Why Gen Y outperforms everyone at work

,

Maybe the reason that young people are optimistic in the face of a poor job market is that young people can probably do your job better than older people can.

The truth is, non-gen-y-workers have a bunch of shortcomings when it comes to competing with today’s workforce. Management consultant Stephen Denning has a great little history of management in his new book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. He points out that managers of the 20th century were trained to supervise people to get them to do stuff, to perform tasks. But now that most people are knowledge workers and not semi-skilled workers, we need managers who inspire, motivate, and encourage collaboration-managers, even, who care about the well-being of their employees and strive to make the workplace meaningful. And that’s not a corporate world where the older set is generally comfortable.

Yup, I’m arguing that Gen Y – that age-group that gets dumped on for acting all entitled – can teach everyone something about making it in the modern workforce. A lot, actually, because Gen Y is more prepared and has an advantage over older folks with far more experience. Here are areas where Gen Y can run circles around everyone at work: Read more

/31 Comments

Come to the Brazen Careerist party in DC

,

Brazen Careerist Party in Washington, DC. Thursday, Nov. 11, 7pm at Lounge 201. You’re invited.

I always had this huge fantasy about how Brazen Careerist would sell for ten million bazillion dollars, and I would use the money to fly everyone I know to a huge party at some fun destination.

This is not that party. But we will be celebrating the company’s recent move to DC, which is one step closer to the company ruling the world. I can say ruling the world now that I am officially not trying to do that myself. But I’m still excited for there just to be a Brazen Careerist party.

Wait, I just noticed that there are very few opportunities for links in this kind of invitation-to-a-party post.

I have this friend who is constantly bugging me to link to her. And I say, “Shut up. My readers are not stupid. They are going to see a random link to you and think, “Penelope’s blog is going to hell.” Also, people sometimes complain to me that I have too many links to random stuff, and mostly I think, “Just don’t click on the links if you don’t like it.” And then someone reminds me about all the research I write about from Barry Schwartz and Dan Ariely about how too many choices drive people crazy, incapacitating them. Read more

/44 Comments

Being a snob creates too many limits


Book snobbery takes many forms in my life. For example, when I worked in bookstores, thinking my life was over because all my friends were lawyers, I spent a lot of time mumbling “Philistines!” as I reshelved A Hundred Years of Solitude under G instead of M.

But the truth is that if you reshelve a book like that to its proper spot, no one can find it. This is true of Out of the Dust, as well. (Hold it. Have you not read this book? It’s the best depiction of dust bowl life that I’ve ever read.) It’s a book for kids, written in verse. But you cannot sell any children’s books by putting them in poetry, so the world is a better place if bookstore workers (who are all literary snobs) would put the book in the young adult section.

Speaking of young adult books, I don’t think I have ever mentioned here that I still read a lot of those. As far as I can tell, the only difference between them and adult novels is that the author explains subtle emotions a little more explicitly in young adult novels. Perfect for someone with Asperger’s, right?

I saved all my childhood books thinking that I’d read them to my kids. But when I offer my girl books, my boys don’t bite. I thought this might happen, but I still carried all my books with me from Chicago to LA to Boston to LA to NY to Madison to the farm. Maybe I was hoping the boys would be gay. I think gay boys might be into reading Ode to Billie Joe. Read more

/82 Comments

How I solved my sleep problems

, ,

I'm deciding if I should take a sleeping pill.

I know tons of people who take them. I never understood the need, to be honest. I remember when I was in a mental ward. My group therapy was a bunch of eating disorder girls (which I was part of, but a little old for) and a bunch of grown-ups who were depressed and maybe receiving electroshock therapy. (Does this still happen? I don't know.)

Anyway, the girls' biggest problem was that they hated their family and wanted to live in the mental ward instead. (I definitely fell into that camp.) The adults' problem was that they could not sleep.

At first, I thought, “If this is your biggest problem, do you need to be in a mental ward?”

And this is why I loved the mental ward, by the way. You learn so much about life from people who are unable to live it. Read more

/122 Comments

Perfectionism is a disease. Here’s how to beat it.

, ,

It’s amazing that people admit to being perfectionists. To me, it’s a disorder, not unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder. And like obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism messes you up. It also messes up the people around you, because perfectionists lose perspective as they get more and more mired in details.

We can never achieve perfection — any of us. Yet so many people keep trying to reach this elusive goal and they drive themselves crazy in the process. So cut it out. Accept that it’s okay to do a mediocre job on a certain percentage of your work. If you need convincing, consider this: Perfectionism is a risk factor for depression. No kidding. Sydney Blatt, psychologist at Yale University, finds that perfectionists are more likely to kill themselves than regular, mediocre-performing people.

Here are three steps to take to avoid the perfectionism trap: Read more

/44 Comments

How to take intelligent risks

, , ,

Recently, I covered my hallway in wallpaper I bought online (via Wallpaper Weekly). Everyone I showed the wallpaper to said the it would be too busy a pattern. But I loved it. So I bought it anyway.

There are a lot of problems with my hallway now — most notably, I used Elmer’s glue instead of wallpaper paste and I’m going to have to pull down the wallpaper and start over. But every time I walk through my hall, I think about how important it is to take risks with my house — because that’s what makes it mine. Which, of course, is very similar to a life. You can live someone eles’s tried-and-true template for a life, or you can make your life your own. Read more

/73 Comments

How to do damage control

Remember the donkey in the last post? Well, here’s the story of the donkey. The farmer bought it, but he doesn’t know very much about donkeys, except “Horses need to be ridden,” he said. About ten thousand times.

The donkey is not trained. And we don’t have any riding gear for the donkey, so I rode her bareback, without reins or anything. Read more

/89 Comments

How I decide to work on Rosh Hashannah

,

We drove to Iowa City yesterday, to have Rosh Hashanah with my family. I took the kids out of school and told their teachers it’s the Jewish New Year so the kids will miss school. I said it in front of the kids so I can teach them that we take off a day for the Jewish high holidays.

The truth is, though, is that today is the day. Last night was the first night and today is the first day. But I can’t take them out of school today because, well, first of all, what would we do? There are no other Jews where we live and we can last only so long on apples and honey before we get sick.

So I sent the kids to school. And, anyway, I have a meeting. I told Ed, the CEO, that I can’t go to the meeting because it’s on Rosh Hashanah. He said fine, because this is why he’s a great CEO. He knows when to push and when not to.

But then, it turns out, that the company is opening an office in Washington, DC. This is not a huge surprise to me. Ed is in Washington, DC in some sort of huge estate which I haven’t seen, but I have heard talk of an uppercase and lowercase balcony, which makes me think he’s not moving to Madison in this lifetime.

So we’re in the next phase of the company and it’s scary and exciting and I’m already doing so many new things that the idea of opening a new office in DC, and having a meeting about it, and me not showing up because of Rosh Hashanah is all too much for me to think about. Also, I have to always make sure that Ed likes me because I think I am hard to like. Maybe not in little blog post snippets, but in long meetings I am hard to like, and Ed still likes me, I think. Because every time I write a desperate paragraph like this about my need to be liked Ed sends me an email saying he likes me. Which normal people would not need to receive, but I need to receive and Ed knows that which is why, as I said, he’s a great CEO.

So it’s Rosh Hashanah and I am driving to a meeting in Milwaukee with Ryan Paugh for the meeting. And I’m over the bad-Jew part of things because I figure that now that I live on a farm I have to feed the animals, so I fed the chicks, too.

Here’s a cool thing about the chicks: we got them via US Mail. The hatchery we bought from, Murray McMurry, hatches them on Monday. And in a normal hatching situation, chicks don’t hatch at once, and the mom doesn’t get up until they all hatch. So chicks can sit under their mom for up to two days while their siblings hatch. Which means the hatchery can put new chicks in a box they arrive two days later in good health.

Taking care of our chicks doesn’t count as work, right? I don’t know. Som
e good Jew will comment about this nuance in Jewish law. But I think feeding the chicks is like feeding my kids. Rosh Hashanah is not a time to starve. (That’s Yom Kippur.)

Read more

/50 Comments

The farmer reviews three business books

, ,

When I first met the farmer, I knew he was not a normal farmer because normal farmers don't email bloggers for a date. But also, he gave himself away because he quoted Garrison Keillor to me. Then, when I thought I could not put up with him dumping me anymore, and this time would be the last time, just as I thought that, he started reading Moby Dick, and he got so excited about certain chapters that he'd read them out loud to me on his porch in the bright sun of long summer nights.

When I first started forwarding my mail to the farmer's address, he had to buy a larger mailbox. “Why do people send you so many books?” he asked. “Don't they read your blog? You never review books you like.” [This is largely true.]

During the tumult of our move to the farm I stopped opening the packages. But the farmer got curious, and he started reading the books. It turns out that he doesn't like them any more than I do. Here are my summaries of his summaries: Read more

/64 Comments

Privacy is the new celebrity

,

In a recent interview with Fast Company, Ashton Kutcher – the celebrity-turned-Internet-mogel – said that privacy is more valuable than celebrity. This makes sense to me.

On the Internet everyone is a celebrity. I think Rebecca Blood was the first person to introduce this concept to me when she said Generation Y manages itself like celebrities online, so privacy is not necessary for them. I think the proof of this is that gen Y prefers communicating via social media rather than email; news travels faster, via larger groups of people.

Marketers and publicists have made a science out of getting benefits from being a celebrity—sponsors, a fun network, great opportunities that lead to even greater opportunities. In the age of transparency Gen Y can see how to do this and they don’t need permission from MGM or Capitol Records to act like a celebrity.

I am constantly telling people to get a strong career by managing their professional profile online . The way to a solid career is to be known for what you’re good at. All good workers are celebrities—a far cry from Horatio Alger and the Protestant work ethic, but a much more relevant trope for the new millennium.

Pace University reports that 99 percent of Gen Y is on Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn, and Redbook reports that one out of five moms is blogging. In this era, if you’re at all relevant in this day and age, you can google your name, and you will find photos, quotes, and some sort of history of your life, in a few lines or a few million lines. If you already have everything that being a celebrity can get you, then you can be private.

I am struck by the way Prince William and Kate Middleton handle the media in England.

Read more

/90 Comments