A universal truth about a group photo is that, once it has been taken and the picture developed, the photo is only as good as each individual thinks they look. Make sense? Next time you are looking at a group photo that includes you, take note of who you look at first, as you pick up the picture. Then watch yourself pass a judgement on the entire photo, based on how good or bad you looked. Forget the fact that there were 70 other people in the photo who may have looked amazing…
Where and what we focus on is important, especially when we’re talking about the growth of people. For too long, in many parts of the world, we have embraced what can be called a ‘medical model’ when it’s come to people growth and development. The term ‘medical model’ is clearly borrowed from the medical profession, and can be simplistically understood as you consider your last visit to your local GP.
Your GP invites you to sit on her examination table and then does an exam looking for what’s wrong with you. I have never met anyone who has gone to their doctor and said, “Tell me what’s right with me, Doc. I want to know all the places I’m fantastically healthy.â€? No, we visit the doctor to find out what’s wrong with us, and then our doctor assists us to get the wrong made right. It is also important to highlight that your doctor is not incentivised to make you super-human in the fixing process. Your doctor spent seven years studying the average human being. Their job is to simply make you average again. Continue reading ‘Inviting People to Grow’
Having written the book, Everything I know about leadership I learnt from the kids, I often get asked if I really believe that leaders can learn about leadership from kids.
Yes, I do. And here’s why I believe leaders can learn from kids.
Last year my daughter Tamryn, was elected as Head Girl of her school (of course the proud parents pointed knowingly to the role that the gene pool had played in the process!). It was interesting to watch her tackle the responsibility and challenges that such a position entailed and I enjoyed some insightful conversations with her as the year unfolded. Once the curtain on the year came down I invited her to send me an email sharing what she had learnt about leadership through the experience.
Besides the obvious need to work on respect for her father, this was the response: Continue reading ‘Leadership Lessons on Teamwork from the Kids’
Dave Snowden of the Cynefin Centre recently said that the relationship between a terrorist and the state, a tax-payer and the tax authority and an employee and the organisation are very similar: they are all complex, a-symmetric relationships and a simplistic traditionalist approach usually gets the opposite effect than what was intended. Peter Senge refers to a simplistic “eventsâ€? and “trendsâ€? focus in stead of a more complex “systemicâ€? focus when trying to understand the drivers behind specific organisational dilemmas. Graeme Codrington calls it a mechanistic, Newtonian, industrial-age approach to try and solve complex, quantum, connection-economy type problems. Continue reading ‘On using overly-simplistic language to describe complex organisational issues…’
The worm has turned…
It seems as if we are reminded on a daily basis – ad nauseum – just how many Boomers are coming up for retirement and the drain they will be on resources. In the US, Leonard Steinhorn has posed an interesting question: “Imagine if the generation getting ready to retire wasn’t the baby boomers, but the World War II generation — or the Greatest Generation, as it’s popularly lionized. No one would be calling those Americans a burden or a drag. If they were retiring today, we’d be writing columns full of praise for their sacrifice and discussing what our nation owes them and how it’s our moral duty to support them. Why the different attitudes toward these two generations? Why is one idealized as heroic and giving, while the other is disdained as self-indulgent and taking? It’s time to reassess…The boomers’ problem is not that they haven’t accomplished a great deal; it’s that we take their accomplishments for granted and don’t give them any credit.â€?
This is a welcome change from recent postings on the Net that have done nothing but criticize and patronize the Boomers. Certainly we see a much more positive portrayal of Boomers in this month’s GenerationWatch.
Continue reading ‘GenerationWatch – March 2006′
The first Baby Boomers will turn sixty this year and they will do what no other generation has done before them: Re-tyre.
There are a number of factors that are already causing futurists to look at the effects of this upcoming change. Many predict that it will bring about a societal change of Tsunami-like proportions. In America, 70 million Boomers will retire over the next twenty years. One of the factors that have changed the Boomer world is medical science. Many more people are living much longer. The generation behind the Boomers, the Xers, are not as large in number as their predecessors. In the States there are approximately 46 million in Generation X – 35% less than the Boomers. Continue reading ‘Retirement vs. Re-Tyrement’
Today, Israel announced the results of their latest election. The winning party is headed by a woman - that’s interesting news in a land dominated by old, conniving male politicians. It seems the people want change!
But, what really interested me was a Pensioner’s Party that managed to gain seven seats in the Knesset. They were entirely retired people, campaigning solely for retired people’s issues, including State subsidies for mature-age medicines. Read more about their victory here, in the Ha-aretz newspaper.
It won’t be long before younger generations get in on the act, with exactly the opposite platforms!
For more on the Israeli elections, go here or here.
Duncan Macleod’s PostKiwi’s Generation blog has some information on Peter Sheahan.
Peter Sheahan’s book, “Generation Y: Surviving and Thriving with Generation Y at Work”, was published in 2005 by Hardie Grant Books. Here Peter outlines the content from his workshops in the workplace. Sheahan bases his work on his research with ‘talented’ Australian Gen Yers born between the years 1978 and 1994. Gen Y, he explains, is also known as Echo Boomers, Generation Next, Millennials, Boomlets, I Generation, Net Generation, Netizens and Generation WHY. This book will be read by many employers who are frustrated with the high level of attrition with people in this age group. Sheahan helps address the issues of recruitment, selection, training, management, motivation and retaining Gen Yers. You can read more of Peter Sheahan’s work at www.petersheahan.com.au
Part 1: Understanding Generation Y
…
Continue reading ‘Generation Y at Work’
Hans Zeiger writes for WorldNetDaily on an interesting phenomenon: there is a generation gap at Harvard. Apparently, these days, the ageing Boomer professors are much more radical than their more conservative, focused, career-minded, Millennial students.
I remember a similar phenomenon when I was studying a Bachelor of Commerce in the early 1990s. Our marketing lecturer was an American (I was studying in Johannesburg, South Africa), and he was a Boomer refugee from the 1960s. He would constantly bemoan our year group of yuppie commerce students, saying “why can’t you get a style? Why don’t you make a statement?”. What he meant was that there was no distinguishing feature of our year group - some guys had long hair, some had short. Some were into grunge, some were straight laced and more preppy (1980s refugees). Some were into the 60s, a few into the 70s, some into the 80s, and some the 90s. Our class photo looked like a pastiche of the previous four decades. That was Gen X.
Gen Y has become even more morally conservative, liberal in their politics and focussed in their career paths. Yet, they maintain a passionate dislike for pigeonholing, defying everyone with their individual uniqueness.
No wonder there’s a generation gap at university.
Continue reading ‘Generation gaps at Universities - radical professors and conservative students’
Anne Marie Owens, of the Canadian National Post, reports on 28 March 2006, that a new study indicates that women are coping better with the transition to retirement than men are. Read her report here (make sure you go to page 2).
She writes:
The generation of women who helped reshape the workforce by pushing for pay equity and work-life balance are now poised to dramatically transform the way Canadians retire….
The report says: “For the first time in history, we have a generation of women entering retirement who have worked in the labour force for most of their adult lives and who still have managed to provide the greater part of care for the young, and, now, for growing numbers of the very old…. These women, who have always juggled work and family responsibilities, will likely follow new routes into retirement, opting in and out of ‘retirement’ depending on caregiving demands.” ….
While women and men take on paid work after retiring in relatively equal numbers (18% of women and 24% of men), women’s patterns of re-employment seem to be more a form of “career progression,” rather than strict retirement reversal…..
They are the first generation of working women to have been in paid employment long enough to amass their own significant pensions, yet because conventional pension policies penalize typical female work patterns — described in the report as “interrupted work histories due to family responsibilities” — their pension benefits are not on par with their male counterparts.”
The report was quoted in other media…
Continue reading ‘Boomer women changing retirement’
I have come across a great resource for understanding Australia’s (and global) Generation Y. It’s written by a young author, professional speaker and consultant, Peter Sheahan, who specialises in Gen Y. His research blog is available at: http://generationy.typepad.com/petersheahan/.
Peter has published four books already, and looks like he knows his stuff. I will be looking over his work in the next few days, and will report more soon.
In 2004, Vertis, a provider of targeted advertising, media and marketing services, announced the results of a survey they had completed. It concluded that today’s young people (Gen X: born 1970s and early 80s; and Gen Y, born 1980s to 2000s) would prefer not to use agents or intermediaries when purchasing various forms of insurance. (see summary of report in the Insurance Journal).
This confirms a warning we wrote a few years ago about agents in most industries - see Death of an Agent.
See a summary of key findings below.
Continue reading ‘Agents are at serious risk from gen X & Gen Y’
Every now and then we load up the entire TT.biz team and head off to a Zoo in Jozi. Don’t ask me why we keep picking zoos to meet at? I don’t really want to go there. Last Sunday we went to the Pretoria Zoo ( 25°44′20.12″S, 28°11′19.79″E - check it out on Google Earth) and played the little known “Great Grand Zany Zoo Picture Picnic”. For more details drop me an e-mail and I’ll send the template. (but you gotta go to a Zoo to get the most out of it - and don’t hold your breath, it was built for 7 year olds)
Anyway it was a fantastic day. The weather gave us a little break in the middle of what’s been a very wet summer. Around 30 of us, including children, spent a fantasmo day getting to know each other a little better, learnt a lot more about Komodo Dragons and one or two got drilled by a frisbee.
If you want to see some pics (and we’re adding as they come in) check out our Flickr photo set.
TomorrowToday.biz got a CEO last year. We elected someone within our ranks to take on the title of CEO. Essentially we wanted to know we had one person that the buck stopped at. Outside of that we’ve had a hard time working out what else we wanted our new CEO to do. And we continue to struggle with this. I smiled as I read an article on FastCompany today about an ‘un-CEO’. It sounded very TomorrowToday.biz like in it’s description of Terri Kelly, the CEO of a company called WL Gore and Associates.
In a decentralised, virtual and highly fractal organisation perhaps the more accurate description of the position is an un-CEO and not a CEO. That’s some of the problem with ‘lanuage’. It means something. And CEO conjures up stuff you want, stuff you don’t want, and even stuff you can’t hope to have in an organisation like ours.
Terri has some interesting stuff to say…
The idea of me as CEO managing the company is a misperception. My goal is to provide the overall direction. I spend a lot of time making sure we have the right people in the right roles. You know the joke, “I’m from corporate, and I’m here to help.” We don’t need unuseful, unvaluable corporate help. We empower divisions and push out responsibility. We’re so diversified that it’s impossible for a CEO to have that depth of knowledge — and not even practical.
I had an argument with my mom on the weekend. My parents have recently stepped up the technology ladder by purchasing a digital camera (yes, I know what you’re thinking … “late uptake”). Anyway, my mom expressed disgust at how much the camera cost, and shared how she believes film is a better option. As the debate raged on, we entered into the realm of general technological advancement in recent years and the impact the advancement has had on kids.
My mom has a belief that the kids of today are impatient, lazy, intolerant and too heavily entrenched in a culture of instant gratification. This is not a unique belief, many Boomers would chorus in agreement. As an Xer (who she was aprtly referring to!) I shot back defesnively “But we’re not to blame, it was your generation who created the world we grew up in. Why should we be patient when we have never needed to be patient?” I rattled off examples such as fast food, email, cell phones and PC games that supported my argument.
As I engage more with generational theory, I begin to wonder who is responsible for “bridging the gap”? When we as the forerunners of a generational movement steam ahead in creating the world we want to live in, do we give much thought to the tpye of world we’ll be creating for our kids. Will we be aforded the privilege of writing off the values our kids adopt, when it is our actions now that will indrectly create the environment for the development of those values.
Any thoughts you’d like to add (especially from the parents amongst us)?
I’m in Australia, doinga lot of generational work. I always try and pick up the latest local writing on generations, talent and management. Last time I was here, I got “What Was It All For” (see review here). This time, my eye as drawn to bright yellow cover, and in-your-face title by Ryan Heath, “Please Just F*ck Off: it’s our turn now.” This 25-year old journalist, now working and living in London, has written an impassioned appeal to his generation (born after 1970, he refuses to succomb to giving them a label).
See the book at the Publisher’s website: http://www.plutoaustralia.com/p1/default.asp?pageId=352.
Its a Millennial’s rant about Boomers in Australia, and what needs to happen get Aussie to be globally competitive. I have only just started reading it, and seems to be well written with a strong message. More on this one later. (See Publisher’s review below)
Continue reading ‘Please Just F*ck Off, It’s Our Turn Now’
I am pretty jaded about advertising. Only the surprising and clever (and possibly the downright wierd) adverts even et my attention. And very few of them even entice me to part with my cash. So, maybe I’m not the best commentator on the advertising industry. Or, maybe I’m their best case study. I don’t know.
But either way, I was seriously impressed with Isuzu just a few days ago.
Continue reading ‘Chuck, The Hoff and Isuzu’
If you’ve tried to book a South African Airways ticket online this week, then you like me, have discovered that it’s not working. I’ve not been able to get past the first page to see available flights. So you call their call centre. Very rarely does the call get answered, and when it does, you aren’t helped there either because they’re working on the same system you are, so you’re transfered to ‘central reservations’. The tickets are booked but it means standing in the ticket line at the airport to pay, so the ticket can be issued.
So why is their website down you ask? I asked…. and it’s because they’re ‘upgrading it’. The upgrade is taking all week. Well all of this week anyway. I wonder if they’ll still be doing it next week? I’m no software implementation guru, but from the little I do know, you don’t ever, no never, kill your primary customer facing system, especially when it’s a major source of income for a ’system upgrade’. It’s called suicide.
Please note that we have implemented extensive changes on our site.
Due to this, you may experience intermittent problems when enquiring on availability and fares.
These problems are being addressed urgently and should be resolved shortly. If you do experience such problems, please contact your local SAA call centre to complete you booking.
We thank you for your patience.
The flysaa.com team
From my perspective the past 2 years has been a comedy of complete stuff ups from SAA. It really does seem like they’re determined to close themselves down. I did a quick search on this blog for posts about SAA, and the headings say it all (June 2005 to today)
Continue reading ‘Determined to go out of business, all on their own’
Should men have more choice when it comes to unintended pregnancy? In the US, the National Centre for Men is filling a lawsuit on behalf of Matt Dubay who has been ordered to pay child support for his ex-girlfriends daughter. Matt’s ex-girlfriend assured him she couldn’t get pregnant.
The gist of the argument: If a pregnant woman can choose among abortion, adoption or raising a child, a man involved in an unintended pregnancy should have the choice of declining the financial responsibilities of fatherhood. The activists involved hope to spark discussion even if they lose.
The National Centre for Men has been wanting to pursue a case like this since the early 1990’s, and they expect to lose.
It’s an interesting case this, as it’s not just about the rights of two adults, because a child is involved. An entire life, a whole future. It’s going to be a healthy discussion to raise some of the issues, especially because there are no simple clear cut answers.
“None of these are easy questions,” said Gandy, a former prosecutor. “But most courts say it’s not about what he did or didn’t do or what she did or didn’t do. It’s about the rights of the child.”
See CNN for the full article.
One of Australian business partners, SageCo, was recently in the HR Magazine in Australia. Their specialty is preserving wisdom, helping mature age workers retire properly, and they have an associated mature age recruitment agency. The TomorrowGroup is working on developing similar offerings in South Africa.
A copy of the article appears below.
Continue reading ‘Flexibility key to older workers’
We have long argued that companies that show some form of genuine social concern and investment will be more attractive to today’s talented young people - both as customers and staff. For many years, top end professionals (especially lawyers and consultants) have had a reputation of doing a certain amount of pro bono work. Now, it seems, that this kind of thinking extends widely, even into the world of computer programmers.
Charles Best is the founder of a non-profit website, DonorsChoose.org. The concept is easy - connect teachers in need of supplies with willing donors. But Charles recently had a request of his own. He contacted Yahoo and asked if they would donate the time of some of their top website developers to help him upgrade his website. He was bold - he asked for 6 of their most talented programmers to help him for three months at a time each.
Yahoo co-founder, David Filo, immediately signed on himself, and made the services of some key programmers available to Charles. In a press release, Yahoo indicated that it wasn’t just philanthropy that drove this decision - it was also about gaining a competitive advantage in the talent wars (they’re duking it out with the likes of Google, Microsoft and many others). Yahoo’s “community relations director”, Meg Garlinghouse (herself a Peace Corp veteran) believes this type of work will help entice the top talent in programmers.
I think they’re onto something. I really do.
One of the significant shifts we’re seeing in talent management is around input versus output performance measurement. The traditional Company Man arrived at work promptly, spent solid hours at his desk, did not overstay his welcome at tea breaks and finished his lunch before the aloted lunch hour was up. His inputs were impeccable. However, todays young talent are asking for a different measure … outputs.
Continue reading ‘Sneaky outputs’
A thought-provoking piece was presented by analyst Tony Rattey on Monday 13 March 2006 on SAFM, on the topic of “Can you truct the Internet?” I have some extension that I would like to offer.
Regarding search engine manipulation, I think that it is important to note that not all search engines operate in the same way. Some, such as Yahoo! operate on the basis of simple text search and the word counts. Others, such as Google, work by referring to the number of references to a page in order to determine its relative importance, amongst all other pages that have similar word counts. The question therefore, is whether the search engine manipulation is based on creating fictitious references to pages based on existing pages so that they seem to be unique pointers to the sites that are being targeted for better ratings. This method could be effective if this was the end of the line. However, the way these reverse-reference algorithms work is to not only count the number of references back to a particular page, but to also rank the importance of the page that points to the target site in question. So how are the importance of these pages determined? In the same way as the importance of the end pages. Therefore, if the pages are spuriously created, and in order for them to be unique such that the algorithm does not see them as copies, and thereby ignore them, these spurious pages would themselves have to have many other pages pointing to them. The effort to construct such a chain of references with sufficient weight (bearing in mind that it is essentially an exponential tree) to influence a search engine outcomes is massive, even using automated methods. This is not too say that it is impossible, but difficult. The above practice is known as GoogleBombing.
Continue reading ‘“Can You Trust the Internet?”’
The Syndey Morning Herald today reports that “Politics a turn-off for gen Y” (read it here). Their main point is that today’s young people are not apathetic about politics, that simply don’t believe that the current form democracy is taking (multi-party spin doctoring) is an acceptable way of making your voice heard. Members of Gen X and Gen Y alike are not interested in watsing their time on token displays of civic duty that achieve nothing, or on supporting sham politicians’ empty lies. Their lack of involvement in politics is therefore a very specific and deliberate choice - not merely a result of apathy.
This opens up a significant door of opportunity for any political party that is prepared to go beyond politicking. As these young generations grow up, and generation wars loom on a variety of issues (from retirement funding to environmentalism, from education to defense spending), there must be a political party in some democratic country that is going to target these young voters and provide them with what they’re looking for. I personally think they’ll scoop up a massive constituency - and this could be a huge balance of power shift in typical democracies where the voter turnout rate for elections is typically well below half of eligible voters.
A NUMBER of political parties would like to claim generation Y - Australians born in the early 1980s, now in their late teens and early 20s - as their own. But discussion about the political outlook of gen Y rarely reaches beyond conclusions of “apathy” and “conservatism”.
There are some basic truths about generation Y’s attitude to politics: they are turned off, annoyed by and distrustful of political parties, politicians and increasingly the media that is supposed to keep them honest. Few see mainstream politics as a useful vehicle for changing the world. But they do care about political issues.
In the minds of political scientists, generation Y is just like the generation before it: generation X, the original apathetic and antipolitical slackers. This charge of political apathy was forged out of an unfair comparison with baby boomers, those 1960s and 1970s radicals. Unfair because there is ample evidence that young people have always felt left out and cynical when it comes to politics.
Instead of seeing generation Y’s lack of interest in party politics as evidence of their apathy, it should be seen as an indication of just how unappealing political parties have become.
Way back on 12 - 13 August 1999, about 140 participants from European institutions, Member State governments, employer and trade union organisations and research institutions gathered for two days of debate during the Finnish Presidency of the European Council. The conference focused on the EU issues of ageing workforces, and EU labour laws that can assist in dealing the emerging issues.
Together with Japan, the EU is one of the “leaders” in facing a problem of an ageing population that impacts on the workforce. The Executive summary conclusions of the conference are listed below.
Continue reading ‘Active Strategies for an ageing workforce Conference - conclusions’
In a recent Fortune magazine, somewhere in a story about Toyota, I zero-ed in on this quote from Jeffery Liker out of his book ‘The Toyota Way’…
Is Toyota a conservative company? Yes. Does it seem to be very plodding and slow to make changes? Yes. Is it innovative? Remarkebly so. Go slow, build on the past, and thoroughly consider all implications of decisions, yet move more aggresively to beat the competition to market with exceptional products.’
I’m still not sure what it is, but I’ve been haunted by something in it ever since reading it. Perhaps it’s the call of one of my colleagues that we slow down a little, and at times a lot. We move too fast for him to keep up. Perhaps it’s because I work with another colleague who moves so darn quickly that there are times when none of us can keep up. But I’m becoming more convinced that the speed reference is not what’s got me. It’s the commitment to ‘exceptional products’ and the attitude of aggression in the market place that is suggested.
Perhaps for Toyota achieving that outcome needs the slow, plodding methodical pace. The question for our business is, what is the formula we need to build off of to ensure a similar outcome? I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it…
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