Our Blog

Keeping on track with my latest blog post and recent research I have been doing about generational cycles, I found an intriguing conversation to participate in on Quora. View all the answers

Someone posed the question:

What are the key challenges when managing intergenerational differences… from any generation’s perspective?

The short answer is that understanding the differences between generations is key. My blog talks about what those differences are. Generation Y constantly gets talked about as wanting “work-life” balance. I think it is better framed in terms of them wanting “work-life-meaning” balance. The increase in enrollment in social enterprise program at MBA schools is one indicator of this. There was a fascinating conversation on NPR this morning where a venture capitalist was talking about the whole idea of job creation as a goal, is completely backwards. He says that the whole goal of a business is profits and employees are an input of that. In his world they look at full time employees under a microscope and are constantly trying to reduce how many jobs are needed to get work done (http://n.pr/n93Zu6).

I think that perspective that the sole goal of a business is profit is very 20th century. The Millennial generation is showing us different. They are absolutely passionate about broadening our understanding bout the reason a business exists. From their perspective there are 4 goals that all need to be simultaneously met:

• To create meaningful work
• Treating employees well
• Treating the environment and community well
• Delivering value to customers

When these objectives are met, you actually get the best profits.

What is important to understand when managing the differences in the generations is recognizing that the Millennial generation takes a much more free market view than prior generations. In free markets it is impossible to just treat your employees as FTE’s, you have to treat them with respect. As well your business has to have job creation as one of it’s priorities. In many cases for Millennials, the idea of running a business to create jobs is the social purpose and reason for the business to exist.

The other point the VC makes is that in the 1980’s we had big typing pools. He mentioned, that if businesses were about creating jobs, we would have never invented the word processor, because it eliminated the need for all of these typing pools.

This is very 20th century optimization focused thinking. Now, most optimization is done to make jobs more productive and more effective. We can track sales pipelines, recruiting, databases, and more much more effectively than we used to. It’s not about thinking in terms of being inefficient for the sake of job creation. When we say we want to create jobs, we are thinking about the kinds of work that can’t be automated. The kind of work that can add value and will be highly labor intensive. This is what draws i.c.stars to social media work and the Internet. We love how labor intensive it to manage social media. It means great 21st century knowledge work jobs.

What do you think?