The Problem With Age Bias & Generations

If you are leading individuals from multiple "generations", you are probably categorizing them incorrectly, and here is why this is bad for you and your business.

There are 78 million pages returned from a Google search for “leading generations”. Almost 5000 books are available on Amazon.com around leading generations, and in the scholarly realm a search across a few academic databases returned almost three million peer-reviewed articles, dissertations and journal entries all on “leading generations”.

I am going to go out on a limb and estimate that we have approximately half a billion pages written on leading generations. Most of this around the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y and the Millennial Generation.

Here is the problem; most of these half a billion pages categorize humans into generations based on when they were born. The generations are most times described as seen in the image below. 

This image is the courtesy of The Atlantic in an article titled “Here Is When Each Generation Begins and Ends, According to Facts”.

We have approximately half a billion pages written on leading generations.

Seems rational right, lets figure out what motivates these generations, what types of followers are they, what type of leadership theory works best for each generation, and what types of leaders would result form each generation.

Well, no.

As I continue to be a nerd and read hundreds of those half a billion pages in preparation for my dissertation, a once fuzzy hunch of mine, has crystalized into a design principle I now use as modus operand.

Belonging to a generation has nothing to do with when you were born.

The theory of generations has been historically researched under two branches of views. Familial and cohort views. Familial generations are those described as “kids of the previous generation”. This is mostly what is in the diagram above. Cohort generations are people regardless of their age that have affinity to a modality or memory of a set of shared experiences. The Great Depression, The Industrial Revolution, The Internet, 9/11, and the invention of the iPhone.

Grand parents, parents, and children can all be in the same cohort generation; but obviously from different familial generations.

This is a key change in thinking, and starts to create questions challenging the chart above as an oversimplification of a single human, and can largely misinform leadership in the private and public sector.

Here is why I wrote this blog.

Recognizing that using cohort association to identify someone’s generation is good, but realizing that a single human can change from one generation to another over time is really where the kicker is.

Principal Analyst, Alan Lepofsky from Constellation Research will tell you that there are no age boundaries when it comes to enterprise social. He has seen as many of the young reject social as many of the old embrace it.

On Alan’s position, and in tandem with my research I have started to apply a new set of lenses to an individual when I think about what “generation” they may be in, and then how to lead them appropriately.

I know many folks my age who have shorter attentions span than most from the Facebook generation.

I know many folks over 55 that are more social and digital than my 16-year-old nephew. And I know many teenagers who study and read the classics more than my uncles and aunts ever do or did. I know many folks my age who have shorter attentions span than most from the Facebook generation, and I know many folks over 60 who are more entrepreneurial than any 21-year-old currently driving to Silicon Valley with a Mac Air and some hoodies in a Subaru.

So what is a leader to do?

1. Understand an individual’s digital competency.
2. Understand how an individual sees entrepreneurial activity.
3. Understand how he or she sees sharing and collaboration.
4. Study how they view rapid iteration.
5. Understand how they see the role of a leader, servant, participative, or transformational.

Then, and only then put them into a generation, and regardless of their age (or gender) lead.

I write as a labor of love, in exchange I ask that you share this writing if you think others may find value,

-Richie

Why Are Brands Anonymous?

The Future of Enterprise Security - Constellation Urges Chief Information Security Officers to Pivot to Strategy

The rise of digital presents an opportunity for the Chief Information Security Officer to move from a purely defensive position to one which uses the organization's information to act strategically and drive business value. 

Today Constellation Research published Strategic Opportunities for the Chief Information Security Officer in a Digital Age, a report highlighting the potential for security officers to utilize an organization’s information as a competitive asset.

Organizations tend to utilize the security department in a purely defensive capacity. However, in the digital age, an organization’s internally and externally collected information are valuable data sources. Security Officers archive, protect, and maintain the quality of an organization’s information, putting them in a unique position to implement strategic, information-driven business initiatives. 

This report describes the evolution of the security department as “the department of no” to a business unit that utilizes a company’s information to create a strategic advantage.

“For as long as we've had a distinct information security profession, it has been said that security needs to be a "business enabler". The real value of information lies not so much in the data itself as in its qualities. The important latent skill I want to draw out for CISOs is their practiced ability to deal with the qualities of data” says report author and Principal Analyst, Steve Wilson.  “To bring greater value to the business, CISOs can start thinking about the broader pedigree of data and not merely its security qualities. They should spread their wings beyond C-I-A, to evaluate all sorts of extra dimensions, like completeness, reliability, originality, currency, privacy, and regulatory compliance.”

Key features of this report:

• Career advice for Chief Information Security Officers
• The future of Enterprise Security
• Guide for CIOs/CISOs to utilize information for competitive advantage
• Table for collecting and archiving an organization’s information

Salesforce Unveils Next Generation Social Studio

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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If you have been wondering what Salesforce has been up to, they have unveiled their next generation social studio, which is now fully integrated into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It’s got an interesting twist in that it includes next generation social listening, social customer service for service teams and new social lead engagement for sales teams. It seems that the world is finally getting that from the customer’s point of view, that they are not talking to Sales, or Marketing or Customer Service — the customer is talking or interacting or engaging with a company. And to have all of that contained in one application or platform and make the customer information available for all of the various functional departments seems like the best way to make customers feel hear and listened to.

@drnatalie

VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Marketing, Sales and Customer Service by Delivering Customer Experiences.

Quips: Digital Transformation - Defining The Fundamental Elements For Digital CXOs

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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Before The Hype Hits A Crescendo, Let’s Lock Down The Basic Elements of Digital Transformation

The stage is set for Digital Transformation to be one of the hottest trends for 2015.  Market leaders and early adopters have already embraced the movement.  Yet, massive hype is coming soon as digital transformation hits mainstream awareness by late 2015.  While digital may be applied as an adjective to every movement or trend, Constellation defines digital transformation as the methodology in which organizations transform and create new business models and culture with digital technologies.

“Digital Transformation is the methodology in which organizations transform and create new business models and culture with digital technologies”

To elaborate, transformation arises when organizations apply design thinking to craft new experiences and outcomes.  As organizations move from selling products and services to keeping brand promises, the digital era requires a high degree of trust and transparency that support and augment brand authenticity.  Digital technologies provide rich data sets which can be analyzed to surface up patterns of insight.  That insight enables organization to easily deliver on mass personalization at scale (i.e. segment of one) by improving contextual relevancy.  Contextual relevancy (i.e. right time relevancy) built on roles, relationships, business process, location, time, and sentiment provide a foundation to create intention driven experiences and outcomes.  Success in digital transformation requires organizations to build a culture that supports a digital DNA and development of digital artisans who can navigate between the right brain and left brain world.  The result is the organization’s capacity to create new business models or augment existing business models that disrupt the status quo; and sense and respond in real-time to market shifts among key stakeholders.

Your POV.

Ready to begin your digital transformation? Still looking for a CDO? Want to jump start your digital business efforts? Let us know how you are getting there and what first steps have worked.  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

Resources

The post Quips: Digital Transformation – Defining The Fundamental Elements For Digital CXOs appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

IOT; Its not about the millions of Devices, its about the Business Value delivered

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Andy Mulholland is Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on cloud business models. Formerly the Global Chief Technology Officer for the Capgemini Group from 2001 to 2011, Mulholland successfully led the organization through a period of mass disruption. Mulholland brings this experience to Constellation’s clients seeking to understand how Digital Business models will be built and deployed in conjunction with existing IT systems. Coverage Areas Consumerization of IT & The New C-Suite: BYOD, Internet of Things, IoT, technology and business use Previous experience: Mulholland co authored four major books that chronicled the change and its impact on Enterprises starting in 2006 with the well-recognised book ‘Mashup Corporations’ with Chris Thomas of Intel. This was followed in…...

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Do we truly understand the economic value that the Internet of Things is able to provide as an Environment as well as to a specific Business Activity? It’s pretty amazing to think what will probably be connected with the resulting amount of data made available, but that’s not a Business argument for making use of the Internet of Things. In fact Business value is created by the context specific, not from the volume… normally. BUT around the late 80s pretty similar arguments were being made about the lack of a Business case for Local Area Network connectivity, and the deployment of email.  Ubiquitous, as in everyone being connected and on email, turned out to play a substantial part in why connect, or why adopt email argument. If everyone else works this way then you, or your Enterprise cant survive dis connected. So what’s happening this time to the Internet of Things, or IOT?

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

There has to be a business model for an Enterprise to invest in, and use, the Internet of Things, and that in turn should be driving the Business approach to the Internet of Things, rather than the technology capability.

In respect of Network connectivity then most people know something about Metcalf’s Law that calculates value by the number of connections that in the 1980’s networking boom became a fair justification for email. More recently Reed’s Law updated Metcalf’s law in the context of Social Networking, introducing limitations to the apparent unlimited increase in value through increasing connections that Metcalf proposed. Reed suggesting the people have personal limits to the operational capability to interact with more than certain numbers of ‘friends’ and in fact the value of a network is finite.

Unfortunately neither of these laws fits an economic model that sees vast numbers of interconnected ‘things’ able to publish their data to the open networked architecture of the Internet, particularly based on Machine to Machine, M2M, interactions.

The best answer for this is the very little known Beckstrom’s Law that aims to answer the economic question of ‘how valuable is a Network’ and if that Network is of Devices and Machines transacting. Beckstrom’s Law is under pinned by a complex theorem, and detailed set of academic papers so follow the link to  Wikipedia as a useful starting place.

In summary Beckstrom’s Law states; "The value of a network equals the net value added to each user’s transactions conducted through that network, summed over all users."

Perhaps herein lies the answer to quantifying at least some parts of the difficult issue of investing in Internet of Things in order to acquire seemly useful capabilities. A difficult proposition without any understanding of exactly how to value, or quantify, returns.  Actually there are two distinctive and different paths for investment; In the first is the broad investment necessary to get a ticket to the game of Digital Business where to participate demands a set of capabilities, call it your Digital Business Infrastructure as its more than a traditional Technology definition of the term Infrastructure. The second ideally will be occurring in parallel, but is more likely for many enterprises to have occurred first. To select to invest against specific business opportunities with a narrow focus on what is deployed suiting only the immediate opportunity.

There is nothing wrong with this; it’s just the business metrics are by necessity narrow and linked to obvious traditional measurements of Revenues, etc. and, the short term can lose sight of the longer term with expensive ramifications as scaling up occurs. A previous blog ‘Digital Business in Smart Cities using the Internet of Things’ used Building Management as an excellent example of focused investment coupled with understanding the bigger issues.

In addition a further blog, ‘Digital Business; mastering new financial controls’, addressed the topic of how to achieve a better and wider understanding of new cost allocations versus the revenues/margins for a Digital Business. But that’s deliberately focusing down into the very necessary aspect of good operational management. Together these blogs give a reasonable picture of how to tackle the first path of identified and focused investment for a specific opportunity, but the case for the second path towards bigger picture of Business Infrastructure investment in the Internet of Things is more difficult.

The basis of The Internet of Things, (IoT) is of big picture created by millions of Devices contributing value. It will be necessary to invest in your own Enterprises IoT devices, as well as using the data from other Enterprise IoT devices. Something new is needed to make sense of what and where value is being created from this amazing new and complex environment.

There is a lot of focus on the use of Big Data and turning it into Smart Data, again see a previous blog ‘The Internet of Things requires Big Data to be Turned upside down into Smart Data’, but what about measuring the sources and the transactional value they contribute? Okay that’s about Machine to Machine, M2M, but then so is the Internet of Things, IoT! There is nothing in Beckstrom’s Law and its Theorem that requires ‘the user’ to actually be a person, in fact its arguable that it applies equally well to Internet of Things devices!

The American Marketing Association updated its definition of Marketing in 2013 to be very much more reflective of the Technology based World of today to read as follows; ‘Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large’. That seems to reflect the realities of Digital Business with its massively interconnected Internet based World pretty well, and to be inclusive of Internet of Things devices too.

In conclusion it would seem that Marketing for a Digital Business is going to have to include assessing data obtained from choosing, and using, the right Internet of Things devices. There is a definite need for some serious thought on how the conjunction of new ‘digital’ technologies is going to address this. Better mathematical algorithms such as Beckstrom’s Law are highly important new tools to become aware of and use. Business Value is usually created by Transactions so lets start measuring this!

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)