The up and comers are different and may be teaching us that the world, if it is not enough, is certainly quite different. No need to keep stuck in the gutter, you need to move forward and manage this new bunch differently. These are some of the major principles that are emerging: solidarity, collaboration, balance, top management, professional and personal alike, wanna live (understand “want to live”)…
1. Solidarity: it may be amazing but humanity does it all the time as it goes round and round in circles and always comes back to the same cycles. If we went away from the whole concept of solidarity over the past couple generations, we are slowly but surely coming back to it. What do you do when you are left by the wayside but “come back to basics”? May be easy to throw the baby with the bath water but plain solidarity is quite comfortable…
2. Collaboration: “work together”, why not? This does not mean “bringing it altogether”! From dependency, the young generations have looked for autonomy (to a certain extent, one should say, as families have welcomed back many youngsters in disarray) but, yet, one should count on complementarities as we are not looking for individual performances anymore even though we are searching for self-development, thanks to the bunch.
3. Balance: like any swing, we all know that the further we reach one way, the further we are tempted the other. Yet, balance is reached when the system comes to a halt as opposite forces have brought it such. Yin and yang, feminine and masculine, night and day, we have all seen numerous researches calling for a balanced world where the opposite come together and the world becomes more harmonious, a mix of opposite bringing strength to the whole.
4. Top management: if we spent many years relying on the President to do it all, we then gave the CEO the main responsibility; first he was from Engineering, then he came from Finance and now… He/she is a mix of different functions where one cannot just expect the Head of the Corporation to make a single decision! The CHO, Chief Human Officer and the CIO, Chief Information Officer, have come forward and participate in the ultimate play.
5. Professional and Personal alike: difficult to separate both types, right? If some people have refused to move to the 24hr contact with company BBY ’s, it is hard to make a clear cut between the office hours and family life. On the other hand, we, thus, created the individual capacity to decide where he/she wants to work, as technology (mobile and portable alike) have allowed each to stay connected and work away from the official jobsite.
6. Wanna live (understand “want to live”): why all this rigmarole about the environment (why the hell did we spend so much public money, gathering thousands of people in Copenhagen or Cancun, and hoping to tame Mother Nature, when we all knew this was impossible?) Kids are laughing out loud (LOL) with older generations wasting cash on that, when they used to smoke dope back in the late 60’s! Time to cool down: peace and love, we used to say!
The SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented and Time-bound) objectives are out, SENSIBLE ones are in… Soon they come to you…
