A Brave New World for Managing People?

Work is not work. It’s a hobby that you happen to get paid for.”
That’s the mantra of today’s desirable young worker. And
forward-thinking companies are tapping into it.

I didn’t write that. Nina Munk did, in Fortune
in 1998. To be young then was to be a member of Generation X. To be
desirable went without saying: Unemployment was negligible, the dot-com
bubble had two years to run, and X was (and is) a small generation. Much
was published about managing this seemingly exotic cohort, by sources
ranging from the U.S. Government’s Office of Personnel Management
(”Constructive feedback facilitates learning and [provides] an
opportunity for growth — two very important factors in managing
Generation X”) to CNN (”Understand their desire for flexibility [and] the fact that they expect to learn as they work”) to China Daily (”Flexibility is the key to managing Generation-X”).

Well, the torch has passed to a new generation-Y, or the Millennials.
These new young ‘uns are supposed to be way different from the old
young ‘uns. Funny, though, how familiar the management prescriptions
are. Millennials look “for feedback about how they are doing frequently —
even daily,” according to About.com. “Gen-Y wants learning opportunities,” says Business Insider. And here at BNET we learn that Deloitte “has retrained its management to adjust to Millennials’ desire for flextime.”

Does any of this matter? Every new generation has something new about
it. I mean, d’oh. This is why Beloit College annually describes the childhood experiences of incoming freshmen,
this year “a post-email generation for whom the digital world is
routine and technology is just too slow.”  I look forward to the list
every year–but how important is it? I dare say that new
entrants in the workforce have always wanted feedback, growth, and
flexibility. Every generation also has something old, something
borrowed, and something blue.

Last time I proposed three things about Millennials that are important from the standpoint of market strategy.
The sheer amount of demand because this will be the first largely
middle-class generation in gi-normous markets like China, India, and
Brazil; the sales and marketing remix implicit in the digital
convergence of all media; and the organization-design opportunities
opened up by the reintegration of work and life.

Each of these has an inside analog, i.e., big implications for talent strategy and HR leadership.

Diversity: This time we mean it. The way you recruit
and promote will change as the global economy’s center of mass moves.
Traditional leadership pipelines are connected to wells that drying up.
Economist Sylvia Hewlett and the Center for Work-Life Policy
calculate that white males account for just 17% of the global talent
pool (defined as individuals with a bachelor’s degree); at the same
time, in emerging economies like Russia, the Middle East, and India,
skilled ambitious women face obstacles that developed economies started
dismantling half a century ago. That they remain high in the West speaks
powerfully about how hard a challenge this is.

Communication: Blow up the dams. CIOs already know
that they can’t maintain the distinction between “legal’ and “illegal”
applications at work. People want to work from home and insist on
playing and shopping at work. Five years ago in San Francisco, Sun
Microsystems’s then-CEO Jonathan Schwartz told a gathering that a young
employee suggested he stop e-mailing memos to the company and instead
“post them on my Facebook wall”–an impossible idea, Schwartz said, given
the need for confidentiality. A couple of weeks ago in London, a friend
told me about a company whose leaders believe they won’t use e-mail in
five years, and instead will communicate via team wikis — and posts on
something like Facebook walls. The technology shift is less important
than the mind shift. Companies will have to give up yet another degree
of control–and seek competitive advantage less from how well they keep
secrets than from how well they exploit openness.

Careers: No beaten paths. For Boomers, an ex-pat
assignment was a good way to ruin a promising career; that’s how hard it
was to get back on track. Now it’s impossible to imagine a CEO
candidacy that doesn’t include a gig abroad. For Xers, loyalty was an
antique. A career path was a series of jumps, forward and lateral, like a
game of Chinese Checkers. This attitude might have had a lot to do with
the fact that demand for talent exceeded its supply. Millennials also
profess a desire to have many different kinds of experiences–but with
one company. This, too, may be a function of the job market. But it also
represents an opportunity to build what Nobel Prizewinning economist
Gary Becker calls “firm-specific human capital” –talent that is shaped by and becomes especially valuable to the capabilities system and strategy of a given enterprise.

To seize that opportunity, strategists will have to answer a question
most of them fob off to HR. Because so many strategists are left-brain,
analytic types, they ignore what may be the most important strategy
questions of all: What kinds of people do we need in order to succeed at
the game we’ve chosen to play? What kinds of experiences do we want to
give them as they develop?

Illustration courtesy flickr user Blyzz


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