Category Archives: Business & Marketing

Is Gen Y changing the workplace?

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Generation Y (GenY) is made up of those born between 1981-1999. I hear a few knocks on today’s young people but mostly from older folks with a very different view of… everything. I found the following in a story on a Canadian website and have applied for membership in Gen Y.

Clay Collins, author of The Alternative Productivity Manifesto and Quitting Things and Flakiness: The #1 Productivity Anti-Hack, argues that Gen Y is different than previous generation workers in the following ways:

  • Gen Y uses modern tools and technologies, including software that’s easily accessible and free from the Internet;
  • Gen Y easily maintains their to-do lists, and priorities by synching with the PDAs and iPODs;
  • Gen Y are not workaholics, and understand the relationship between a balanced life and productivity;
  • Gen Y are more likely to love their jobs, because they change jobs more frequently, and stay in jobs that match their passions and talents;
  • Gen Y has a continuing thirst for learning and personal growth;
  • Gen Y wants to have new experiences, try new things, and be creative;
  • Gen Y doesn’t stay in jobs they don’t like just to be comfortable and secure.

Understanding Generation Y is important not just for employers. Older workers–that is, anyone over 30–need to know how to adapt to the values and demands of their newest colleagues. Before too long, they’ll be the bosses. via Is Gen Y changing the workplace? Entrepreneur Financial Post.

Direct Mail Spam

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It bothers me –more than it should– that I can filter out most email spam but not the spam that hits my USPS mail box.

The envelope above contained a not-very-interesting offer from a local car dealer (Capitol Chrysler Jeep Dodge). I’m guessing the dealer knew it wasn’t very interesting because he designed the envelope to look like something official from the state DMV. He knew that if the recipient knew is was fr0m a car dealer, she would just toss it.

So, if the dealer is this dishonest in his marketing, why should I expect him to be any more trust-worthy in selling me a car?

 

“The new normal”

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“What’s actually happening is this: we’re realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.”

From a post by Seth Godin.

Techies and Taciturns

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Olivar Marks blogs about collaboration for ZDNet. He brings up an issue that I’ve been dealing with as I push for an enterprise social networking platform (Yammer) at our company.

“There seems to be a personality type that has a huge appetite for learning and using ever more frequent waves of new technology developments that is independent of any particular demographic, and who are eager to participate in group activities online or off.”

“These folks are often called “early adopters” and “techies” in companies and are leveraged in pilot try outs of new technologies. Their opposite –I call them the Taciturns (habitually reserved and uncommunicative)– are those who have limited interest (or competence and confidence) in collaborating, preferring instead to work solo and communicate on their own terms.”

Okay, I’m squarely in the first group. To the point of being annoying.

“Obviously some of the people who have created the workflows and body of knowledge inside a company through years of service resent the trivialization of their old fashioned ways of working, and some have been led to believe that they need to buck up their ideas and get with it on Twitter, micro/macro blogging, Facebook-in-the-enterprise and other forms of social engagement with their cohorts.”

…and I helped create some of those workflows and bodies of knowledge during the last quarter century but it’s time for some of them to go!

“The Taciturns of all ages generally speaking are laughing inwardly at all the teenage leadership stuff they hear being bandied about, and have often already decided they won’t be participating in any of that.”

What most managers -in my experience- really want is for every employee to immediately open, read and act on every email “from the top.” The notion of a social networking platform is less appealing because they now have to compete for attention with stuff (they consider) less important than theirs (usually everything).

 

“The Future of Work”

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Chris Brogan thinks work will be more and more modular, mobile, cause-balanced, smaller/bigger, and goal-aligned.

“Many of us will start using “project” as the unit of measurement of work. Meaning, a job won’t be a job any more, but a collection of projects, sometimes with the same employer and sometimes not. We will all work a bit more like Hollywood’s film industry, gathering the right team for the right project, and having more than one “picture” in the works at all time. This will require a lot more self-organizing and a lot more self-discipline, but people who define work around the unit of “project” instead of the unit of “job” will definitely have a better chance of succeeding.”

Brogan notes that “management styles are still based around “butt in chair” metrics.” While you might just be hoping to have a job in the future, this short –but insightful post– is worth a read if you want a peek at what things will be like in the future.

“How to make trillions of dollars”

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David Cain is (Raptitude) helping me (and many others) “get better at being human.” In this post he explains how television has been used by “very-high-level marketers” to create a nation of people who typically:

  • work almost all the time
  • absorb several hours of advertising every night, in their own homes
  • are tired and unhealthy and vaguely dissatisfied with their lives
  • respond to boredom, dissatisfaction, or anxiety only by buying and consuming things
  • have disposable income but can’t find a more fulfilling line of work without losing their health insurance
  • create health problems for themselves, which can be treated with drugs they can “ask their doctor about”
  • own far more items than they use, and believe they don’t have enough
  • are easily distracted from the unhealthy state of their lives and their culture by breaking news and celebrity gossip
  • perpetually convince themselves it is not the right time to make major lifestyle changes
  • happily buy stuff that breaks within a year, and which nobody knows how to fix
  • have learned, through the media’s culture of blame-mongering, that the key to solving public and private issues is to find the right people to hate

Wow. Sound like anyone you know?

I’m trying to stop watching the evening network news. A tough habit to break. It’s been part of my life since… well, since the beginning of network news. Thanks to DVR technology I can skip all the adds to which Mr. Cain refers.

My friend (and one of the 5 smartest guys I know) Henry has eliminated “news” completely. Or so he says. I’m not sure how one does that. But if anyone can, it’s Henry. He makes a compelling case that knowing the news adds nothing to his life. He’s very well (selectively?) informed, so…

The excerpts above don’t tell you much about “how to make trillions of dollars” so I encourage you to read the full post if that’s something you’d like to do.

    Neuromarketing

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    Blipverts from Max Headroom’s world (“20 minutes into the future”) grows more real every day. From The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzenger:

    “Today, the advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking the very foundations of our capacity for experience, drawing us into the vast and confusing media jungle. They are trying to rob us of as much of our scarce resource (attention) as possible, and they are doing so in ever more persistent and intelligent ways. Of course, they are increasingly making use of the new insights into the human mind offered by cognitive and brain science to achieve their goals (“neuromarketing” is one of the ugly new buzzwords). We can see the probable result in the epidemic of attention-deficit disorder in children and young adults, in midlife burnout, in rising levels of anxiety in large parts of the population.

    New medial environments may create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states — a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization.”

    Blogger Screening

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    Starting and maintaining a blog (any website?) is like buying a hamster. You hurry home and put together the cage with brightly colored tunnels and the little wheel that spins round and round. The sawdust in the bottom of the cage smells fresh and sweet.

    And then it becomes work. A chore that must be attended to every day.

    I help people (clients and internal staff) set up blogs and websites and the initial conversation goes something like this:

    ME: So what will you put on this website?

    THEM: Well, there will be an “about” page… and maybe photos and bios of our people.

    ME: Okay, what else?

    THEM: Uh, how about a map showing where we’re located?

    ME: Alright, although it’s pretty easy to Google us for that. Anything else?

    Nobody really cares about your bios and company history. They really don’t. They care about stuff that will be useful to them. If you don’t have that –and have it regularly–I’d argue a blog probably isn’t the right tool.

    As for the Web 1.0 static “home page,” name one you’ve visited twice.

    Going forward, I think I might use the following test:

    Before we start building your new website, I want you to pick a topic that you know something about. Ideally, something about which you are passionate. Skeet shooting, counted cross-stitching, raising llamas, whatever.

    Send me an email every day for the next 10 days. It should include an excerpt and link to something related to your topic… along with 150 words explaining why you think this is interesting or important.

    That’s it. If you can’t do that, you’re probably wasting your time (and mine).

    Every good blogger I know would have no problem with this. It would take them 5 min each day. Maybe 10. Comments?

    If this page had ads, you’d ignore them

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    Robin Wauters takes a look at the results of a new Adweek Media/Harris Interactive survey of about 2,100 U.S. adults. Topic: ads
    “over six in ten respondents say they tend to ignore or disregard Internet ads. Among those who ignore online ads, two in five say they ignore banner ads (43 percent) the most, and one in five say they ignore search engine ads (20 percent) the most.”
    Ms. Wauters notes Internet ad revenues in the U.S. are at an all-time high. What about other media?
    “people who said they ignore ads on other media: television ads (14 percent), radio ads (7 percent) and newspaper ads (6 percent).”
    If only 7% ignore radio ads, I’ll put that in the win column. Younger folks are more likely to ignore radio ads, compared to older people.
    11% in the 18-34 demo say they ignore radio ads, compared to 6% 55+.
    Ms. Wauters concludes her post by concluding all ads have to be better. Much better