Category: demographics

Little Boxes, big data and modern management

The careers of folk singers Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds have some lessons for modern management.

Yesterday’s passing of folk singer Pete Seeger at age 94 is a chance to think about old age, the Twentieth Century and how we use technology might be restricting us from seeing the opportunities around us.

One of Seeger’s best known hits of the 1960s was Malvina Reynold’s song ‘Little Boxes’ that described middle class conformity in the middle of the Twentieth Century, which had a renaissance in recent years as different contemporary singers did a take of the song for the TV series ‘Weeds’ .

As the ‘Weeds’ opening credits imply, we are probably more conformist today than our grandparents were in the 1960s.

In business, that conformity is born out of modern management practices that insist employees be put into their own ‘little boxes’ – if you don’t tick the right boxes then the HR department can’t put you in the right box.

With big data and social media expanding, increasing computer algorithms are used to decide which box you will fit into. One of the boxes that managers and HR people love ticking is the age box.

Little Boxes’ writer Malvina Reynolds would never have fitted into one of the modern HR practioners’ little boxes as she only entered the folk music community in her late forties.

Despite being a late bloomers, Malvina wrote dozens of folk and protest songs through the 1960s and 70s – The Seekers’ Morningtown Ride was another of hits – before passing away at age 77 in 1977.

Were Malvina Reynolds born 60 years later, she would expect to live to at least Pete Seeger’s age and expect to switch careers several time during her working life.

Modern age expectancy means the modern workplace’s age discrimination and the box ticking of HR managers is unsustainable; there’s too much talent being wasted while individuals, business and governments can’t afford to fund a society where the average person spends the last thirty years of their life in retirement.

With technology there’s no reason why a forty year old air pilot can’t retrain to be an accountant or a sixty year old farmer get the skills to become a nurse, the very tools that are being used to keep workers in boxes are the ones that enable them to break out of those boxes.

Similarly modern technology allows an accountant, farmer or young kid in an obscure developing nation to create a new business or industry that puts the box ticking HR managers in downtown high rises out of work.

Just as today’s box ticking manager might be confronted by a threats they barely know exist, so too is the business that spends all its time looking at data that confirms its owners’ and executives’ prejudices.
Life, and data, doesn’t always neatly fit into little boxes.

Filing box image courtesy of ralev_com through sxc.hu

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When entrepreneurship gets old

As the baby boomers retire, the cruel reality of demographics is forcing them back into business

As part of their series on America’s aging population, Bloomberg looks at the story of 61 year old Lee Manchester who lives in a friend’s basement.

While the Bloomberg story focuses on the contrast between Lee and her father who benefitted from the post World War II economic boom, the real story is Lee’s work history.

Key to her work history is her setting up a business in 1986, that business failed in the late 1980s recession and Lee ponders what might have been had she not made that investment.

Lee sometimes can’t help dreaming about the trips she’d be planning if she’d invested the $150,000 she spent to start a construction company.

This is the downside setting up your own business that those currently peddling the cult of the entrepreneur don’t mention. If the business fails, and many do, then the costs can be high in lost savings and damaged career opportunities. Being an entrepreneur is high risk, hard work.

We may well find though that more people find themselves launching businesses in their older years as the economic realities of the post baby boom era start to be felt by communities.

In many respects though Lee is ahead of the curve, the generation behind her have no expectations of a long and affluent retirement, “the government will abolish the pension about two years before I retire” is the common theme among Gen Xer and Ys.

For GenYs and Xers this attitude is realistic, the demographic sums that worked for Lee’s father are now working against them while the post war economic system that guaranteed Lew Manchester a safe job and company pension ceased to exist in the 1980s.

Had boomers like Lee been thriftier, they would have still been hurt by a shift to 401(k) accounts from pensions in the 1980s. Thirty-seven percent of the elderly in the U.S. collect pensions, which provide some guaranteed income until they die. Fewer than 10 percent of boomers collect pensions, and that number is quickly shrinking.

Lew’s generation were the lucky ones, while the boomers – particularly the early boomers born between 1945 and 55 – believe they are entitled to similar benefits as their parents, their reality is going to be a much harder and precarious existence into old age.

While Lee is paying the price for interrupting her career with a stab at running her own business, in many ways she’s better prepared for a future that is going to require people of all ages to be more entrepreneurial.

In fact, many of those baby boomers forced to become entrepreneurs may well enjoy it, “launching the business was the most fun I ever had and my way to fight a frightening medical diagnosis” says Lee.

As the reality of their financial situation dawns upon them, many of Lee’s contemporaries are going to find themselves launching businesses long after the age they thought they were going to settle into a sedate retirement – lets hope they have fun too.

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A difference in expectations

While the focus is on the work ethic, expectations and careers of GenY workers, could it be the group set up for the most disappointment are the baby boomers as they reach their retirement years?

Could it be the age group set up for the most disappointment in today’s economy are the baby boomers rather than GenYs?

The Wait But Why? blog has a provocative post on why Generation Y Yuppies are unhappy. It hasn’t gone down well with some prominent Gen Y writers.

Part of the reason the article offended Gen Ys like Adam Weinstein is its focus on the younger generation having an entitlement mentality and feeling ‘special’.

Were I a GenY I’d be pretty irritated at those views, particularly – as Weinstein points out – when younger folk are saddled with much greater debts and far less work security than baby boomers. Interestingly, Weinstein’s rebuttal makes almost the same points the Wait But Why blog from the opposite perspective.

A mismatch of expectations

Despite some of the provocative statements, the Wait But Why post makes a very good point about the expectations of different generations and the mismatch between what different age groups expect and the reality they encounter.

The economic boomers – the group born from 1935 to 1955 – had the good fortune to spend most of their working lives during the post World War II period that saw the Western world experience the greatest economic boom mankind has seen.

During their working lives, all but the lowest paid economic boomers became healthier, better fed and had more access to creature comforts than even royalty had a generation earlier. The average Westerner today is rich beyond the belief of our great grandparents a hundred years ago.

As the Wait But Why blog contends, the result is the boomers are the happiest, most fulfilled generation we’ve ever seen.

In contrast, GenYs are facing a far less fulfilling future in a lower growth economy that is far tougher and a society more focused on ‘user pays’, ‘cost recovery’ and outsourcing labour to the lowest cost provider than the greater good of the community.

Can boomers continue to be lucky?

While this is true of both Boomers and GenY, it’s worth questioning whether the Boomers’ happiness of exceeded expectations will continue.

Today governments are cash strapped, almost pension scheme is underfunded and the demographic time bomb of an aging population has started to be felt across the developed world.

Worse for the baby boomers is their retirement plans require their assets – primarily their homes, investment properties and small businesses – need to be sold at prices beyond what GenX and GenY buyers can afford.

A reversion to the mean in asset prices for economic boomers means a lot of them will be going back to work.

Recently I spoke to one economic boomer who had lost heavily after the global financial crisis. “No worries,” he said. “If need be I’ll get one of my old jobs back, I can still use a set square and drawing board.”

Sadly, he didn’t understand that being good at using a set square and drawing board in a modern engineering office are as useful as making horseshoes or operating an electric telegraph. Those skills, while noble, are no longer necessary.

While GenY will get on with adapting to the realities of their economic situation – they have little choice but to do so – the big challenge will be for their parents to deal with the modern economy.

A new ‘Greatest Generation’?

Perversely it’s likely the GenYs will turn out more like their grandparents who had to deal with a great depression and a massive World War.

While hopefully the GenYs won’t have to deal with either of those, they are faced with a much different economy than the one which nurtured their parents.

So the real ‘happiness deficit’ could turn out among the baby boomers in retirement at the very time in their lives they are least able to deal with it.

Hopefully the GenY workers will be compassionate on their asset rich but cash poor parents and grandparents.

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Privacy’s still beating heart and the social media challenge

The changing habits of younger web surfers are challenging the assumptions underlying social media services.

“I’m not a very public person,” twenty-two year old Walter Woodman tells the New Yorker in How A Relationship Dies on Facebook.

One of the assumptions of the social media industry is that digital natives, those born after 1990, have little if any expectations of privacy. The New Yorker story challenges that idea.

Much of the New Yorker’s background is taken from the Pew Centre’s May 2013 report Teens, Social Media and Privacy which interviewed 802 US teens and their parents to identify young adults’ attitudes towards privacy.

As the Pew Centre’s Mary Madden wrote in a follow up post to that report, US teenagers aren’t about to about to abandon Facebook yet but they are concerned about privacy and the work involved in managing an online persona.

While some of our teen focus group participants reported positive feelings about their use of Facebook, many spoke negatively about an increasing adult presence, the high stakes of managing self-presentation on the site, the burden of negative social interactions (“drama”), or feeling overwhelmed by friends who share too much.

This suggests a far more mature, and complex, understanding of privacy by teenagers than many of the social media boosters assumed when declaring that privacy is irrelevant in the Facebook era.

Like their parents, teenagers and young adults know there are consequences for sharing too much online which challenges the social media platforms that have built their businesses around users spilling everything about themselves into the big data pot.

It turns out digital natives are just as conscious of the risks as their parents, although how they handle it may manifest in different ways, and the assumptions of many social media businesses aren’t quite as robust as they appeared not so long ago.

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Kinkabool – the highrise past and future

A visit to the Gold Coast’s oldest high rise raises some questions about sustainability.

Today high rise buildings are the norm on Queensland’s Gold Coast, but just over fifty years ago in Surfers Paradise, nine storey Kinkabool was the first of the breed to be built. Its condition today is a warning on how skyscrapers can turn into expensive liabilities for owners.

ABC Open has an interview with one of the workers on the building and in the accompanying video Bob Nancarrow shows just how Kinkabool dominated the then sleepy seaside resort of Surfers Paradise in 1960.

kinkabool-overshadowed

A visit to Kinkabool today reveals a building struggling in the face of poor maintenance and an undercapitalised ownership. Luckily for the owners’ corporation,  the Queensland government pitched in to repair the roof but much of the rest of the complex is showing its age.

kinkabool-lobby

The rabbit warren lobby with its orange tiles indicate some of the building was upgraded in the 1970s but apart from a lick of paint, it hasn’t seen much love since.

kinkabool-lift-lobby

The lift is are where the building’s age and owners’ lack of investment really shows. An old, slow elevator that hasn’t been upgraded since the first residents moved in clunks its way up the building. Even Hong Kong’s Chunking Mansions – the world’s best example of a dysfunctional high rise – gets its lifts upgraded sometime.

kinkabool-lift-interior

Inside the lift, it’s a depressing scene and one wonders if the antiquated equipment would meet today’s building standards. Even if it does meet the regulations, the dispiriting ride on its own would knock a big chunk off the asking prices for buyers or renters.

kinkabool-lobby-stairwell

Stepping out of the lift, the view in the stairwell isn’t much better. The lack of maintenance or investment begins to show in old fittings, damaged glass and hints of painted over graffiti.

kinkabool-stairwell

While standing on the ninth floor, music from unit 1B drifts through the building – it’s lucky the occupant has a taste in cheesy 1970s music as some thumping headbanger music could to serious damage to the building along with the residents’ sanity.

One wonders just how noisy the building would be with a party happening or a young, crying baby although it seems families aren’t really interested in these apartments or the central Surfers Paradise location.

Though a very undistinguished building, it does have one touching little architectural feature in  the different tile patterns on each floor, although probably not enough to redeem it in the eyes of most people.

kinkabool-tile-featurekinkabool-tile-feature-2

Probably the saddest thing about Kinkabool is how a building that once dwarfed everything in the region is now overshadowed by its much bigger neighbours.

kinkabool-neighbours

Across the road, and blocking out most of Kinkabool’s sunlight, is the 1980s Paradise Centre.

Time isn’t proving any kinder towards the Paradise Centre with the lack of maintenance beginning to show on the thirty-year old complex as this vent across the street from Kinkabool illustrates.

kinkabool-neighbours-rusting

Generally, if the landlord or owners’ corporation is too stingy to afford a coat of paint, then you can be sure there are more nasty surprises

Both the Paradise Centre’s and Kinkabool’s declines illustrate a much more fundamental problem in an economy driven by property speculation and taxation allowances — there isn’t a lot of money to go around for maintaining older buildings.

While Kinkabool’s residents can get by with a clapped out lift, inhabitants of larger and more modern complexes like the Paradise Centre will find the costs of running and maintaining their buildings an increasingly difficult burden.

It could just turn out that Kinkabool, should it escape the wrecker’s ball, may well turn out the more desirable dwelling than its bigger, more modern neighbours.

For the meantime though, Kinkabool marks the beginning of a far more sophisticated era in Australian and Gold Coast history. Whether that era became too sophisticated for itself remains to be seen.

kinkabool-goodbye

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Evolving cities and Silicon Valley’s private buses

What do Silicon Valley’s corporate buses tell us about the way our cities are evolving?

One of the phenomenon of Silicon Valley’s development has been the rise of the ‘Google Buses’ – the private services run by the big tech companies to shuttle their workers between home and their workplaces.

The Bay Area’s private bus shuttles are a real time illustration of how regions evolve around industries and economies and how cities and communities are in many ways dynamic, living creatures themselves.

An effect of the Google Buses is that San Fransisco is experiencing a ‘reverse sprawl’ notes Eric Rodenbeck in his Wired Magazine story Mapping Silicon Valley’s Gentrification Problem Through Corporate Shuttle Routes

It’s about more than gentrification as we’ve experienced it thus far: It’s about an entirely reconfigured relationship between density and sprawl, and it’s going to need new maps to help us navigate this landscape.

Driving those buses is instructive as well and Buzzfeed has an interview with an anonymous driver employed by one of the bus companies.  The driver’s tale shows the scale of the phenomenon.

This bus holds 52 people and that is 52 cars that are not on the road in one trip, and we have 70 routes in our system. That’s thousands of cars everyday.

Driving cars is fundamental to the American – and Australian – lifestyle. The modern American city developed around the motor car and that mobility is the defining feature of the Twentieth Century.

So maybe the Google Buses are an early part of the redefinition of our cities to meet the the needs of the 21st Century and cars are not the driving factor.

In this vein, Jarrett’s Walker’s Human Transit blog teases out some of the issues behind these developments.

Finally, this joke is on the lords of Silicon Valley itself.  The industry that liberated millions from the tyranny of distance remains mired in its own desperately car-dependent world of corporate campuses, where being too-far-to-walk from a Caltrain station — and from anything else of interest — is almost a point of pride.  But meanwhile, top employees are rejecting the lifestyle that that location implies.

While I don’t agree with Jarrett’s proposition that the geeks riding these buses want to mingle with strangers given the locations they live – I’d argue they’re attracted to those locations because their peers live there and downtown amenity to good restaurants and bars – he raises a very good point about the mismatch between where the workers and the jobs are.

Jarrett’s point touches on land use zoning and its effects on the evolution of cities. An excellent piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic tracked Silicon Valley’s iconic techonolgy sites, most of which have been demolished due to the pollution partly caused by zoning requirements for underground tanks.

The issue of zoning is also raised by Rodenbeck who points out that zoning issues with carparks are what has made employee buses more attractive to the giant tech employees.

Zoning different land uses makes sense on one level as no-one wants to live next door to a tannery, heavy metal waste dump or quarry, but there’s a risk with fixed ideas that our cities will become less responsive to economic developments, particularly in an era when people don’t want to, or can’t, dive across town to get to their jobs.

What Silicon Valley’s corporate buses really show is that our cities are evolving around the needs of today, not yesterday. It’s something governments, businesses, investors and communities should keep in mind.

Image of Google shuttle bus stop from David Orban through Flickr

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Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

A challenge for organisations is opening the career path for Gen Y managers as baby boomers hang around the executive suite.

One of the great challenges in today’s workplace is how organisations will manage Generation Y entering the boardroom.

Lazy, unfocused and high maintenance are some of the descriptions used by boomers when talking about younger workers, but how much truth is there really in that and how do organisations plan for this generation to take leadership positions?

As part of the recent Sydney EMC Forum, I had a chance to discuss the challenges of managing Gen Ys with social researcher Micheal McQueen and EMC Australia Managing Director Alister Dias.

Like many tech companies, EMC has a younger workforce with around 25% of staff being GenY and Diaz sees global thinking and a fresh, bright approach as some of the advantages younger people bring to the workplace.

“We want to see this grow,” says Diaz. “There’s two reasons for this; one is that energy level, quick learning and adaption to the new world but the other is the shortage of general talent in the market.”

That shortage is an early part of the global race for talent, with Diaz seeing the priority for EMC and other tech companies to develop home grown skills rather than importing skilled workers.

Offering a career

For Diaz’s, one of the great challenges in this race for talent is retaining skilled and motivated Gen Y and Gen X through offering more diverse career options.

Career progression is one of the big problems facing both GenY and X workers as, in McQueen’s view, the baby boomers have no intention of going anywhere as many define themselves by their work so they don’t plan to retire.

“For Baby Boomers their work ethic is their identity,” says McQueen. “Stepping back from a leadership position, or any position in general is a big deal.”

Not working huge hours which is a key difference between baby boomers and their GenY kids and grandkids who don’t wear long hours as a badge of honour.

Language barriers

An area that concerns McQueen is a lack of vocabulary as text and social media messaging has eroded the teenagers vocabulary with average 14 year old today only knowing 10,000 words as opposed to 25,000 in 1950.

“It started off as text speak and it’s gone beyond that now,” says McQueen. “If you have a Gen Y person operating with older workers there’s often a disconnect there.”

The effects of electronic gaming and communications also has created a climate where today’s teenagers have less empathy than those of twenty years ago — McQueen cites a University of Michigan study — this has consequences in fields as disparate as sales, technical support and nursing.

Organisations are going to have to learn to deal with these differences.  “In our own organisation we talk about the need to adapt to Gen Y,” says EMC’s Diaz. “Personally I think we have to meet them half-way.”

“We’ve found it difficult to get talent. You really have to do your homework on it.”

Part of EMC’s problem in finding skilled Gen Y workers has been the collapse in university IT course enrolments along with the broader turning away from STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmetics — related degrees.

Diaz is quite positive on this and sees the pendulum swinging back towards more technical degrees and diplomas with more younger people taking on STEM subjects. At present though enrolment statistics aren’t bearing this out.

Finding those skilled workers is going to be one of the great challenges for business in planning for the rise of GenY workers, one of the greater tasks though might be getting the baby boomers out of the corner office.

Image of a younger worker courtesy of ZoofyTheJi through sxc.hu

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