Supposedly, "Gen X'ers" come out of the egg expecting to run companies, earn $100k in their first year out of collage, and be mobile enough to have had at least five senior executive jobs by the time they turn 25 - and an attention span of less than 3 seconds!
What surprised me the most was they were all clearly focussed on metrics, specifically any metric that involved an assessment of their personal performance.
On a number of occasions I witnessed someone deliberately position themselves before their company, clearly believing that they could survive, but the company may or may not, and in any case, ti didn't really matter to them one way or another.
This somewhat ruthless attitude was completely foreign to me, having been brought up in the era where your loyalty to your company came only after that to your family.
But what really took me by surprise was their attitude to information.
Everything had to be "dot points", with the key elements first, and everything else relegated to the back - which never got read.
Now, to me, context is everything. As a negotiator, facilitator, and mediator, finding the "win-win" position is critical, and you usually can't achieve this if you do not deeply research the background and context to the discussion from everyone's point of view.
However, business is what business is, and as I see the outcome of this different style of thinking, I start to understand why younger people are obsessed with social media.
It is the great diversion from having to deal with reality!
I've suggested this before in another forum - for one weekend, get everyone in your family to turn off their phones, Ipads, computers, WII's, TV's, Ipods, everything electronic.
Have conversations, not stutter points. Relate to each other. Go for a walk. Visit someone. Do things together. Look back a little, from where you have come from, rather than race towards a diminishing future.
And use your Mind more - read, debate, discuss, create, prove you are a human being and not the willing slave of some piece of technology.
Well, what have you got to lose? A million "friends" on facebook?
On the other hand, you might just generate a relationship that will support you for the rest of your Life!
1 comment:
There's a lot going on here Pete. I think you relayed part of this experience to me in an email recently, and it filled me with lament.
I'll cite the story of Cyrano for my analogy, but more specifically, its telling through the movie "Roxanne" with Steve Martin. Watching you work with that company was like watching Martin's Cyrano acting in the life around him; watching the executive in charge was like watching the fellow named Chris who's sole focus was scoring.
The subtle thing is, that Chris's quest for scoring wasn't sleazy; that was portrayed through the mayor. Chris didn't suffer sleaze, but he did suffer something else- a lack of depth, or some lack of context proper to the situation. Certainly Chris didn't have the mind for nuance that Cyrano did.
Specifically though, just when Cyrano opened a moment for something transformational to happen, Chris blundered in like a bull in a china shop and aborted a pregnant moment.
On another note, I've been working on some language that gets at the thinking and behavior of people in power that is all too willing to take advantage of others for their own engrandizing. I want to call such a way of being "aristocracy" and play it off "democracy".
Right now, any talk in wealth disparity gets brushed away as "class warfare" or just plain envy.
I think there's something profoundly destructive going on though when centers of power use the periphery for their private pleasure. This is the driving force behind Free Market Fundamentalism because such a view of capitalism allows for aristocracy within the midst of democracy.
Or to tie back in to my Roxanne/Cyrano allegory, a more democracy based capitalism would feel more like Martin's Cyrano, instead of the aristocracy capitalism we currently live in that looks more like the movie's Chris.
One more thing, I wonder if this Gen-X and beyond culture, see their selves more as avitars than as singular persons? In other words, there felt sense of reality is one where they're at work creating Virtuality rather than Reality.
I'll stop here for now, but like I said, there's a lot going on in this post....
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