Tag Archives: boomer

Transitioning from a Bossy Boss into a Digital Age Leader [Series Conclusion]

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Now that we are to the end of our 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion about digital management over the last seven posts. This series was born of our frustration with patterns of leadership in digital organizations: overly directing leaders stifle their team while hands-off leaders fail to provide critical direction. Neither culture is leading effectively!

Digital managers have to be two things at once

We felt that our “cultural intuition” is failing us.  That drove us to describe what’s broken and how to fix it.

Digital work and workers operate in a new model where top-down management is neither appropriate nor effective. To point, many digital workers actively resist being given too much direction, rules or structure. No, we are not throwing out management; on the contrary, we believe management is more important than ever, but changes to both work and workers has made it much harder than before.

That’s especially true when Boomers and Millennials try to work together because of differences in leadership experience and expectation. As Brad is always pointing out in his book Liquid Leadership, “what motivates a Millennial will not motivate a Boomer,” or even a Gen Xer.

Millennials may be so uncomfortable having to set limits and enforce decisions that they avoid exerting the very leadership that digital workers need! While GenX and Boomers may be creating and expecting unrealistic deadlines simply because they truly do not understand the depth of the work involved.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? As we’ve pointed out in previous posts, it’s neither! Why? Because unlike Industrial Age Models, there is no one way to get something done in The Information Age.

We desperately need a management model that works for everyone. How does a digital manager know when it’s time to be directing? If you’ve communicated a shared purpose well then you are always at liberty to 1) ask your team if this is aligned and 2) quickly stop any activity that is not aligned.

The trap we see for digital managers who have not communicated the shared goals is that they lack the team authority to take the lead.

We believe that digital leadership requires finding a middle ground using these three guidelines:

  1. Clearly express your intent and trust, don’t force, your team will follow it
  2. Respect your teams’ ability to make good decisions around the intent.
  3. Don’t be shy to exercise your authority when your team needs direction

Digital management is hard: you don’t get the luxury of authority or the comfort of certainty.

If you are used to directing then you have to trust yourself to communicate clearly at an abstract level and then let go of the details. If you are used to being hands-off then you have to get over being specific and assertive when the situation demands it.

Our frustration was that neither Boomer nor Millennial culture is providing effective management. Instead, we realized that elements of both are required. It’s up to the digital manager to learn when each mode is required.

Thank you for following along. It has been an honor.

Leading vs. Directing: Digital Managers must learn the difference [post 5 of 8]

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Fifth IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

On the shouldersDigital Management has a challenging deep paradox: digital workers resist direct management but require that their efforts fit into a larger picture.

If you believe the next generation companies we discussed in post #4, then the only way to unlock worker potential is enable self-motivated employees and remove all management. In Zappos case, they encouraged 14% of their workers to simply leave the company because they don’t believe in extreme self-management.

Companies like W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of GORE-TEX, operate and thrive very well in a team-driven environment… This apparently loosey-goosey management style has brought about hundreds of major multibillion-dollar ideas and made W. L. Gore a leading incubator of consistently great ideas and products for more than fifty years. To an outside observer it looks as though the focus is on having fun. But to the initiated, it is about hiring intense self-starters who contribute wholeheartedly to what they are doing and to the team, and most important, who can self-manage their time and skill sets.

— Liquid Leadership by Brad Szollose, page 154

Frankly, both of us—Brad and Rob—are skeptical. We believe that these tactics do enhance productivity, but gloss over the essential ingredient in their success: a shared set of goals.

Like our Jazz analogy, the performance is the sum of the parts and the players need to understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. A traditional management structure, with controlling leadership and über clear, micromanaged direction, backfires because it restricts the workers’ ability to interpret and adapt; however, that does not mean we are advocates of “no management whatsoever” zones.  

The trendy word is Holacracy.  That loosely translates into removal of management hierarchy and power while redistributing it throughout the organization.  Are you scared of that free-fall model?  If workers reject traditional management then what are the alternatives?

We need a way to manage today’s independent thinking workforce.

According to Forbes, digital workers have an even higher need to understand the purpose of their work than previous generations. If you are a Baby Boomer (Conductor of a Symphony), then this last statement may cause you to roll your eyes in disagreement.

Directing a Jazz ensemble requires a different type of leadership. One that hierarchy junkies —orchestra members who need a conductor—would call ambiguous…IF they didn’t truly know what was happening.

Great musicians don’t join mediocre bands; they purposely seek out other teams that are challenging them, a shared set of goals and standards that produce results and success. This may require a shift in mindset for some of our readers.

Freedom in jazz improvisation comes from understanding structure. When people listen to jazz, they often believe that the soloist is “doing whatever they want.” If fact, as experienced improvisers will tell you, the soloist is rarely “doing whatever they want”.  An improvisational soloist is always following a complicated set of rules and being creative within the context of those rules.  From Jazzpath.com

In the past generation, there was no need to communicate a shared vision: you either did what you were told, OR just told people what to do. And people obeyed. Mostly out of fear of losing your job. But, in the digital workforce, shared goals are what makes the work fit together. Players participate of their own will. Not fear.

Putting this into generational terms: if you were born after 1977 (aka Gen X to the Millennials) then you were encouraged to see ALL adults as peers.  In the public school system, this trend continued as the generation was encouraged to speak up, speak out and make as many mistakes as possible…after all, THAT is how you learn. And the fear of screwing up and making mistakes was actually encouraged, as teachers also became friends and mentors.  Video games simply reinforced the same iterative learning lessons at home.

Thousands of years of social programming were flipped over in favor of iterative learning and flattened hierarchy.  Those skills showed up just in time to enable us to survive the chaos of the digital work / social media revolution.

But survival is not enough, we are looking for a way to lead and win.

Since hierarchy is flat, it’s become critical to replace directing action with building a common mission.  In individual-centric digital work, there are often multiple right ways to accomplish the team objective (our topic for post 7).  While having a clear shared goals will not help pick the right option, it will help the team accept that 1) the team has to choose and 2) the team is still on track even if some some individuals have to change direction.

Just listen to the most complex work out there that has been influenced by Jazz; the late Jeff Porcaro, pop rock drummer and cofounder of Toto admits to being influenced by Bo Diddley for his drum riffs on the song Rosanna. Or if you are a RUSH fan you know that songs like La Villa Strangiato owe the syncopated rhythms, chord changes and drum riffs to Jazz.

Or the modern artist Piet Mondrian who invented neoplasticism, was inspired by listening incessantly to a particular type of jazz called “Boogie-Woogie.”

Participants in this type of performance do not tune out and wait for direction. They must be present, bring 100% of themselves to each performance, and let go of what they did in the last concert because each new performance is customized.

You have until our next post to cry in your beer while whining that digital managers have it too hard.  In the next post, we’ll lay out 12 very concrete actions that you should be taking as a leader in the digital workforce.

PS: Brad some important insights about how their childhood experience shapes digital natives’ behavior.  We felt that topic was important but external to the primary narrative so Rob included them here:

Continue reading →

Management free falling! Why The Zappos & Valve Model is Terrifying [Post 4 of 8]

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Forth IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.  — Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computers

Trust, not stability, is the new management contract. Digital workers interpret “strong” management as a lack of trust. Megaphone!

Before we can talk about how to manage digital workers, we have to talk about trusting them to do their jobs. Why? Digital workers largely adopt Millennials’ unwillingness to follow directed leadership.  If we want to succeed in managing them then we need to foster mutual respect that is built on bi-directional trust.

20th Century business models were based on “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” thinking that went along with mass manufacturing control, discipline and predictability. Physical goods were sold to a passive marketplace with minimal feedback from markets and internal workers; consequently, decisions could be made by a few leaders as long as workers did what they were told. All out-of-the-box decision had to go through a leader. The bigger the decision, the higher up that decision needs to go for approval. Like in our symphony analogy, control and discipline is the main ideology.

In 21st Century business, there is no script just as there is no score for a Jazz concert. That does not mean it’s a worker free-for-all! We still need to deliver products. But instead of top-down control, we talk about collaboration, shared mission and team work. This change is critical because digital work as so much situational content that it is impossible to proscribe it’s exact results in advance. Like Jazz, you can create a general framework and guidelines but the exact composition has a degree of improvisation because it must reflect the players’ situation in the moment.

Since you have to trust people to make decisions, you’d better create an environment where they want to make the best decisions for your business!

Glassdoor’s multiyear study discovered that the “Best Places to Work” from 2009 to 2014 outperformed the S&P 500 by 115.6% while a similar portfolio named Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For,” outperformed the S&P 500 by 84.2%! That is impressive.

What does trust look like? Leading gaming software maker Valve has thrown out the traditional employee handbook and replaced it with a 37 page breakdown of what they expect from an employee. The manual tells people their desk is on wheels so they can just roll over to a new team if they want to change jobs. The trust implied in that type of follow-your-passion enablement is unheard of in most workplaces.

Zappos, recognized 6 years in a row by FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work For®, pays employees $4,500 to quit if not satisfied with the culture. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is advocates for a no management whatsoever model called Holacracy. Like Valve, Zappos counts of their hiring process to find workers who thrive in a self-led model where leadership is fluid and people organize themselves to solve problems and deliver value.

If our undirected Jazz model scares you, Holacracy will terrify you.

However, it’s critical to understand that neither Zappos nor Value are “wild west” work environments. Like a top Jazz ensemble they provide trained performers, concrete structure, appropriate tools and clear expectations. By giving your teams the right tools to know what to do when they are working on their own, you will see a different workforce, striving to make your company better than even you thought possible.

Why does this work? In digital work, we have to give up the idea that the knighted leaders make the best decisions.

It’s not just a question of good decisions, we also need to improve quality and speed of action. Check out Navy Submarine Captain David Marquet’s talk on Greatness, based on his book, Turn The Ship Around! He explains quite well why people should be allowed to think and take responsibility for their work. 

In the end, it’s simply physics. Without trust, all decisions must flow downward and the entire organization is limited by the leadership. Our information economy makes it simply impossible for leaders to sufficiently learn and react. When people are trusted to think for themselves and take control for the products they create there is a psychological shift. They take ownership in their work. That means quality and output go through the roof as they get competitive with creating a wow product.

So, how can you create a company culture that taps into the skills sets of a new digital worker yet engages everyone for the long haul? Let’s dig in and instead of giving you rules or regulations, let’s start with a few principles to create the right environment.

Tune it for our next post: Setting direction – how too much freedom is bad too.

Jazz vs. Symphony: Why micromanaging digital work FAILS. [post 3 of 8]

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Third IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

Now that we’ve introduced music as a functional analogy for a stable 21st century leadership model and defined digital work, we’re ready to expose how work actually gets done in the information age.

First, has work really changed?  Yes.  Traditionally there was a distinct difference between organized production and service-based/creative work such as advertising, accounting or medicine.  Solve a problem by looking for clues and coming up with creative solutions to solve it.

Jazz Hands By RevolvingRevolver on DeviantArt http://revolvingrevolver.deviantart.com/

Digital work on the other hand, and more importantly – digital workers, live in a strange limbo of doing creative work but needing business structures and management models that were developed during the industrial age.

In today’s multi-generational workforce, what appears to be a generational divide has transformed into a non-age-specific cultural rift. As Brad and Rob compared notes, we came to believe that what is really happening is a learned difference in the approach to work and work culture.

There is learned difference in the approach to work and work culture that’s more obvious in, but not limited to, digital natives.

In most companies, the executives are traditionalists (Baby Boomers or hand-selected by Boomers).  While previous generations have been trained to follow hierarchy, the new culture values performance, flexibility and teamwork with a less top-down control oriented outlook.

It’s like a symphonic conductor who is used to picking the chair order and directing the tempo is handing out sheet music to a Jazz ensemble.  So how is the traditional manager going to deliver a stellar performance when his performers are Jazz trained?

In traditional concert orchestra, each musician has to go to college, train hard, earn a shot to get into the orchestra, and overtime, work very hard to earn the First Chair position (think earning the corner office).  Once in that position, they stay there until death or retirement.  Anyone who deviates, is fired. Improv is only allowed during certain songs, by a select few.  It’s the workplace equivalent to climbing the corporate ladder.

Most digital workers think they belong to a Jazz ensemble.  

It’s a mistake to believe less organized means less skilled.  Workers in the Jazz model are also talented and trained professionals.  If you look at the careers of Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, they all had formal training, many started as children.  The same is true for digital workers: many started build job skills as children and then honed their teamwork playing video games.

But can a loosely organized group consistently deliver results? Yes. In fact, they deliver better results!

When a Jazz Improv group plays, they have a rough composition to start with. Each member is given time for a solo.  To the uninitiated there appears to be no leaders in this milieu of talent, but the leader is there.  They just refuse to control the performance; instead, they trust that each member will bring their A Game and perform at 100% of their capacity.

In business, this is scary. Don’t we need someone to check each person’s work? People are just messing around right? I mean, is this actual work? Who is in charge?

In businesss environments that operate more like Jazz, studies have proven that there is a 32% increase in productivity from traditional command and control environments driven by hierarchy.

Age, experience and position are NOT the criteria for the Digital Worker. Output is.  And output is different for each product. Management’s role in this model is to get out of the way and let the musicians create. Instead of conforming to a single style and method, the people producing in the model each bring something unique and also experience a high degree of ownership.

This is a powerful type of workplace diversity: by allowing different ways of problem solving to co-exist, we also make the workplace more inclusive and collaborative.

Sound too good to be true?  In our next post we’ll discuss trust as the critical ingredient for Jazz performance.  (Teaser)

Can Digital Workers Deliver? No. [cloud culture vs. traditional management, post 1 of 8]

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In this 8 post series, Brad Szollose and Rob hirschfeld invite you to share in our discussion about failures, fights and frightening transformations going on around us as digital work changes workplace deliverables, planning and culture.

On the shouldersDigital workers will not deliver. Not if you force them into the 20th century management model then they (and you) will fail miserably; however, we believe they can outperform previous generations if guided correctly. In the 21st Century, digital technologies have fundamentally transformed both the way we work and, more importantly, how we have learned to work.

So far, we’ve framed this transformation as a generational (Boomers vs Millennials) challenge; however, workers today transcend those boundaries. We believe that we need to redefine the debate from cultural viewpoints of Boomers (authority driven leadership) and Millennials (action driven leadership). In the global, digital workforce, these perspectives transcend age.

We looked to performing music as a functional analogy for leadership.

In music, we saw very different leadership cultures at work in symphonic and jazz performances. The symphony orchestra mirrors the Boomer culture expectation of clear leadership hierarchy and top-down directed effort. The jazz band typifies the Millennial cultural norms of fluid leadership based on technical competence where the direction is a general theme and the players evolve the details. Both require technical acumen and have very clear rules for interaction with the art form. More importantly, these two extremes both produce wonderful music, but they are miles apart in execution.

Today’s workforce generations often appear the same way – unable to execute together. We believe strongly that, like symphonies and jazz concerts, both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. The challenge is to understand adapt your leadership cultural language of your performers.

That is what Brad and Rob have been discussing together for years and, now, we’d like to include you in our conversation about how Cloud Culture is transforming our work force.

Read Post #2!

Three critical ingredients for digital age relationships. [Collaborate Series 8/8]

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Translation: Are you ready to apply these lessons?

This post is the final post in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

End of LineDuring this blog series, we’ve explored how important culture is in the work place.  The high tech areas are especially sensitive because they disproportionately embrace the millennial culture which often causes conflicts.

Our world has changed, driven by technology, new thinking, and new methodologies yet we may be using 20th century management techniques on 21st century customers and workers. There is an old business axiom that states, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”  Yet how much of our process, interaction, successes, and failures never wind up on a spreadsheet, yet impact it?

Customers don’t leave bad companies; they leave companies that miss the mark when it comes to customer engagement. To better serve our customers we need to understand and adapt to the psychology of a new customer … one who has been trained to work as a Digital Native.

What would that look like? Tech people who interact with patience, collaboration, deep knowledge, and an openness to input, adapting to a customer’s needs in real-time. Wouldn’t that create a relationship that is second to none and unbreakable? Wouldn’t that be a leg up on the competition?

By understanding that new business culture has been influenced by the gaming experience, we have a deeper understanding of what is important to our customer base. And like a video game, if you cling to hierarchy, you lose. If you get caught up in linear time management, you lose. If you cling to bottlenecks and tradition you lose.

Three key takeaways: speed, adaptation, and collaboration

Those three words sum up today’s business environment. By now, you should not be surprised that those drivers are skills honed in video games.

We’ve explored the radically different ways that Digital Natives approach business opportunities. As the emerging leaders of the technological world, we must shift our operations to be more open, collaborative, iterative, and experience based.

Rob challenges you to get involved in his and other collaborative open source projects. Brad challenges you to try new leadership styles that engage with the Cloud Generation. Together, we challenge our entire industry to embrace a new paradigm that redefines how we interact and innovate. We may as well embrace it because it is the paradigm that we’ve already trained the rising generation or workers to intuitively understand.

What’s next?

Brad and Rob collaborated on this series with the idea of extending the concepts beyond a discussion of the “digital divide” and really looking at how culture impacts business leadership.  Lately, we’ve witnessed that the digital divide is not about your birthday alone.  We’ve seen that age alone does not drive the all cultural differences we’ve described here.  Our next posts will reflect the foundations for different ways that we’ve seen people respond to each other with a focus on answering “can digital age workers deliver?”

Like the conclusion?  Reading the rest of the series! 1: Intro > 2: ToC > 3: Video Reality > 4: Authority > 5: On The Game Training > 6: Win by Failing > 7: Go Digital Native > 8: Three Takeaways

 

Cloud Culture: Becoming L33T – Five ways to “go digital native” [Collaborative Series 7/8]

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Subtitle: Five keys to earn Digital Natives’ trust

This post is #7 in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

WARNING: These are not universal rules! These are two cultures. What gets high scores for Digital Natives is likely to get you sacked with Digital Immigrants.

How do Digital Natives do business?

You've gotta deal with itYou don’t sell! You collaborate with them to help solve their problems. They’ll discredit everything say if you “go all marketing on them” and try to “sell them.”

Here are five ways that you can build a two-way collaborative relationship instead of one-way selling. These tips aren’t speculation: Brad has proven these ideas work in real-world business situations.

Interested in Digital Native Culture?  We recommend reading (more books):

1) Share, don’t tell.

Remember the cultural response in Rob’s presentation discussed in the introduction to this paper? The shift took place because Rob wanted to share his expertise instead of selling the awesomeness of his employeer. This is what changed the dynamic.

In a selling situation, the sales pitch doesn’t address our client’s needs. It addresses what we want to tell them and what we think they need. It is a one-way conversation. And if someone has a choice between saying “yes” or “no” in a sales meeting, a client can always have the choice to say “no.”

Sharing draws our customers in so we can hear their problems and solve them. We can also get a barometer on what they know versus what they need. When Rob is presenting to a customer, he’s qualifying the customer too. Solutions are not one size fits all and Digital Natives respect you more for admitting this to them.

Digital Native business is about going for a long-term solution-driven approach instead of just positioning a product. If you’ve collaborated with customers and they agree you’ve got a solution for them then it’s much easier to close the sale. And over the long term, it’s a more lucrative way to do business.

2) Eliminate bottlenecks.

Ten years ago, IT departments were the bottleneck to getting products into the market. If customers resisted, it could take years to get them to like something new. Today, Apple introduces new products every six month with a massive adoption rate because Digital Natives don’t wait for permission from an authority.

The IT buyer has made that sales cycle much more dynamic because our new buyers are Digital Natives. Where Digital Immigrants stayed entrenched in a process or technology, Digital Natives are more willing to try something unproven. Amazon’s EC2 public cloud presented a huge challenge to the authority of IT departments because developers were simply bypassing internal controls. Digital Natives have been trained to look for out-of-the-box solutions to problems.

Time-to-market has become the critical measure for success.

We now have IT end-user buyers who adopt and move faster through the decision process than ever before! We interfere with their decision process if we still treating new buyers as if they can’t keep up and we have to educate them.

Today’s Digital Workers are smart, self-starters who more than understand technology; they live it. Their intuitive nature toward technology and the capacity to use it without much effort has become a cultural skill set. Also they can look up, absorb, and comprehend products without much effort. They did their homework before we walked in the door.

Digital Natives are impatient. They want to skip over what they know and get to real purpose and collaboration. You add bottlenecks when you force them back into a traditional decision process that avoids risk; instead, they are looking to business partners to help them iterate and accelerate.

 How did this apply to the Crowbar project?

Crowbar addresses a generation’s impatience to be up and running in record time. But there is more to it than that: we engage with customers differently too. Our open source collaboration and design flexibility mean that we can dialog with customers and partners to figure out the real wants and needs in record time.

3) Let go of linear.

Digital Natives do not want to be walked through detailed linear presentations. They do want the information but leave out the hand holding. The best strategy is to prepare to be a well-trained digital commando—plan a direction, be confident, be ready to respond, and be willing to admit knowledge gaps. It’s a strategy without a strategy.

Ask questions at the beginning of a meeting—this becomes a knowledge base “smell test.” Listening to what our clients know and don’t know gets us to the heart and purpose of why we are there. Take notes. Stay open to curve balls, tough questions, and—dare we say it—the client telling us we are off base. You should not be surprised at how much they know.

For open source projects at Dell (Rob’s Employeer), customers have often downloaded and installed the product before they have talked to the sales team. Rob has had to stop being surprised when they are better informed about our offerings than our well trained internal teams. Digital Natives love collecting information and getting started independently. This completely violates the normal linear sales process; instead, customers enter more engaged and ready if you can be flexible enough to meet them where they already are.

4) Be attentively interactive.

No one likes to sit in one meeting after another. Why are meetings boring? Meetings should be engaging and collaborative; unfortunately, most meetings are simply one-way presentations or status updates. When Digital Natives interrupt a presentation, it may mean they are not getting what they want but it also means they are paying attention.

Aren’t instant messaging, texting, and tweeting attention-stealing distractions?

Don’t confuse IMing, texting, emailing, and tweeting as lack of attention or engagement.

Digital Natives use these “back channels” to speed up knowledge sharing while eliminating the face-to-face meeting inertia of centralized communication.

Of course, sometimes we do check out and stop paying attention.

Time and attention are valuable commodities!

With all the distractions and multi-tasking for speed and connectivity, giving someone undivided attention is about respect, and paying attention is not passive! When we ask questions, it shows that we’re engaged and paying attention. When we compile all the answers from those questions, our intention leads us to solutions. Solving our client’s problems is about getting to the heart of the matter and becomes the driving force behind every action and solution.

Don’t be afraid to stray from the agenda—our attention is the agenda.

5) Stay open to happy accidents.

In Brad’s book, Liquid Leadership, the chapter titled “Have Laptop. Will Travel” points out how Digital Natives have been trained in virtualized work habits because they are more effective.

Our customers are looking for innovative solutions to their problems and may find them in places that we do not expect. It is our job to stay awake and open to solution serendipity. Let’s take this statement out of our vocabulary: “That’s not how we do it.” Let’s try a new approach: “That isn’t traditionally how we would do it, but let us see if it could improve things.”

McDonald’s uses numbers for their combo meals to make sure ordering is predictable and takes no more than 30 seconds. It sounds simple, but changes come from listening to customers’ habits. We need to stop judging and start adapting. Imagine a company that adapts to the needs of its customers?

Sales guru Jeffery Gitomer pays $100 in cash to any one of his employees who makes a mistake. This mistake is analyzed to figure out if it is worthy of application or to be discarded. He doesn’t pay $100 if they make the same mistake twice. Mistakes are where we can discover breakthrough ideas, products, and methods.

Making these kinds of leaps requires that we first let go of rigid rules and opinions and make it OK to make a few mistakes … as long as we look at them through a lens of possibility. Digital Natives have spent 10,000 hours playing learning to make mistakes, take risks, and reach mastery.

Keep Reading! Next post is Three Takeaways (previous Win by Failing)

 

 

Cloud Culture: Level up – You win the game by failing successfully [Collaborative Series 6/8]

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Translation: Learn by playing, fail fast, and embrace risk.

This post is #6 in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

It's good to failDigital Natives have been trained to learn the rules of the game by just leaping in and trying. They seek out mentors, learn the politics at each level, and fail as many times as possible in order to learn how NOT to do something. Think about it this way: You gain more experience when you try and fail quickly then carefully planning every step of your journey. As long as you are willing to make adjustments to your plans, experience always trumps prediction.

Just like in life and business, games no longer come with an instruction manual.

In Wii Sports, users learn the basic in-game and figure out the subtlety of the game as they level up. Tom Bissel, in Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, explains that the in-game learning model is core to the evolution of video games. Game design involves interactive learning through the game experience; consequently, we’ve trained Digital Natives that success comes from overcoming failure.

Early failure is the expected process for mastery.

You don’t believe that games lead to better decision making in real life? In a January 2010 article, WIRED magazine reported that observations of the new generation of football players showed they had adapted tactics learned in Madden NFL to the field. It is not just the number of virtual downs played; these players have gained a strategic field-level perspective on the game that was before limited only to coaches. Their experience playing video games has shattered the on-field hierarchy.

For your amusement…Here is a video about L33T versus N00B culture From College Humor “L33Ts don’t date N00Bs.”  Youtu.be/JVfVqfIN8_c

Digital Natives embrace iterations and risk as a normal part of the life.

Risk is also a trait we see in entrepreneurial startups. Changing the way we did things before requires you to push the boundaries, try something new, and consistently discard what doesn’t work. In Lean Startup Lessons Learned, Eric Ries built his entire business model around the try-learn-adjust process. He’s shown that iterations don’t just work, they consistently out innovate the competition.

The entire reason Dell grew from a dorm to a multinational company is due to this type of fast-paced, customer-driven interactive learning. You are either creating something revolutionary or you will be quickly phased out of the Information Age. No one stays at the top just because he or she is cash rich anymore. Today’s Information Age company needs to be willing to reinvent itself consistently … and systematically.

Why do you think larger corporations that embrace entrepreneurship within their walls seem to survive through the worst of times and prosper like crazy during the good times?

Gamer have learned that Risk that has purpose will earn you rewards.

Cloud Culture: Online Games, the real job training for Digital Natives [Collaborative Series 5/8]

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Translation: Why do Digital Natives value collaboration over authority?

Kids Today

This post is #5 in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

Before we start, we already know that some of you are cynical about what we are suggesting—Video games? Are you serious? But we’re not talking about Ms. Pac-Man. We are talking about deeply complex, rich storytelling, and task-driven games that rely on multiple missions, worldwide player communities, working together on a singular mission.

Leaders in the Cloud Generation not just know this environment, they excel in it.

The next generation of technology decision makers is made up of self-selected masters of the games. They enjoy the flow of learning and solving problems; however, they don’t expect to solve them alone or a single way. Today’s games are not about getting blocks to fall into lines; they are complex and nuanced. Winning is not about reflexes and reaction times; winning is about being adaptive and resourceful.

In these environments, it can look like chaos. Digital workspaces and processes are not random; they are leveraging new-generation skills. In the book Different, Youngme Moon explains how innovations looks crazy when they are first revealed. How is the work getting done? What is the goal here? These are called “results only work environments,” and studies have shown they increase productivity significantly.

Digital Natives reject top-down hierarchy.

These college educated self-starters are not rebels; they just understand that success is about process and dealing with complexity. They don’t need someone to spoon feed them instructions.

Studies at MIT and The London School of Economics have revealed that when high-end results are needed, giving people self-direction, the ability to master complex tasks, and the ability to serve a larger mission outside of themselves will garnish groundbreaking results.

Gaming does not create mind-addled Mountain Dew-addicted unhygienic drone workers. Digital Natives raised on video games are smart, computer savvy, educated, and, believe it or not, resourceful independent thinkers.

Thomas Edison said:

“I didn’t fail 3,000 times. I found 3,000 ways how not to create a light bulb.”

Being comfortable with making mistakes thousands of times ’til mastery sounds counter-intuitive until you realize that is how some of the greatest breakthroughs in science and physics were discovered.  Thomas Edison made 3,000 failed iterations in creating the light bulb.

Level up: You win the game by failing successfully.

Translation: Learn by playing, fail fast, and embrace risk.

Digital Natives have been trained to learn the rules of the game by just leaping in and trying. They seek out mentors, learn the politics at each level, and fail as many times as possible in order to learn how NOT to do something. Think about it this way: You gain more experience when you try and fail quickly then carefully planning every step of your journey. As long as you are willing to make adjustments to your plans, experience always trumps prediction.Just like in life and business, games no longer come with an instruction manual.

In Wii Sports, users learn the basic in-game and figure out the subtlety of the game as they level up. Tom Bissel, in Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, explains that the in-game learning model is core to the evolution of video games. Game design involves interactive learning through the game experience; consequently, we’ve trained Digital Natives that success comes from overcoming failure.

Keep Reading! Win by Failing (previous Authority)

Cloud Culture: No spacesuits, Authority comes from doing, not altitude [Collaborative Series 4/8]

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Subtitle: Why flattening org charts boosts your credibility

This post is #4 in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

Unlike other generations, Digital Natives believe that expertise comes directly from doing, not from position or education. This is not hubris; it’s a reflection both their computer experience and dramatic improvements in technology usability.

AstronautIf you follow Joel Spolsky’s blog, “Joel on Software,” you know about a term he uses when describing information architects obsessed with the abstract and not the details; Architecture Astronauts—so high up above the problem that they might as well be in space. “They’re astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don’t know how they’re breathing.”

For example, a Digital Native is much better positioned to fly a military attack drone than a Digital Immigrant. According to New Scientist, March 27, 2008, the military is using game controllers for drones and robots because they are “far more intuitive.” Beyond the fact that the interfaces are intuitive to them, Digital Natives have likely logged hundreds of hours flying simulated jets under trying battle conditions. Finally, they rightly expect that they can access all the operational parameters and technical notes about the plane with a Google search.

Our new workforce is ready to perform like none other in history.

Being able to perform is just the tip of the iceberg; having the right information is the more critical asset. A Digital Native knows information (and technology) is very fast moving and fluid. It also comes from all directions … after all it’s The Information Age. This is a radical paradigm shift. Harvard Researcher David Weinberger highlights in his book Too Big to Know that people are not looking up difficult technical problems in a book or even relying on their own experiences; they query their social networks and discover multiple valid solutions. The diversity of their sources is important to them, and an established hierarchy limits their visibility; inversely, they see leaders who build strict organizational hierarchies as cutting off their access to information and diversity.

Today’s thought worker is on the front lines of the technological revolution. They see all the newness, data, and interaction with a peer-to-peer network. Remember all that code on the screen in the movie The Matrix? You get the picture.

To a Digital Native, the vice presidents of most organizations are business astronauts floating too high above the world to see what’s really going on but feeling like they have perfect clarity. Who really knows the truth? Mission Control or Major Tom? This is especially true with the acceleration of business that we are experiencing. While the Astronaut in Chief is busy ordering the VPs to move the mountains out of the way, the engineers at ground control have already collaborated on a solution to leverage an existing coal mine and sell coal as a byproduct.

The business hierarchy of yesterday worked for a specific reason: workers needed to just follow rules, keep their mouth shut, and obey. Input, no matter how small, was seen as intrusive and insubordinate … and could get one fired. Henry Ford wanted an obedient worker to mass manufacture goods. The digital age requires a smarter worker because, in today’s world, we make very sophisticated stuff that does not conform to simple rules. Responsibility, troubleshooting, and decision-making has moved to the frontlines. This requires open-source style communication.

Do not confuse the Astronaut problem as a lack of respect for authority.

Digital Natives respect informational authority, not positional. For Digital Natives, authority is flexible. They have experience forming and dissolving teams to accomplish a mission. The mission leader is the one with the right knowledge and skills for the situation, not the most senior or highest scoring. In Liquid Leadership, Brad explains that Digital Natives are not expecting managers to solve team problems; they are looking to their leadership to help build, manage, and empower their teams to do it themselves.

So why not encourage more collaboration with a singular mission in mind: develop a better end product? In a world that is expanding at such mercurial speed, a great idea can come from anywhere! Even from a customer! So why not remember to include customers in the process?

Who is Leroy Jenkins?

This viral video is about a spectacular team failure from one individual (Leroy Jenkins) who goes rogue during a team massively multi-player game.  This is a Digital Natives’ version of the ant and grasshopper parable: “Don’t pull a Leroy Jenkins on us—we need to plan this out.”  Youtu.be/LkCNJRfSZBU

Think about it like this: Working as a team is like joining a quest.

If comparing work to a game scenario sounds counterintuitive then let’s reframe the situation. We may have the same destination and goals, but we are from very different backgrounds. Some of us speak different languages, have different needs and wants. Some went to MIT, some to community college. Some came through Internet startups, others through competitors. Big, little, educated, and smart. Intense and humble. Outgoing and introverted.  Diversity of perspective creates stronger teams.

This also means that leadership roles rotate according to each mission.

This is the culture of the gaming universe. Missions and quests are equivalent to workplace tasks accomplished and point to benchmarks achieved. Each member excepts to earn a place through tasks and points. This is where Digital Natives’ experience becomes advantage. They expect to advance in experience and skills. When you adapt the workplace to these expectations the Digital Natives thrive.

Leaders need to come down to earth and remove the spacesuit.

A leader at the top needs to stay connected to that information and disruption. Start by removing your helmet. Breathe the same oxygen as the rest of us and give us solutions that can be used here on planet earth.

On Gamification

Jeff Attwood, founder of the community-based FAQ site Stack Overflow, has been very articulate about using game design to influence how he builds communities around sharing knowledge. We recommend reading his post about “Building Social Software for the Anti-Social” on his blog, CodingHorror.com.

Keep Reading! Next post is On The Game Training  (previous Video Reality)