I’ve been seeing a lot of the Best Practices Guy lately. If you’ve been in the work world long enough, you’re probably familiar with this person: he or she is the one at any and every meeting whose only real contribution to the discussion is to harp on the need to look at “best practices.” Before we can do anything, Best Practices Guy argues, we need to determine what everyone else is doing.

And then, presumably, we’ll just copy them. Because that’s how profits are made.

There’s nothing wrong with keeping your eyes open and making sure you’re up on the latest trends, conventions and breakthroughs, but the problem with Best Practices People is that they’re usually the one who isn’t at all. If they knew what the “best practices” were, they’d probably mention it. Instead, they just continuously request that someone else do the research and report back.

I keep putting “best practices” in quotes because it’s really one of those empty-headed phrases that sounds like it means more than it actually does. If I were to tell you the best way to make scrambled eggs, I’d sound informal, casual and cool. If I were to say I had with me the “best practices for scrambled eggs” I’d come off sounding not unlike a corporate wannabe tool.

Best Practices Guy isn’t always a tool. Usually the intentions are good, but in a roundabout way. The problem with the type of person I’m describing is that he or she is often motivated almost entirely by fear. It’s not so much research they crave, but safety. If we just do what someone else has done (and succeeded with) we thus have no risk of failure.

That’s boring. Maybe it’s a good strategy in a fiscally conservative kind of way. But it’s BORING. And boredom is not a desirable trait for a company. Boring companies already have trouble attracting talent, and, in the information age and with Generation Y being kind of difficult to work with (I hear), they’re likely not going to have much time for boredom either.

Innovation can’t happen when you limit yourself to ‘best practices’. The companies who have recently seen success have been the ones who have been willing to brazenly eschew established practices. Look at Apple with the mp3 player, Nintendo with the Wii, Google with Internet Advertising and even smaller companies like Moleskine with notebooks or Threadless with T-shirts. While these companies undoubtedly understand the marketplace, I guarantee that the top brass don’t sit around worrying about ‘best practices’.

Innovation can’t happen if you’re always looking to adhere to ‘best practices’. Let’s shut that Best Practices Guy up.

I recently came across a great post at Ian Selvarajah’s blog on the correlation between Generation Y and the management theory called ‘boreout’.

You would think that the “best of the best” would be highly productive and contributing a lot to their organizations right? Wrong. Oddly enough, despite several of us getting very good jobs with prestigious firms in a variety of industries and decent pay, many are unhappy with our jobs, primarily because we’re bored!

I had never heard of ‘Boreout’ before (though it must be a real thing — it has a wikipedia entry) but it’s certainly a familiar concept. It’s the opposite of ‘burnout’, which is when an employee has too much challenging work on his or her plate. With ‘boreout’, the employee has too little.

The truth about most of us Gen Yers who work office jobs is that we often ARE bored. Employers and managers tend to blame the internet (and namely facebook these days) as a sapper of productivity in office environments, but I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. We don’t forsake work to surf, we surf because we’re bored with work. And sometimes because we don’t even have any work to do.

Causes? I can think of a couple.

‘Climbing the Ladder’ Syndrome

The first is the old career-centric dynamic, where big companies hired people (often with WAY less education and experience than entry-level employees have now) and ‘grew’ them inside the company. It’s the old story about starting in the mailroom and working your way up to the corner office. Gen Y knows this is BS, though, and those of us (especially the top of the class types) starting out are going to get bored fast if we’re sitting around doing data entry while other people do the real meaty work.

Gen Y is not patient. Expecting them to ‘wait their turn’ is going to absolutely lead to hardcore burnout.

Exceeding ‘realistic’ time expectations

The second cause may be more anecdotal, but I thought I’d throw it out there and see what sort of response it gets. See if this scenario is familiar:

You’re starting at a new job and are given a few tasks to get your feet wet. They expect that these tasks will take you a week to complete. You finish in two days. So, being a good employee, you report that you’re done to your manager and ask for more tasks. But the cycle continues, as you continuously finish tasks days before you’re expected to. Eventually, the act of continuously having to come up with new things for you to do seems to start to annoy your boss, who is likely burned out with their own work.

The result? You start to wait. Give yourself a buffer. Finish a task, surf for an hour, hang out at the watercooler, and then see if there’s anything else you need to be doing. Short-term it can actually feel like a nice respite from having to do work all day long. Long-term it can easily manifest itself as the dreaded boreout.

The beginnings of a solution

The real solution to both issues is likely exceedingly complicated, requiring a whole new shift in management thinking. But to simplify it, I’d say it just comes down to this: encourage your young employees to be self-directed. Give them tasks, set deadlines, and if they exceed them, then encourage them to focus on more educational endeavors in their newfound ‘free’ time: learn a new computer program, start a company blog, study a new programming language or research new design trends. Google’s 20 percent time is a good model of self-directedness because not only has it led to a lot of awesome google products but it also means that managers don’t have to manage so much.

Gen Y is complicated, requiring you to be hands-off in some ways and hands-on in others, but the self-directedness is at the core of our attitude toward work. Some might characterize it as impatience, but it more has to do with just wanting to get things done without others standing in the way.

Photo by phoenixdailyphoto. Licensed under Creative Commons

The headline at forbes.com is Mister Softee Buys Cool, referring to yesterday’s announcement that Microsoft is in the process of a hostile takeover of Yahoo! and all their properties.

So, why is this merger/buyout in the works? Simple: It is all about the Facebook Nation. This is apparently the main focus of the Microsoft plan, as they have been slowly moving toward a greater relationship with Facebook for some time. Have you taken notice of the sea change to the look and feel of Microsoft? As a company, it has finally realized that “square corners” is not selling. Microsoft wants desperately to be hip. It owns the desktop, but it doesn’t own the action/nightlife.

Think of a teenager living in his parent’s home. He uses it as a place to flop, eat and wash. He tolerates his parents yet keeps them at a social distance. Once he has his wings, he is out of there. Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) has done a good job at capturing the early adoption of many of the Gen-Xers and now Gen-Y is up for grabs. This is the social generation with idealism.

It’s a good point and it throws the spotlight on something really interesting about this deal: Yahoo! wasn’t at the very top of Microsoft’s to-buy list when it comes to ‘hip’ web properties. What they really wanted, and have been angling for for months, is Facebook. But Mark Zuckerberg - worth billions and one year younger than me (dammit!) - wasn’t playing ball: Microsoft ended up only getting a small piece.

There’s no doubting that Microsoft desperately wants to foster a more youth-friendly image, but I’m not sure Yahoo! will do anything to help that. For the most part, Yahoo! is too big to really seem cool. Some of their properties have the right kind of cred: Flickr is definitely cool. Del.icio.us is pretty cool. Even the Fantasy Sports sites have potential. But Yahoo! Finance and News? The search engine itself? The mail program? These things are nowhere near as ‘cool’ as Google’s products. Plus, there’s not really any “Yahoo! Communities” on the level of Facebook, Myspace or even Digg.

Is it a bad deal? Probably not. If anything, it takes out a major third party in the Battle for the Web, leaving this as essentially a two-horse race. (With maybe Newscorp hanging out somewhere, far behind.) But any talk of the Yahoo! buy giving Microsoft more Gen Y appeal seems a little presumptuous.

Photo by Gnal. Licensed under Creative Commons