Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Welch is still alive and must love today’s optimized millennials, who were raised to constantly strive and never stop working. Burnout would be no problem, since he could simply fire them.
In spite of that I doubt he could manage them; neither they, nor their elders, would take kindly to his style.
In fact, Welch’s approach is actually the fastest way to produce a bumper crop of weeds.
I’ve disagreed with Jack Welch many times going back to the start of this blog. In December 2006 I wrote Men Want A Life, Too in response to Welch’s comment.
“We do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder goal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally but about what is right for their kids. It can be a fraught time, since choices and consequences are more complex. That, however, is a topic for another column.”
It took two-and-a-half years, but he did return to that topic recently at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference telling them that women need to choose between raising kids and running a company.
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” (The article is from the Wall Street Journal and is the first link on this Google search page.)
Putting the comments together we have a high profile x-CEO who believes that the way to the top is for both men and women to make the tough choice and put their family second to their career.
Just let relatives, nannies (if you can afford them), daycare, schools, friends, gangs and the internet raise the next generation.
Why do comments like these come primarily from old, rich white guys?
What planet are they living on? More importantly have they bothered listening to today’s workers—and I don’t mean just Millennials.
As long as this is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that runs companies that attitude will translate to corporate action and companies will face problems staffing. The recession won’t go on forever and demographically there’s a serious people shortage at every level and in every field.
If you really want to attract the best and brightest men and women then you need to recognize that their priorities have changed and if forced to choose the company will, in most cases, come in second.
And those candidates who do choose company over life may lack the empathy needed to innovate and market, let alone lead, the current workforce.
There are plenty of companies that already know this and have adjusted their culture accordingly, but most will be dragged kicking and screaming into the reality once the economy turns around, demographics rears its ugly head and they have no choice.
Back in 2010, Standard & Poor’s predicted that the biggest influence on “the future of national economic health, public finances, and policymaking” will be “the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”
As usual, our governments at all levels are doing little more than funding studies, wringing their hands and making dire predictions. In all likelihood they will continue doing more of the same, since constructive efforts would require bipartisan cooperation, and politicians aren’t known for their willingness to bite unpopular bullets — as our country’s aging/decrepit infrastructure proves.
Companies, by contrast, are uniquely positioned to change practices and attitudes now. Transformation won’t be easy, but companies that move past today’s preconceptions about older employees and respond and adapt to changing demographics will realize significant dividends, generating new possibilities for financial return and enhancing the lives of their employees and customers.
Companies might be in a better positioned, but rampant cognitive bias, whether unconscious or conscious, often prevails, resulting in a preference for hiring “people like me.”
Soon, the workforce will include people from as many as five generations ranging in age from teenagers to 80-somethings.
Are companies prepared? The short answer is “no.” Aging will affect every aspect of business operations — whether it’s talent recruitment, the structure of compensation and benefits, the development of products and services, how innovation is unlocked, how offices and factories are designed, and even how work is structured — but for some reason, the message just hasn’t gotten through.
So forget companies.
Current bosses, as well as bosses-to-be, have the great advantage of being able to do it now themselves, rather than waiting for their companies to act.
And it’s to their advantage, assuming they want to keeping their teams humming, well-staffed and highly productive.
But, depending on your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), don’t expect it to happen overnight or minimize the amount of work that may be required.
To get started, click the link at the link. It will take you to a seven part series in the Harvard Business Review called The Aging Workforce. It’s probably the fastest way to wrap your mind around what’s happening in all its complexity — or at least a lot of it.
And join me tomorrow for a closer look at cognitive bias, which affects the entire human race — including you and me.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I wrote this post in 2008, midway through the Great Recession (2007-2009), which lowered demand for talent and mitigated the expected people shortage. It took a decade, but the talent shortage is here with a vengeance — at all levels. Moreover, birth rates have fallen below replacement needs creating a demographic time bomb. One result is that bosses at all level need to become expert at managing a multigenerational workforce — not just managing, but also hiring outside their comfort zone if they want to stay staffed. More on that tomorrow.
Great post by Steve Roesler over at All Things Workplace on How Age Impacts Your View of Life. It focuses on satisfaction and expectations at various stages of life. Click over, it’s well worth reading.
But what I wanted to discuss here today appeared near the end of the post.
“During the past few years we’ve seen the headlines for Talent Wars, Saving Institutional Knowledge and Learning, and Diversity. My experience so far with recent layoffs has been that workers nearing retirement are being offered packages to accelerate their decisions…I wonder if the decision-making maturity and collective knowledge of these newly “retired” workers will be irreplaceable and actually prompt a lengthening of the recovery process.”
Steve’s got a point about the recovery, but what if this mess hadn’t happened?
What if a normal down cycle had occurred? One that didn’t go global with the same vengeance; one that required only spotty realignment as opposed to wholesale layoffs.
Worker demographics have been a global concern for over a decade, but the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and the corresponding skills needed to manage a multigenerational workforce haven’t improved nearly as much as was hoped.
Why? Is there a root to the problem (challenge, if you prefer) that should be addressed, but isn’t?
I have an idea about the root, tell me what you think.
I believe that one large piece of this problem stems from the relationship of parents and children and the difficulty of letting go and changing the paradigms.
Notice that ‘paradigm’ is plural, since there are several going on simultaneously; the major ones are
older (parent), younger (child);
peer (siblings/relatives) to peer;
older (sibling/relative), younger (sibling/relative) and vice versa,
but there are multiple other minor configurations.
What I’ve found is that although there is no family involved, for many people the interaction styles are habitual, unconscious and happen across all ages with no discernible pattern.
If, in fact, this is a root problem how do we fix it? Other than a one-at-a-time approach I have no idea.
What are your thoughts regarding the validity of my hypothesis? What ideas do you have to address it?
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
In a country still focused on youth it’s good to remember that Rob Hull was no spring chicken when he founded Adaptive Insights in 2003, was rejected 70 times by VCs and survived the 2008 recession. Adaptive is now a software unicorn that seems to have no interest in chasing spring chickens when hiring — just great talent of whatever age — and ranks 3.9 on glassdoor.
Who does a company, with explosive growth, founded and built by old folks in their forties and fifties all with extensive executive management experience, turn to when moving to the next level?
The company hasn’t disclosed exact revenue figures, but it says it grew new annual recurring revenue by more than 50% in 2014, and claims more than 2,500 companies, including Coca Cola, Toyota, and AAA use its software. It’s raised $100 million in funding from investors like Salesforce, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
The company is Adaptive Insights and the guy is Tom Bogan, an even older guy, with even more experience.
When a large sample of Facebook groups created by 20- to 29-year-olds was examined by a team based at the Yale School of Public Health, three-quarters of the groups were found to denigrate old people. More than a third advocated banning old people from public activities like shopping.
Of course, one assumes that the ‘old people’ to which they refer aren’t their relatives.
(I’d like to hear them on the subject 10, 20, 30 and 40 years from now.)
There is enormous value in having ‘been there/done that’ through multiple economic cycles, cultural change, globalization and technology evolution/revolution.
But to take advantage of it you need to be comfortable enough in your own skin to admit you need to learn — like Mark Zukerberg and Larry Page.
This is a generation, after all, that thinks of itself as “forever young,” even as some near 70. Most of all, what came across onscreen as well as in Greenfield-Sanders’ portraits was an unapologetic affirmation of the essential Boomer mantra—yes, it is still all about ME.
For a small, and supposedly lost, generation, Gen X’ers have found their way to positions of power. (…)Gen X’ers, incidentally, are among the most highly educated generation in the U.S.: 35% have college degrees vs. 19% of Millennials.
We all know that everything moves faster these days — whether products, attitudes — or generations.
So, without more ado, meet Generation Z, which encompasses those born between 1995 and the early 2000s.
They present a new challenge to bosses, especially since they bear little resemblance to Millennials.
The question for most bosses and bosses-to-be is this: having finally wrapped their heads around Millennial dos and don’ts is it worth the effort to add Gen Z to the repertoire?
Unequivocally yes.
Actually, you don’t have much choice, since there are 79 million (and counting) of them.
I’ve disagreed with Jack Welch many times going back to the start of this blog. In December 2006 I wrote Men Want A Life, Too in response to Welch’s comment.
“We do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder goal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally but about what is right for their kids. It can be a fraught time, since choices and consequences are more complex. That, however, is a topic for another column.”
It took two-and-a-half years, but he did return to that topic recently at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference telling them that women need to choose between raising kids and running a company.
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” (The article is from the Wall Street Journal and is the first link on this Google search page.)
Putting the comments together we have a high profile x-CEO who believes that the way to the top is for both men and women to make the tough choice and put their family second to their career.
Just let relatives, nannies (if you can afford them), daycare, schools, friends, gangs and the internet raise the next generation.
Why do comments like these come primarily from old, rich white guys?
What planet are they living on? More importantly have they bothered listening to today’s workers—and I don’t mean just Millennials.
As long as this is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that runs companies that attitude will translate to corporate action and companies will face problems staffing. The recession won’t go on forever and demographically there’s a serious people shortage at every level and in every field.
If you really want to attract the best and brightest men and women then you need to recognize that their priorities have changed and if forced to choose the company will, in most cases, come in second.
And those candidates who do choose company over life may lack the empathy needed to innovate and market, let alone lead, the current workforce.
There are plenty of companies that already know this and have adjusted their culture accordingly, but most will be dragged kicking and screaming into the reality once the economy turns around, demographics rears its ugly head and they have no choice.
Yes, it’s another post about my favorite company. Why do I write so much about Zappos?
Because, according to CEO Tony Hsieh, “Our No. 1 priority is the company culture. Our whole belief is that if we get the culture right, then everything else, including the customer service, will fall into place.”
Zappos embodies everything I believe about culture being the bedrock of corporate success.
Not bad for a dot com startup that was given exactly one week’s worth of additional funds in which to turn itself around or be shut down.
But heaping more kudos on CEO Tony Hsieh isn’t the purpose of this post. Rather, I’d like your opinion of why cultures such as this are so rare.
Hsieh is a Gen Xer running a truly multi-generational company (I confirmed this by calling and chatting with a customre support person, not HR or an official source, just a worker) that hires based on cultural fit and skills—they carry equal weight.
The focus on culture is one reason that Zappos doesn’t have the generational management problems besetting so many companies.
The Zappos culture is a long way from rocket science and Hsieh isn’t shy about explaining how to duplicate it, so you tell me.
Great post by Steve Roesler over at All Things Workplace on How Age Impacts Your View of Life. It focuses on satisfaction and expectations at various stages of life. Click over, it’s well worth reading.
But what I wanted to discuss here today appeared near the end of the post.
“During the past few years we’ve seen the headlines for Talent Wars, Saving Institutional Knowledge and Learning, and Diversity. My experience so far with recent layoffs has been that workers nearing retirement are being offered packages to accelerate their decisions…I wonder if the decision-making maturity and collective knowledge of these newly “retired” workers will be irreplaceable and actually prompt a lengthening of the recovery process.”
Steve’s got a point about the recovery, but what if this mess hadn’t happened?
What if a normal down cycle had occurred? One that didn’t go global with the same vengeance; one that required only spotty realignment as opposed to wholesale layoffs.
Worker demographics have been a global concern for over a decade, but the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and the corresponding skills needed to manage a multigenerational workforce haven’t improved nearly as much as was hoped.
Why? Is there a root to the problem (challenge, if you prefer) that should be addressed, but isn’t?
I have an idea about the root, tell me what you think.
I believe that one large piece of this problem stems from the relationship of parents and children and the difficulty of letting go and changing the paradigms.
Notice that ‘paradigm’ is plural, since there are several going on simultaneously; the major ones are
older (parent), younger (child);
peer (siblings/relatives) to peer;
older (sibling/relative), younger (sibling/relative) and vice versa,
but there are multiple other minor configurations.
What I’ve found is that although there is no family involved, for many people the interaction styles are habitual, unconscious and happen across all ages with no discernible pattern.
If, in fact, this is a root problem how do we fix it? Other than a one-at-a-time approach I have no idea.
What are your thoughts regarding the validity of my hypothesis? What ideas do you have to address it?
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Companies and bosses have struggled over the last decade or so learning how to attract, 
