From Changing Tides and Gen Y:

There are very few ties that keep us in one place or in one job. The internet allows us the ability to be instant experts on any given topic - learn about a topic one day, spend the next researching it, teach it the third. With the right resources and determination it is a very easy process. Sure, we won’t be experienced experts but we’ll know what the tools are, what the problems look like and some general idea of how to mix the two. Creativity will fill in the gaps.

I love this quote. I think a lot of people will quibble with it, arguing that the internet isn’t a deep enough platform for real leaning. And, sure, it’s rare that someone will actually become an expert on a topic after honing their google fu for a day or two.

But that’s really the point: how useful are experts, really? Once we get away from the more traditional varieties of work, specialization and expertise loses its value. In its place, adaptability becomes paramount.

Someone who is exceptionally good at, say, Microsoft Visio isn’t really going to be of much use 99% of the time, but someone who can learn the basics the morning before your board of directors needs an extensive org chart? That employee is golden.

Something to think about.

BusinessWeek had an article last week full of tips for employers on how to communicate with Gen Y employees. For the most part, it was kind of useless - ValleyWag even called them on it - made up of platitudes like “Don’t manage, mentor” and “Don’t conceal, communicate”, which run the gamut between obvious and oblivious but don’t get anywhere near real value.

I’m not exactly sure why older generations are having trouble communicating with Generation Y. They seem to regard us like they would a foreign language, looking to books and consultants and lists-disguised-as-articles for explanations on how to best learn what makes us tick.

But the dirty little secret behind all of this is that a lot of managers aren’t just looking for information about us — our habits, culture, attitudes, and so on –, they’re also looking for information on how to control. These employers don’t want to adapt. They’d much rather just figure out how to BS their way into the appearance of Gen Y friendliness.

They want to harness this changed workforce without ever really acknowledging our differences.

The only tip employers really need for communicating with Gen Y is this: don’t BS. Be honest. Speak plainly and directly. Don’t lean on hierarchies, memos, policies and procedures. Keep your explanations straightforward. And don’t you ever use the “because I’m your boss” card.

That may seem like a lot, but it’s really not. It all boils down to a simple “No BS” rule. Try that, and all the other ‘tips’ you need will start to fall into place.

Photo by fabblo. Licensed under Creative Commons

Here’s the sequence of events:

• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reveals his company’s newest product: The Kindle, a handheld electronic device for reading & buying books on the go.
• Apple CEO Steve Jobs responds to the release, saying “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read any more.”
• Timothy Egan, blogger for the New York Times, responds in a blog post, firing back with “The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude. Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.”
• Blogger and my pal Erin Balser responds to that, writing “Egan is confusing “reading” with “books”. iTunes and iPods are products, listening is not. The Mac is a product, everything we use it for is not. iPhone is a product, interacting with friends and surfing the internet is not.”

Got that? Good.

I think it’s pretty clear that Jobs was referring specifically to printed books (and not the act of reading itself) when he made his statement. It’d be silly to think Jobs & Apple don’t see a future for reading in and of itself: just look at the iPhone. One of its most touted features is the ability to deliver the ‘real’ internet. They even ran a commercial showing the New York Times web site on the phone, all primed and ready to be read.

If Apple was so down on reading, they would have emphasized the iPhone’s video and youtube abilities, and not made a device that offers probably the nicest mobile text-reading experience available. Seems simple, doesn’t it?

What Jobs (probably) meant

I think you have to look at what Jobs was saying from two angles:

First, he’s not a man who’s above being overtly dismissive and even hostile when it comes to competitors’ products. He can be a bit of a prick. How much this figures into his statement is left as an exercise to the reader.

Second, and more critically, Jobs was responding to the idea of the Kindle as a product where the primary use case is buying digital books online. This isn’t a convergence device. It does (basically) one thing — lets people download and read books.

And so I ask: is the idea that that market segment isn’t large enough to sustain a $400 electronic device really that outrageous? It’s not that there is zero market for digital books, it’s just that there’s no market for a $400 digital-book-reading device that doesn’t do anything else. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Apple announced book sales through iTunes tomorrow, because it makes sense to offer them for reading on a convergence device like the iPod or iPhone. What Apple would never do is design and release a device dedicated to reading digital books.

When you have music, movies and games, books are a nice side-business. But to think books can stand-alone as the driver behind a device like the Kindle? I’ve got to side with Jobs on this one: on that scale, people don’t read any more.

All that said, I’ll leave you with two digressions, offered without comment.

Digression #1: Some Sales Figures

• Est. Unit Sales of You: Staying Young, the #1 selling book for the period October 29 to December 9: 503,000 _source
• Est. Unit Sales of Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360), the #1 selling video game for the period November 2007: 1,565,404_source
• Est. Unit Sales of Ratatouille, #1 selling DVD for the period October 29 to December 9: 9,190,669 _source

Digression #2: A message from Amazon on the Kindle

From Kindle’s product page:

Kindle Availability
Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is temporarily sold out. We are working hard to manufacture Kindles as quickly as possible and are prioritizing orders on a first come, first served basis. Please ORDER KINDLE NOW to reserve your place in line. We will keep you informed by email as we get more precise delivery dates. Note that Kindles cannot currently be sold or shipped to customers living outside of the U.S.

The Toronto Star recently published an article about Generation Y’s attitude toward retirement plans and banks in general. The interesting bit:

At the same time, the generation born between 1977 and 1994 – also called the millennials or echo boomers – tend not to visit their bank branches and talk to advisers about investing and financial planning advice.

“They are young, have grown up in a technological age and are very comfortable with computers,” says Dmitri Mastoras, regional manager with BMO Retail Investments.

“Visiting their local bank branch is not one of their regular habits.”

The technology piece is huge. Thinking back over the past year, I have only physically gone into my local bank branch twice: once to see if I could get some Euros there (I could, but not a lot!) and once to cash a bond my parents bought for me when I was younger.

Other than that, I do all my banking either online or through the machine. And I think most of my peers would echo that. If there was a simple way to contribute to an RRSP or make investments through the web interface, I might be liable to do it, but — at least with the bank I use — there is not.

It’s a key point when dealing with Gen Y: making us call you is a red light. If we can’t find the info or functionality we’re looking for on your web site, it might as well not exist. The article tends to hint that Gen Y doesn’t invest because it’s not a priority for them, but I suspect it has far more to do with the accessibility (or rather lack thereof) of doing such things without having to either pick up a phone or physically go into a bank.

A postscript on retirement

Also from the above article:

Many generation Y investors might be saving for shorter-term goals such as buying a house or going back to school to further their education rather than retirement.

Financial advisers believe this generation should be taking more ownership for their financial future.

The whole concept of ‘retirement’ needs to change. It doesn’t really make any sense when no one actually considers it likely (or at all possible, really) that they’ll spend their whole life working one job. Also, is it just me, or does 65 kind of seem like it’s a little bit young to just stop working completely?

Photo by benchilada. Licensed under Creative Commons

A couple of interesting bits from my news reader from the past week:

The changing face of the global labour market

From Auckland, NZ: Generation Y Full of Demands

A finance and accounting recruitment firm is firing a warning shot at a lazy element amongst Generation Y job seekers.

The agency Robert Half says it was shocked when an applicant handed over a list of demands, instead of a CV. The woman wanted $15,000 over the going rate, cash for her exam fees and a short contract so that she could do her OE.

More Gen Y & Finance

From The Motley Fool: Who can save Financials Now?

Generation Y certainly can’t change the financial industry overnight — not even Superman could fix the years of lax practices that have led to the current debacle. But with their large numbers, Generation Y certainly can be key to a turnaround in the financial world.

Tips for Employers on managing multi-generational offices

From The Financial post: Restructure to be cross-generational

Here are a few basic changes employers can adopt to recruit and retain Gen-X and Gen-Y workers:

• Restructure leadership to be cross-generational. Gen-Xers demand challenging but balanced work assignments. Gen-Yers expect high perks in exchange for loyalty;
• Restructure compensation, benefits and incentives to satisfy each generation. The Baby Boomer one-size-fits-all won’t work;
• Expand communication strategies. Stop relying so much on corporate communication, but make communication available in multiple formats;
• Make mentoring a natural part of the management structure, with flexible mentoring models.

(I fixed the formatting on that last one. Text is unaltered.)

Via Chris Bird: a nifty map of social networking sites based on their popularity in countries around the world.

Some thoughts:

• I’d love to see some historical data. It’d be neat to see Facebook’s growth versus myspace in English-speaking countries
• Why has Facebook been so so slow to launch international (non-English) versions of the platform? It’s only now that they’re getting going on that. It seems to me that the time spent developing the application system would have been better spent shoring up mindshare in big markets like India and Latin America.
• Friendster? REALLY, Asian Pacific?

This stuff may seem trivial now, but consider the future of business as a peer to peer network of contacts and resources. Your chosen platform may end up meaning more than you think.

Kristin Gissaro at Generational Recruiting has a post on the many names of ‘Generation Y’. I had a similar struggle when trying to come up with a name for this blog — our generation really doesn’t have a ‘definitive name’, so how do you even begin to write about it?

In addition to their diverse ethnicities, which I think has a lot to do with why this generation is so different than those before, Gen Y has their own set of rules. They’re not wrong. They are just different. They have their own set of standards. Again, not wrong just different. More importantly, within the generation it changes from person to person.

So, who is this new generation?

Should we wait until this group of people has had enough time to shape the world and then classify and profile them?

Of all the various names you give us, I actually like “Generation M” the best, because it at least has the connotation of something that really defines us as a group — being mobile. That said, I’m reasonably sure that “Gen Y” is the name that’s going to stick. Yes, it’s derivative and not-at-all creative, but it is simple and instantly recognizable, and that goes a long way.

Plus, coincidence or not, we do tend to ask “Why?” a lot. So it works on that level too.

This post at Impressions Through Media got me think about the common practice of typing major historical events to each of the generational groups. (I do it myself on the about page, even.)

In her post at Impressions Through Media, Kathy Greer mentions the death of JFK and his son as generational touchstones:

This was a basis for a discussion that took place in KGA, Inc.’s training program on Managing Generational Differences. Karen Shaw, Senior Training Consultant, asked participants to recall how and where Kennedy died. The Traditionalists and Baby Boomers say things like gunshots in Dallas, Texas; Generation Xers recall a plane crash near Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. and Generation Y participants say they really are not too sure.

It’s hard to argue with the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War as touchstone moments for the boomers, just as Nixon/Watergate and Reaganomics tend to typify Gen X. That these are all American touchstones is notable, but not really objectionable: American culture is so pervasive news coming out of it tends to have an encompassing global impact. Other countries still have their own national touchstone moments (For Canada, I’d point to Trudeaumania and the FLQ stuff as the obvious ones from the last 50 years) but American events tend to be at the core.

That said, Generation Y is hard to pin down. I hear 9/11 bandied about a lot, but that event, and the War on Terror after-effects, may find a stronger association with the generation coming after us. To really pin some history on Y, we have to look at the 1990s which, honestly, were a relatively quiet decade in terms of world-making events.

Some possibilities include:

• The Clinton impeachment
• Columbine
• Princess Diana Death
• O.J. Trial
• Rise of the internet
• Oklahoma City Bombing
• The quick rise and fall of ‘Grunge’ music
• 2000 Presidential Election Controversy

I think we have to look at the rise of the internet as our pivotal game-changing event, as it led to all the gadgets and connectivity that defines us at work now, but I may be biased by my nerdiness and love of all things digital. It’d be interesting to hear what others think.

The above (taken from the absolutely awesome web comic xkcd — visit or you’re a fool) pretty well sums up my feelings toward wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. It’s both an amazing resource and a fabulous time waster, and has become my quick go-to source for quick information about any subject, from actors and actresses to vacation destinations.

Yes, there’s the very real possibility of information being incorrect or (much more commonly) badly written, but the mountains of information more than make up for it.

Education has struggled with wikipedia since it hit the scene. Almost immediately after hearing wikipedia described to them, educators decided it was a menace — the academic equivalent of speculative hearsay. The rules fell into place very quickly: never cite wikipedia in a formal essay. You might as well source the National Enquirer.

Hearing their teachers continuously hammer home the message that wikpedia is unreliable has apparently had an effect on students, as evidenced by this report from a Generation Y workshop.

Interesting discussion during Dave Brown’s Generation Y workshop at LIFT08. It seems asking a few teenagers how they use the Internet is always going to produce a few findings like these:

Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.

(emphasis mine)

And, sure, wikipedia probably shouldn’t become an automatically accepted authoritative source for academic essays. But you know what? Neither should anything else. The underlying message to all this “wikipedia is so unreliable!” chest-besting (which isn’t even really true) is that sources should be judged based on the medium in which they appear, and not on the quality of the source itself. For the most part, kids aren’t being told to look at their sources carefully before they quote them in an academic paper — they’re being told that the internet is bad, and print is good.

There is a way to make wikipedia a part of education, and it starts with teaching students the difference between a well-researched article on wikipedia versus a poorly-researched one. It could include instruction on examining footnotes, looking at the history and discussion pages and the way the article is presented. In short, teaching kids how to research instead of just blindly hunting for sources that their teacher has deemed as ‘acceptable’.

Wikipedia does have a place in academia. To argue otherwise is to ignore the massive growth and mindshare the site as claimed over the last few years. And there’s a way to make wikipedia fit with good, qualified research — it just requires a different approach to teaching.

I love e-mail. It’s undoubtedly my primary means of communication at work, to the point where I feel as if I could give up my phone tomorrow and not really be impacted. Honestly, I think being able to communicate effectively via e-mail is an absolute must in pretty much ANY industry these days, including unlikely ones like carpentry and stock car racing.

And while I love to rail on business for being backwards technologically, I’d be really hard-pressed to argue that e-mail wasn’t adopted quickly enough. Because it exploded onto the scene and became incredibly pervasive very quickly.

That said, there’s a whole lot about e-mail — and, more accurately, the way people use e-mail — that drives me crazy. Having spent many of my years in the office in a mostly unofficial ‘tech support’ role (something I’m sure a lot of Gen Y workers can relate to), I’ve seen absolutely mind-bending practices from co-workers when it comes to their e-mail programs.

I think a lot of the odd behaviour stems from the fact that e-mail did come into offices so quickly. If you think about it, nobody was ever really trained on e-mail, at least not like they were trained on how to use the copier (or whatever). Habits that may have made sense for composing, sending or filing ‘real’ mail were transferred over to the electronic Inbox, despite the fact that those habits make almost no sense when dealing with electronic media.

In that light, I don’t blame anyone for adopting these bizzare practices. But I’m still going to make fun of them.

What follows is five non-sensical things people do with e-mail.

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