A company as human as the people in it

Most companies operating in mature markets have similar value chains with limited sources of competitiveness – in these markets the employees become the key differentiating factor. Unfortunately many companies are experiencing that traditional models of motivation, such as financial reward and personal achievement is suffering in the post financial crisis era. The misalignment between the organisational goals of corporations and the individual aspirations is increasing. Business performance, risk management, efficiency, cost control, uniformity, lean is colliding with greater autonomy, variety, meaning, challenge and growth.

“Management is undoubtedly one of humankind’s biggest inventions“  Gary Hamel

A large group of employees are satisfied and stay with the corporation but they are not inspired to go the extra mile and create productivity gains. Gallup and other organisations have demonstrated a significant performance gap between engaged and disengaged employees. This is now making corporations increasingly interested in Employee Engagement.

As Employee Engagement is often seen as tactical task, is becomes the ownership of the HR department that has to fix the issue with Compensation & Benefits, Training and Recruitment peppered with some leadership training of middle managers. This is ignoring that most people, be it customers, employees and other stakeholders distrust and are demotivated by the current mainstream management philosophy.

Gary Hamel together with other prominent thinkers and business leaders has outlined 25 points that needs to be addressed in order for corporations to evolve to management 2.0:

Management 2.0

1: Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.

2: Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.

3: Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology, political science, and theology.

4: Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.

5: Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.

6: Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.

7: Redefine the work of leadership.  The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.

8: Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.

9: Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.

10: De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.

11: Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.

12: Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process in which share of voice is a function of insight, not power.

13: Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.

14: Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. We need to discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.

15: Create a democracy of information. Companies need information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.

16: Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than the past.

17: Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.

18: Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.

19: Depoliticize decision making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization and beyond.

20: Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or-choices. What’s  needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.

21: Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.

22: Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.

23: Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the firm’s boundaries and can render traditional power-based management tools ineffective.
New management tools are needed for building and shaping complex ecosystems.

24: Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice, and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.

25: Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.

This is undoubtedly a significant challenge for most corporations. However it is becoming obvious that the old models are not sustainable anymore. A new management model that creates engagement in all stakeholder groups can significantly disrupt existing large companies and markets.

Who dares to start?

What engages employees is not the same that attracts and retains them

The view of humans as resource often leads corporations to think that people are motivated in a uniform way and motivate the same in all circumstances. This leads to a narrow people and policy strategy centered on the classical functional areas of HR, ignoring that people are motivated differently according to their situation, their age, their tenure and what company they are working for.

The Gebauer Attraction, Retention and Engagement Model serves as a reminder to tailor people processes to the task at hand

It is also a reminder that the creation of Employee Engagement is not a low level process that can be automated in the HR department. Engagement needs to be designed into the fabric of the corporation, it purpose, the way it believes in people, the way the corporation plans, strategizes and communicates.

“Employee engagement is not about changing people, it is about changing corporations”

Employee engagement is not the responsibility of HR – it is the responsibility of the Corporation

Most companies intuitively know that satisfied employees, create satisfied customers and the result is a positive impact on financial performance. In management theory this is known as the service profit chain and starts with how the corporation treats its employees. This also used to be a key competitive differentiator – but not anymore. As all companies now have satisfaction ratings above 80%, satisfaction has become a qualifier for being able to compete – not an order winner.

Some companies have found out that engaged employees outperform non engaged employees significantly and have started to measure employee engagement.  That Employee Engagement matters was demonstrated in recent McKinsey study. It revealed that engaged white collar workers had: 16% better overall performance, 125% less burnout, 32% more commitment to their organisation and had 46% more satisfaction. Interestingly engagement also had a significant impact on blue collar workers: 27% overall better performance and 53% higher likelihood of positive career progression.

“More than 25% of US workforce is actively disengaged”

Often the results of measuring Employee Engagement are quit depressing as Gallup has found: In the US less than one third of employees are engaged and more than one quarter is actively disengaged. Senior management teams can choose to ignore the results or they can make it the responsibility of the HR function to go fix.

“31% of companies do not see Employee Engagement as an issue”

That management sees engagement as the role of HR was seen in the McKinsey study: 69% of companies surveyed identified Employee Engagement as a top priority for HR although only 43% had activities to measure and impact Employee Engagement. 31% of the companies did not see Employee Engagement as an issue.

 “Only 50% of HR’s activity is seen as value add by leaders”

Unfortunately employee engagement is not only the responsibility of an HR department, often designed to deal with operational and transactional issues rather than strategic. In the McKinsey study leaders only found half of HR’s activity to create value for the business. It is easy for the senior managers to blame HR forgetting that they themselves have created the boundaries and the rules for HR to operate under.

38% of HR professionals believe that their current Engagement actions will succeed

The view of management is shared by HR professionals themselves. Only 38% believed that their current actions in Employee Engagement would be successful.

A lot of HR activities have been designed to ensure a flow of people through the organisation with a focus on Analysis, Recruitment, Compensation, Training and Organisational Design. People seen as uniform objects responding to the same kind of motivational or demotivational activity is not something that creates engagement. Engagement is a very individual state for each employee. Engagement is also a state that connects to the corporation’s or department’s purpose and finally engagement is not only about what you do, but also how and why you do it.

The single most important driver of employee engagement has been identified as the behaviour and leadership skills of the Line Manager – not something that is fully within HR’s area of responsibility.

"Employee Engagement cannot be fixed with the current HR toolbox"

To significantly impact Employee Engagement it is necessary to either elevate it to top management level or to enable HR to participate at a strategic level. Employee Engagement cannot be fixed with the current HR toolbox.

The 4 Pillars of Employee Engagement

The world of management is still obsessed with the mechanistic view of employees as resources, something that can be acquired and exploited in the quests for profit. This has been covered up by improvement in working conditions, benefits and skill training programs and it has even made the executive wall: People are our greatest strength. Despite this apparent progress most corporations still treats people as a commodity. HR departments are tasked with getting the best resource, shaping the resource with skills training, keeping the resource with competitive compensation packages and finally getting rid of the resource if it does not live up to expectations.

The employee is seen as something that has certain characteristics that can be changed (skills) and something that cannot (personality and motivation). When something goes wrong the problem is assigned to the employee rather than the corporation and the personal improvement process starts often resulting in a termination and a search for more appropriate resource.

Assuming that employees can be “good” or “bad” and corporations are always “right” makes the life of management a lot easier but not necessarily more profitable. The task will become to locate engaged employees and attract them with appropriate reward.

Research has shown that although engagement is clearly a state of the employee, the creation of engagement is an activity that both depend of the employee and the corporation. Progressive and innovative corporations know that employee engagement is not the responsibility of the employee. This gives them an opportunity to create long term sustainable competitiveness even in mature industries interlocked in the Race to Zero (margin).

Employee engagement can be viewed as being founded on 4 different pillars:

Fairness: The concept of fairness as being important for employee engagement is not new. What is often forgotten is that fairness is completely subjective and changes over time. People don’t see their parents work contract as fair. For younger generations, the concept of fairness goes well beyond the psychological contract between the corporation and the employee – it involves the fairness towards all stakeholder groups.

Identity: Through the development of social psychology it has become apparent that people’s decisions are heavily influenced by social settings and what group people belong to. As work represents a significant part of most people’s lives they derive a lot of their identity from work. Great corporations understand this and create jobs and an organisation that individual are proud of being associated with.

Growth: Being appropriately challenged and given the opportunity to learn and grow is a key element in employee engagement. Is the corporation a place where mistakes are seen as learning opportunities or where they are punished? Is HR and their policies and procedures seen as enabling people or limiting them? Do employees have the opportunity to be promoted at appropriate points in their career or are they locked in their current position. Great corporations know that this is the responsibility of the corporation.

Purpose: The days of pure focus on shareholders are over. Money, profits and growth is not a purpose – it is an outcome of successfully pursuing a purpose. Being the very best “x” in the “x” industry is a very common vision, but not a powerful purpose. A powerful purpose is in its essence something that benefits many if not all stakeholders of the corporation – a purpose that benefits society and humanity. This might sound soft to hardnosed finance people but customers and employees do not get engaged by cost cutting and headcount reductions in a race to zero margin as most mature companies are engaged in.

Purpose is connected with creation of prosperity – the solution to human problems

Companies that believe in people and in their ability to create value for customers and society have the potential to rally all stakeholder groups around a strong purpose and will prosper as they will create engagement in all groups.

The essential role of capitalism is not allocation – it is value creation.

Research from Gallup has proven that companies with engaged employees creates engagement in the corporations stakeholders and as a result creates better financial results. Corporations with engaged employees outperform companies with lack of engagement:

-          22% better profitability

-          21% Higher Productivity

-          147% better earnings pr share

-          10% better customer ratings

-          41% reduction in quality defects

-          65% reduction in turnover

-          50% reduction in accidents

-          37% reduction in absenteeism

All companies have the phrase “People are our greatest strength” hanging at the walls unfortunately most miss the opportunity to create sustainable competitive advantage through employee engagement. It starts with believing the sign.

“One great employee equals three good employees”  Kip Tindall, CEO Container Store

Capitalism 1.0 is dead - Long live capitalism 2.0. How to compete in the new economy

Many mature industries are being disrupted by new agile companies that lack respect for the old and well established rules. The incumbent players have a very difficult time to analyse and respond with effective countermeasures against these disruptors. The disruptors often use new technology to their advantage: The cloud, mobile devices, social networking, sensors and big data are some of the tools. None of these technologies are really based on proprietary technology and could be deployed by the incumbents – this is not the real threat against them. The real threat to the established businesses from the new players is that they think differently about business and leadership.

To understand the difference it is necessary to review the current narrative that exists about the business world and capitalism. According to Edward Freeman, Professor at Darden Business School, the old business paradigm is based on a number of assumptions:

• Business is primarily about making money
• The only constituency that really matters is the shareholder
• There does not need to be a concern for the environment, because we live in a world of limitless resources
• Capitalism works because people are self-interested
• Given the opportunity, business people will cheat or cut corners.
• Business works because people are competitive and greedy.

These assumptions show themselves in a lot of both internal and external communication from large corporations – focus is on the shareholder. The assumptions are also confirmed when legislators make new laws –business and banks in particular has seen tighter regulations based on distrust from the regulators. This is not without merit – Quartz.com shows the top 9 banks have used more than 15B$ in litigation charges in just one quarter.  Dissatisfied customers are faced with endless pages of legal T&C’s, rules and inflexibility all designed to protect the shareholders. Employees are faced with HR departments not designed to enable people but to limit them with endless conduct manuals written by legal department. Also NGO’s has been battling with business based on a basic distrust in their intentions. 

Many new companies do not follow this logic – largely because it is based on the business logic of Generation X and the Baby Boomers. The new business logic is the logic of generation Y – Capitalism 2.0.

It might not be obvious to everybody but some visionary business leaders have identified the shift:

“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world”

Jack Welsh, exCEO GE

“Pure focus on shareholders alienates the employee, 

the customer the supplier and everybody else”

Kip Tindell, CEO The Container Store

“We’re not going into the three-month rat-races. We’re not working for our shareholders. We’re working for the consumer, 

we are focused and the shareholder gets rewarded.” 

Paul Polman, CEO Unilever

“We prefer to forgo revenue, rather than bring a product to market that does not delight customers. Doing so negatively affects the short term, but positively affects the long term. There are many other companies that do not follow this philosophy that may be a more attractive home for investor capital. 

Tesla is not going to change.”

Elon Musk, CEO Tesla

Driven by Generation Y, the paradigm of Capitalism 2.0 is based on value creation for all stakeholders (defined as groups that are affected by the actions of the corporation or that can affect it). In Edward Freeman’s definition:

• Business is primarily about purpose – revenue and profit follows
• Any business creates and destroys value for stakeholders – Leading a business involves getting these interests going in the same direction
• Capitalism works because we are complex creatures with many needs and wants. People can act in multiple ways: selfish, cooperative and altruistic. Incentives are important but so are values
• Most people tell the truth, keep their promises and act responsibly most of the time and we expect that.
• Business and capitalism is the greatest system of Social Corporation ever invented. Competition is important in free society as it ensures options but value creation is the engine of capitalism

No doubt capitalism 2.0 will require leaders to deal with much more complex and conflict interests but there is a lot to be gained. In leadership circles it is understood that satisfied employees and customers does not lead to financial results as it used to – satisfaction is not sufficient anymore. To create great results you need engaged employees creating engaged customers and that needs more than a good product and a service. 

“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first”

Simon Sinek

What is needed is a high level purpose that engages, followed by actions that demonstrate commitment to that purpose even when in trouble.

Ed Freeman outlines three main principles that need to be followed when creating business strategies according to the new paradigm:

• Interconnection – Because stakeholder interests go together over time, we need solutions that satisfy multiple stakeholders simultaneously.
• No Trade-offs – We try never to trade off the interests of one versus the other continuously over time
• The principle of friction: It is not just who agree with you - sometime your opponents are helping you create value. We want friction to go away but understanding friction can be a source of value. Critics are telling you something about your business. How can we use this critique to become better at what we do? Meet with critics ahead of time - you can improve before implementations.

Not trying to give the impression that this will be easy, Ed Freeman suggests that business leaders should utilise the only free resource available to them – creativity of their people. Involve many stakeholders and allow them to think and explore freely about value creation according to the principles and wonders might happen.

One of the fastest growing companies of the new economy is Facebook. Their commitment to Capitalism 2.0 is very visible in Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to the shareholders prior to their IPO:

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. 

It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and 

why we do the things we do” 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook

If your company is struggling with flat or declining revenue in mature markets that are being attacked by innovative disruptive start-ups, maybe it is time to rethink your purpose.

“When is now a good time”

Design your Engagement Survey so that it creates Engagement.

Although many companies has understood that having high scores in satisfaction surveys does not correlate strongly with customer satisfaction and financial results anymore, they are struggling to understand why and what to do about it. Some companies have found that having high employee engagement impacts customer engagement which in return does create positive financial returns for the corporation, but don’t understand how to increases employee engagement. The increasing importance of employee engagement and the resulting lower importance of employee satisfaction have its roots in the generational mixture of the corporation in question.

The new generation is very different from Baby boomers (born 1940-60) that was motivated by duty to the corporation they served and  generation X (1960-80) with a focus on individual return versus the sacrifice of serving the corporation. Generation Y (1980-2000) is only loyal to the corporation if it serves a higher purpose, listens to them and invests in them.

This is very important to understand when designing an engagement survey for a given corporation. The questions themselves can create or destroy engagement – make sure you ask the right questions.

To create additional engagement you should think about including questions about the future direction of the corporation – get the employees opinion of what is important. The fact that you ask will increase employee engagement and if you ask questions about the future purpose of the corporation it will go even higher. GenY is motivated by purpose in opposition to Baby boomers acceptance of a focus on shareholder and the more personal gain/sacrifice view of GenX  motivated through profit sharing .

If you accept that pay itself does not motivate (too little can demotivate however) this is an overview of what motivated the different generations:

	Motivated by	Willing to	Activity should   benefit	Employee measurement
Baby Boomers	Duty	Sacrifice	Shareholders	Retention
Gen X	Balance	Sacrifice for personal gain.	Shareholders, Management and Employees	Satisfaction Survey
Gen Y	Purpose	Engage in return for benefits to society	Society and environment before corporation	Engagement Survey

Conclusion – Imagine the unimaginable. Chapter 7 of "How Google Works"

Technology driven change is outpacing the ability to train people in new skills putting unprecedented pressure on companies and societies. The technology is disrupting most known mature industries. In the preindustrial era the upper-class household was the centre of economic activity replaced by the corporation after the industrial revolution. In the 21^st century the corporation is being replaced with The Platform. A platform does not have a one way relationship with is customers and suppliers. There is a lot more of give and take – a place to connect like amazon.

Companies have a choice. They can operate the way they have always operated and only use technology to optimise their current operations or they can view it as the powerful force of disruption that it really is. Technology and innovation should be high on the CEO’s agenda.

Innovation means change and for many companies status quo is a much more comfortable place to be. At a corporate level most innovation initially looks like very small opportunities to a large company – not worth the time and effort. At the individual level people within big companies aren’t rewarded for taking risks but are penalised for failure. The payoff is asymmetrical so the rational person opts for safety.

The very nature of big companies is to be risk adverse and attack big change like the body attacks an infection. Google itself did well in Web 1.0 that was based on viewing text and images and basic transactions. It also thrived in Web 2.0 where is became a gigantic shopping mall and a place where people could do all sorts of things including complex transactions but was itself disrupted by Web 3.0 - the social and mobile web.

The solution is to always ask yourself the hardest question. Understand what to do about the future, what you see for the business others may not see or sees and choose to ignore.

“I keep my attention on the questions I need to ask so that I can catch the issues of the future” Clayton Christensen.

CEO´s should not only focus on the core business but also on the future. Companies rarely fold because of operational issues but more often because of a technological disruption of their industry. The question is not to ask what will be true but what could be true.

Do customers love your products or are they locked in by other factors that might evaporate in the future? Do your decision making processes lead to the best decision or the most acceptable?

Governments would benefit of including support for the disruptive elements of business, but tend to do the opposite and defend the incumbents as they have power, money and many workers. Tesla did not only fight the incumbent automakers but also the government that tried to prevent Tesla to sell directly to consumers.

Google believe in the power of technology and its ability to make the world a better place. Most big problems are information problems that can be solved with enough data and the ability to crunch it.

Google believe the technological disruption is a gift even if it means that somebody someday would create a technology that eventually renders Google irrelevant. Some might find this chilling but Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg finds it inspiring.

Innovation - Create the primordial ooze. Chapter 6 of "How Google Works"

Google’s approach to innovation is different from that of Apple – focus is on being open and collaborating like the android ecosystem versus Apples closed IOS infrastructure. Even though there are competition and legal battles, Apple is not seen as the arch enemy and there are possibilities of cooperation.

Innovation is not giving people what they want – that is being responsive. An innovation has to offer both new functionality and surprise. An innovative product should not only be useful, it should be radically useful. It could also be many small incremental improvement steps that together makes a product like the search engine of Google radically better every year.

The Google [x] approach can be seen in diagram below

Google looks for the right context for innovation and prefers high growth areas with plenty of competitors – they are not looking for empty spaces.

Innovation is not something you can organise yourself into. You cannot tell people to be innovative – you can allow them to be innovative. It is not a process rather it is a lack of process. Google has a view of ideas that each compete for survival in a Darwinistic innovative environment.

Not only are people allowed to innovate – they are also encourage to be followers of innovative ideas as all successful ideas needs followership.

“Focus on the user and all else will follow” is also an important guidance in innovation. Many projects do not have a formal financial analysis as part of the decision process – if it benefits the user it will eventually turn into revenue. Some of the innovations Google has implemented has actually hurt revenue short term but the belief is that it benefits long term.

Google differentiate between users and customers and contrary to most companies they side with the user when there is a conflict between the two.

“You aren’t thinking big enough” or “think 10x” are classical Google statements trying to encourage engineers not to limit themselves when thinking and innovating. Google are trying to improve things 10x not 10%. This creates huge ambitious projects that attracts great people and is too important to fail. Interestingly that increases it success rate versus small projects that does not affect the corporation’s survival. Apple is a classic example – they could not afford to have the iPhone fail as they only had few very important product lines – any problems affect survival and that gets maximum attention.

Although Google funds and protects risky projects they also limit resources available as they believe this limitation actually increases creativity. In Marissa Meyer’s words: “Creativity loves constraints”.

Not stigmatising failure in Google is important – to innovate you need to fail well . Many quotes exemplify this philosophy:

“If you are thinking big enough, it is difficult to fail completely” Larry Page

“It helps to see failure as a road, not a wall” Scott Adams

"If everybody has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing" M. Gladwell

“Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement” Mulla Nasrudin

At the same time Google does not believe in sunk cost and are ready and willing to kill projects without killing the participants – also failed projects are a path to promotion.

“When achieving success requires multiple miracles in a row, it is probably time to call it a day." Regina Dugan & Kaigham Gabriel

Communications - Be a damn good router. Chapter 5 of "How Google Works"

Google does not limit information based on seniority, it believes in sharing information on all levels. A quarterly briefing of the board was initiated by Eric Schmidt involving all areas of Google and containing a lot of proprietary information. This gets shared with all employees in a presentation after the board briefing. Everything is shared except if it is prohibited by law – which is not the same as the red marker of death lawyers use for anything containing a risk. As the material is not only share with the board but with the entire company, people work hard to make the material great.

So far leaking has not been a problem – “We trust our employees with all sorts of vital information and they honor that trust”.

People post their personal strategic goals in a document called OKR – Objectives and Key Results.  This is not a description of role or title, but what a person cares about and is working on. The top level shares and reviews their own performance against the OKRs and discusses the ambitious goals they did not achieve. Employees are expected to create their own OKRs in light of this with the company’s best interest in mind.

Google’s leadership style is question based: “The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them” John Seely Brown Xerox. Rather than managing, Eric Schmidt would regularly ask questions of the executives and expect them to be on top of the details. People are also expected to understand the big picture – not just the details.

It is important to get bad news out in the open. Google does not punish the miner that brings the dead canary up into the light. Googlers are expected to ask tough questions and a voting system ensures the toughest questions climb to the top of the list and gets answered. When bad news is delivered it is important that it is not sugar coated and that you don’t have all of the answers yet. "If everything seems under control, you are just not going fast enough" Mario Andretti.

Google’s transparency approach: Climb Confess and Comply. This is an analogy for Pilot errors. The first thing a pilot need to do is to climb to get out of danger. Then tell the tower about the mistake and lastly comply with the towers advice on how to do better.

Instead of staff meetings that reinforces the functional boxing of people Google encourages people to present in a more holistic and interesting way – like trip reports or what I learned in my vacation. These kinds of presentations often are more relevant to the business issues at hand than the functional update.

Communication should reinforce, be effective, be fun, be inspirational, authentic, directed at the right people use the right media and finally be true.

In 1:1 meetings it is important that both the leader and the employee bring their top 5 issues to discuss. Hopefully there is an overlap - if not there is a bigger issue at hand. 4 main topics should be discussed: Performance, Relationships Leadership and innovation (Best practices).

Communication with partners has to be handled diplomatic. Many of Google’s partnerships are also competitive in other areas and needs a diplomatic approach. Differences in objectives are fine and should be acknowledged. The communication should be pragmatic rather than ideological and the relationship should be based on the partner’s actions.

If you lose the Millennials – you lose!

Corporations with long tenure in mature industries often operate based on a number of principles that is reasonably stable. The most important one is that the future success of the corporation is based on the same principles as the historic success. The leads to an operating principle focusing on continuous improvement: Evolution over revolution or small incremental changes to what was done last year. The model is also based on a view of the market as a place with stable boundaries and actors that are quite similar and unchanging - a place of competition.With the rise of first the internet and later the revolution of social networks, unlimited power of the cloud and the rapid move to mobile technologies, no industry is immune to disruptive changes.It is well known that the disruption can come from a change in product offerings, like the iPhone changed the mobile industry. It can also come from outside the market boundaries like Google’s absorption of advertising budgets or it can be a disruption of the supply chain the way Blockbuster died from Netflix competition. Most mature companies are aware that they need to keep an eye on changes in the market structure, customer preferences.
There is however a significant change underway that will fundamentally change the way corporations has to operate in order to succeed independent of what industry or market they operate in. The rise of the Millennials or generation Y as people born in the 1980 -2000 time span has been categorised. This is not a surprise to the marketing departments of consumer based corporations – they know Millennials are different customers to the prior generations (generation x and baby boomers) and work hard to position offerings attractive to them.
What seems to come as a surprise is that Millennials are also becoming a significant factor as employees. 

Before 2020 Millenials and younger generations  will become the dominant part of the labour market everywhere, and most of them will work in an environment designed by generation X for generation X. This is likely to fail, just ask your marketing department.

Beyond.com survey, 2013

A survey done by beyond.com shows that the gap between Millennials perception of themselves and that of HR professionals are very different, This indicates the expectations of the corporations based on Gen X thinking and that of Millennial employees are very different – a recipe for disaster.

The problem has still not become visible as very few corporations has been in talent acquisition mode since the financial crisis but as Gen X moves towards retirement it will become an issue

It is easy to point fingers at HR and HR policies and blame them for not adapting to attract and retain the new employees but the problem goes a lot deeper. Millenials don’t see work as a chore like the baby boomers and they don’t see it as means to an enjoyable life outside work like generation x. They are hard workers but not motivated the same way as earlier generations.  Millennials want freedom, trust, support, fun and they need a higher level purpose to really engage. Corporations need to develop a purpose above and beyond profit and revenue. To attract and keep Millenials, it is imperative to create an environment of personal growth, equality, Social/Environmental responsibility, freedom and team spirit.

Are your company’s policies designed to enable employees or limit them?

This might sound alien to companies firmly based in command and control thinking but it is already being implemented by successful companies in the new economy. Google, Amazon, Netflix, Tesla and similar companies are ahead and design their people policies very different.

You are not only competing with these companies for the consumer

 You are also competing with them for the employees.