The Perfect Entrepreneurial Storm

By: Sarah Sladek, Limelight Generations

A few weeks back, I was a mentor for the Girls Going Places Entrepreneurship Program in Minneapolis. I was truly inspired by how business-saavy these young girls were, and being in the generational line of work, I know that today's students and young adults claim the largest volume of start-ups in America. This business-savvy generation presents great opportunity for some, and great challenges for others. In either case, this generation presents significant change for our business climate as we know it.

An April 27, 2009 article in BusinessWeek refers to this change as the "perfect entrepreneurial storm". Just as the famously independent Generation Y enters business school, the world economy goes to hell in a handbasket. The former blue chips of Wall Street can no longer offer long-term job security and generous end-of-year bonuses, giving this new generation of MBA graduates the impetus to pursue their own business ownership dreams.

If business schools are smart, they will rush to embrace this entrepreneurial generation and give them the tools they need to realize those dreams. The time is certainly ripe. Most colleges had already observed declines in enrollment in nearly every major--with the exception of business.

What can business schools do to unleash this generation's inner entrepreneur? The BusinessWeek article advises them to take a cue from the Tuck School of Business (Tuck MBA Profile) at Dartmouth, which is hosting a new business plan competition, with a $50,000 prize, in an effort to inspire new entrepreneurial ideas and create jobs on both a local and national level.

Or they can follow the lead of schools like the Haas School of Business (Haas MBA Profile) at the University of California, Berkeley. The school's Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation provides students with the expertise to pursue their ideas and improve their negotiating hand with venture capitalists. It's a great example of how to encourage innovation in both new and established companies, and we need more such schools offering innovative solutions to the entrepreneurial challenge. With their accumulated store of knowledge about how to launch a business, and proximity to the profitable ideas in technology and the sciences, business schools should be the ideal platform to nurture a new generation of entrepreneurs. And this generation—highly social, confident, and networked—seems ready for the challenge.

I would add that high schools could take a lesson from Thomas Alva Edison High School's Business Entrepreneurship Program. The Business Enterprise program utilizes work-readiness training, job shadowing, e-mentoring, college site visits, guest speakers, and entrepreneur and high-tech clubs to give students a foundation of skills to build upon and transition from a high school setting to post-secondary two-year and four-year educational programs. If more schools provided business training at an earlier age, perhaps America's workforce would be successful at bridging the talent gap and not be in danger of lagging behind Europe, India, Australia, and other countries already preparing their next generation workforce.

Certainly the world needs this new generation of business-savvy entrepreneurs—now more than ever before. If the economy is going to recover, their optimism and their new ideas will be a big part of the reason.

Trophy Kid to Shot-Caller Rule #1: Speak Up without Talking Down

By: Nick Tasler

The one thing middle managers and executives alike from companies of all shapes and sizes agree on is that credibility comes from speaking up. In the knowledge economy where information is worth more than its weight in gold, it is critical to be an active participant in the knowledge exchange. As young employees, there are two fatally flawed tendencies that get in the way of effectively speaking up.

1. PROBLEM: TAKING WITHOUT GIVING

Remember this: Your employer is not your teacher. The importance of being a good learner was relentlessly drilled into us from the very first time our miniature shadows darkened the doors of our kindergarten classrooms. While growing up, our lives were dominated by authority figures—coaches, teachers and parents—whose job was primarily to teach us. To maker their jobs easier, they taught us how important it is for us to be willing to learn. Managers, however, need more than just your willingness to learn. A manager’s job is about getting things done and they need your help for that. Good managers don’t mind teaching you, but all of them expect you to do more than soak up knowledge.

SOLUTION: Paraphrase if you must, just contribute something. Ideally, you’ve done some homework or solid thinking before a meeting or during an email exchange so that you have something new to add. But as my Gen Y friend Eric told me “if you’re in a meeting and you really can’t think of anything new to add, then at least paraphrase a main point.” His managers agree. It shows that you’re actively participating and not just being a parasite on other people’s mental energy. And it really can help to crystallize fuzzy concepts for other people who maybe aren’t totally getting the big picture yet.

2. PROBLEM: Speaking with Unearned Authority

Personally, I’ve never had a problem voicing my opinion. I was that nerd in the 200-student lecture in college that raised my hand to ask the professor a question. For those of you more like me, remember this: It’s good to speak up, but bad to be a know-it-all. Bosses and co-workers want your contributions. What they don’t want is your baseless certainty, your sarcasm or your need to constantly display your superior intellect. I made this mistake more times than I care to admit when I started my career, and my ideas always suffered because of it.

SOLUTION: Master the Art of Suggestion. Even when you’re making a statement, phrase it as a suggestion. Instead of saying “This apple is clearly red,” say “I wonder if this apple is red, even though some parts of it look green like Sam mentioned?” Statements come across as argumentative even when you don’t intend them to be. Suggestions come across as though you’re trying to building on other people’s ideas instead of demolishing them to make room for your own.

Destination Nation

By: Gina Kellogg-Gardner, MAOL

As a store manager I loved managing destination stores. You know the store locations that customers have to go out of their way to shop at, stores that are off the beaten track. Why did I love managing these store locations? Well, even though my traffic was less than my fellow store manager’s locations my customers were on a mission to buy! Customers walking into a destination store go out of their way to get there, and are already in a purchasing mind-frame when they arrive. Because my customers were ready to purchase, add-on-sales and up-selling was that much easier. My traffic may have been lower, but my conversion rate and sales ratio was through the roof.

Has today’s economy actually turned your retail store into a destination hot-spot? Today, consumers are making a conscious decision for how and when they spend their money. Because consumers are more intentional about when and what they buy, when a customer does walk into your store they have already made the decision to buy. In our economy, your customers are in a purchasing mind-frame when they walk through your doors! Learn how to take advantage of the economic climate, increase your retail sales and breathe a sigh of relief. Register for Destination Nation, and on June 30 experience this season’s thought provoking session and retail inspiration. >>>Retail Fusion.

How to Go From Trophy Kid to Shot-Caller

By: Nick Tasler

Last year a few smart, ambitious Gen Y employees at TalentSmart asked me about the things I’ve done and learned that might help them steer their careers. These conversations plus the fact that I have a younger brother finishing college in the fall got me thinking and eventually researching. Here is part one of my answer.

THE RESEARCH
As a recovering trophy kid myself, I’ve learned quite a bit about this topic the hard way. But I wanted this to involve more than just my opinions. So I spent the last couple of months conducting structured behavioral interviews with managers from corporate stalwarts including Target, Best Buy and General Mills all the way to cutting edge startups and non-profits. To avoid speculation and generic platitudes, I asked these managers to tell me about a specific Gen Y’er they have worked with that had/has clear leadership potential. Then I asked them to describe specific events and situations covering everything from how they do project work to how they write emails. After 30 or 40 minutes, we then switched gears and had the exact same interview about one specific talented, yet somewhat disappointing Gen Y’er (i.e. a trophy kid).

THE RESULTS
Regardless of age, industry or company size, I was astonished to hear manager after manager tell me virtually identical stories listing virtually identical behaviors distinguishing the effective Gen Y leader who “gets it” from the talented trophy kid who doesn’t. The much-touted intelligence, confidence and ambition of Gen Y are every bit as real as the entitlement, narcissism and poor follow-through. The big difference? Some Gen Y’ers have simply learned to behave more in-line with the first set of traits than the second.

The good news is that even raging, narcissistic trophy kids can whittle away their rough edges to reveal the confident and humble high-performer underneath. It’s not rocket science, but it does take a willingness to confront face-to-face some uncomfortable realities about your thinking and action. In the coming weeks, I’ll be blogging about 10 specific things you can do to make the transition from trophy kid to influential leader.

WHAT YOU CAN DO IN THE MEANTIME
I included this quick and dirty table below to help you start thinking about what you currently do, say and think that is either helping or hurting your career. Whether you want more flexibility and independence, more meaningful work, or a fat pay check and a corner office, truly doing good work is what ultimately gets you there. Branding, blogging and social networking definitely help to open doors, but once inside that door your boss and/or clients need substance.

NEXT GENERATION LEADERS	TROPHY KIDS
Create meaningful work for themselves	Expect meaningful work to be given to them.
Ask “is there anything else I can do?”	Say “that’s not really my job”
Constantly strive to do their best work	Constantly claim “I’m trying my best”
Try to solve problems on their own before asking for help.	Ask for help at the first sign of an obstacle.
Use self-deprecating humor to give everyone a laugh	Make sarcastic comments in attempts to be funny
Think about how what other people want	Frame things in terms of “what I want…”
Have enough self confidence to learn from other people	Talk down to other people
Eye long term rewards for themselves	Expect a constant flow of immediate rewards
Pride themselves on results	Pride themselves on trying hard
Earn their success	Blame others for failures
Try to create real value	Try to earn praise
Adapt their language and appearance to fit the situation	Believe that their appearance defines them
Seek out feedback on their performance	Get defensive when critiqued

Will Gen Y be a Hero Generation?

By: Nick Tasler
Obviously, we’re in a crisis. Obviously, it sucks. But this might be just the crisis Gen Y has been groomed for…if not destined to overcome.

Nine years ago, in their book Millennials Rising Neil Howe and William Strauss argued that every 4 generations a “hero generation” is born. The last such generation of heroes was the band of WWII brothers (and sisters) known to most of us as Grandma and Grandpa. They were followed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X and then—four generations later—Gen Y.

Each of these hero generations is raised by adults that are deeply concerned about the youth. Their parents believe that the world they know is just one more generation of wayward youths away from total collapse. So the parents take especially close, nurturing care of their children. In such times, parental neglect becomes sacrilege, and these children are constantly reminded that they are the future.

Then at some time during the hero generation’s young adulthood, crisis strikes. These crises—the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWII—provide the catalyst for this special generation to step up and carve out their destined places in history. Strauss and Howe called the crisis the “hero trial.”

Gen Y’s Hero Trial In our case, the concerned parents are Boomers. The first wave of wayward youths are the Gen X’ers. The hero generation is the Gen Y’ers.

What I found so remarkable about Millennials Rising is how eerily prophetic it was. Corny as it sounds, goose-bumps literally sprouted up on my arms while reading it this morning. It predicted a coming crisis sometime in the “Oh-Oh’s” (i.e. between 2000 and 2009) that would act as the Millennials’ hero trial. Keep in mind, this book was published a full year before 9/11 and eight years before the recent economic meltdown. Nostradamus couldn’t have scripted it better.

Although hopeful, the question Strauss and Howe posed is: Will the Millennials pass their hero trial? Psychologist, Jean Twenge doesn’t think so. In 2006, she wrote in Generation Me that Strauss and Howe got it all wrong. She argued that Gen Y was more narcissistic and self-serving than Baby Boomers ever dreamed of being. She did some very convincing research showing that Gen Y college students scored way higher on Narcissism scales than Boomers did when they were in college. She also pointed to the poor youth voter turnout in 2000 and 2004 to show how Gen Y was not at all concerned with civic virtues like Strauss and Howe claimed. Instead, she argues that Gen Y cares as little for the world beyond their individual cocoons as Gen X, and even less so than Boomers.

But then came the 2008 election in which Gen Y mustered up a higher youth voter turnout than in any election since 1972 when 18-year olds were first granted the right to vote. Now that a crisis has unfolded it would be interesting to recheck the narcissism numbers. Just as Boomer young adults rebelled against the values of their parents and triggered the Me-first mindset, isn’t it possible that circumstances have caused Gen Y to choose their own new path as young adults?

In the spirit of transparency, I was born in 1978, which according to Strauss and Howe (1982-2000) makes me a Gen X’er. According to the Pew Foundation (1976-2000) that makes me a Y’er. Regardless of where I objectively fit (if it’s even possible to make an “objective” generational cutoff), I consider myself a recovering trophy kid. That makes me both optimistic and a little nervous about what I consider to be my generation’s ability flourish in the hero trial. I’m sort of nervous, because everything I’ve read about the entitled Gen Y’ers in the workforce, I can relate to. Such as the time when, within the first two months at my first job at the 60,000+ employee global consulting firm, I outlined what I was certain the global new hire training program should look like. Then I demanded that one of the firm’s partners look at it. I never did hear his response to the idea, but I can only imagine what he thought of me personally. Had I not learned to smooth down my entitled trophy kid edges, I would be mostly useless right now.

On the other hand, high self-esteem has significant benefits if based on some real ability that Gen Y definitely has. I’m also convinced Gen Y has the right ideals—valuing collaboration over individual gain; humility over hubris; learning over being “right;” and practicality over idealistic masturbation.

The verdict of the hero trial will depend on 4 questions:
1. Will we be able to translate unbridled optimism into effective action?
2. Will the weight and duration (could be years) of this crisis eventually bury that optimism altogether?
3. Will we become so disillusioned with the state of the world that we choose to withdraw from it instead of holding strong to change it?
4. Will we get defensive when critiqued, or will we learn to do what’s necessary to become influential in a world we might not care much for at the moment?

A few years ago, John Mayer said that he and all his friends were “waitin’ on the world to change.” I think the time for waiting has passed. What do you think?

Livin' on the Edge without Falling Off

By: Nick Tasler

The other day I posted an article about beating your impulses. Every time I write or talk about that, someone points out that not all impulsive decisions (or impulsive people) are bad. I fully agree. In fact, sometimes they can be good. Really good.

But there is a difference between good and bad impulses.

DYSFUNCTIONAL IMPULSIVITY: Psychologists have identified two different kinds of “impulsive.” One is called ”dysfunctional impulsivity.” That’s what people who are slaves to their impulses have. They get their kicks mostly from booze, blow and law-breaking. They usually end up with illustrious careers as inmate #7825. Or they end up getting buried–financially and/or physically.

FUNCTIONAL IMPULSIVITY: Some people are just risk-takers. They push the speed limit, but don’t drive drunk. They make bold decisions, but don’t win Darwin Awards. They fail often, but then adjust accordingly and continue on. They never stop being impulsive, but they don’t keep making the same bad choices over and over again. They are constantly learning from past experience.

TO BE FUNCTIONAL think about which risks also offer potential reward, and which risks are just plain old risks with no potential payout. Where the functional might break some rules to get ahead, the dysfunctional break windows just because they feel like it. Are you telling off your boss just b/c it feels good? Are you skimming off the top to pick up some chump change while jeopardizing a much larger long term payout?

Impulsive people are always going to be impulsive, but some learn and some just lose.

Radical Innovation

By: Gina Kellogg-Gardner, MAOL

So what’s the big deal about innovation anyway? The big deal is that new ideas, originality and the modernization of status quo is the survival guide for our new economy and global marketplace. Long are the days of systematically ran businesses having the competitive edge. Today, companies who think big picture, creatively respond to consumer needs and act entrepreneurial have the edge. In today’s economy companies have a choice – embrace radical innovation or fold.

How does a company embrace radical innovation? Leaders have to get savvy on multi-level collaboration, engage entry level employees in decision making and become immersed in consumer input. Leaders need to become expert visionaries, encourage employees to act on new ideas and foster a culture of creativity. Another key ingredient to radical innovation is talent. Aside from leadership, companies need to have a talent bench of creative souls – designers, consolers, storytellers and artists.

Most companies already have what it takes – employees who want to innovate and consumers who want new ideas. To move innovation forward, leaders need to promote a culture that actively connects consumers to the creative brilliance of employee’s.