HR head of IBM India and Nasscom president Kiran Karnik . Businessworld’s deputy editor Indrajit Gupta moderated the discussion.

The objective of the session was to identify the challenges India’s knowledge-based firms will face as they scale up, and also identify creative solutions and ideas that will help them design organisations that leverage and engage talent.

Excerpts of their excellent discussion are available online here.

Some highlights (without context):

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