Millennials Seeking Purpose

The Promise of a Pencil – How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change - Adam Braun (Scribner)

One of the biggest challenges facing experienced leaders and managers is to bring the necessary skillsets to bare to properly develop and lead millennial generation employees. Millenials bring not only a unique set of challenges to the work environment given their everybody gets a trophy upbringing and helicopter parents, but also their desire to affect lasting change on the world they live in.

While The Promise of a Pencil – How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change, by Adam Braun is the perfect guidebook for millenials to follow their dreams, but also a solid tools for those leaders and managers who are facing that leadership challenge.

Braun is the founder of the education organization Pencils of Promise, that was founded with $25 and has since gone on to develop and build a development model to tackle worldwide education issues and in the process build 200 schools. Braun’s is a unique story; a new to the fold business advisor for Bain Capital who chucked all of the capital gain and lifestyle associated with the position based on an overwhelming desire to pursue and worthwhile work.

Each chapter of the book details a lesson that Braun learned and brought to the pursuit of his dream. This makes for an ideal leadership toolkit for mentoring and developing millenials and designing a leadership process that will meet not only your needs, but their needs as well.

Business, Right to the Point.

The Executive Checklist – A Guide for Setting Direction and Managing Change – James M. Kerr (Palgrave)

There are literally hundreds of business books that bring a singular focus to one segment of a business or another. Many deliver an in depth approach to tackling those segmented problems, issues and strategies, but I find that the most useful are those that offer up action steps that are easy to put into play.

Author and management consultant James Kerr brings a broad base of experience in a variety of industry sectors. He applies that broad base of knowledge to a variety of business approaches to change management in his new book The Executive Checklist – A Guide for Setting Direction and Managing Change.

During my career I have worked in a variety of industries including entertainment, broadcasting, manufacturing, sports, and healthcare and no matter what the sector and no matter what the project, I have seen that a large percentage of problem solving and change management really boils down to effective communications. Many of the strategies and tactics that Kerr outlines in book offer guidance to effectively communicate about goals and process.

The checklist approach that Kerr lays out, prove to be an effective roadmap that can be applied and adapted to any business or project at any stage of development, be it a start up, a company looking at transformational change or a complete overhaul. The Executive Checklist is not an in depth, here’s what you should do book, but offers a structural framework to apply to your project and for you build upon. It proves to be a very effective tool for any leaders toolbox.  

Get To the Point

Brief – Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less – Joseph McCormack (Wiley)

The upfront no brainer on this one is that any one in business is being blasted on a daily basis with a fire hose of information; we are literally being inundated with e-mails, text messages, reports, updates, white papers, mounds and mountains of information.

While we have newer and better tools than ever before for carrying out business, trying to have or make an impact is getting harder and harder in the face of this overload. Author Joseph McCormack makes the solid business case that it’s not just what you say, but how you say it that improve the impact of your information.

In Brief – Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less McCormack offers up workable solutions and tactics that you can put to use today for a lean communications strategy. Often times communicating with clarity and brevity comes done to discipline and choice; why offer up 2500 words when a few hundred focused and impactful words can have a better impact with an information drenched executive? Part of your message can certainly be the offer to serve up more detail only if needed.

McCormack has devised a straightforward approach to utilizing the skills he offers, by breaking the book down into easy to digest and use bites. The layout makes it easy to pick and choose the sections that apply to your needs in a plug and play approach.

Really Move the Ball Forward

Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change – Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon (Simon & Schuster)

Call me old school, but I turn off my cell phones during meetings…both of them. There’s nothing I find more annoying than colleagues and business associates who place their phones down on the table only to have them vibrate spasmodically in circles or chirp some ridiculous ring tone in the middle of a thought or who can’t seem to make it through the meeting without crooking their neck down to check for the latest bit of junk email.

So it wasn’t a surprise that my phones started to sound off immediately when I turned them back on following a particularly grueling series of back to back meetings. One message from my son required an immediate response, so I apologized for the delay by mentioning that I was in meetings; to which he replied, “you’re always in meetings…how do you ever get anything done?” 

Clearly my offspring’s time spent recently earning a Penn State, Business Management degree did not go wasted; the lad clearly gets it. Business meetings, webinar broadcasts, and training sessions have become a huge time suck that often produce less than stellar results and act as roadblocks to actually getting things done.

Authors Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon are hoping to change the conversation and the way we get things done with their new book; Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change. Ertel and Solomon offer up workable solutions that can be implemented quickly to move an organization forward quickly by breaking down silos, engendering collaboration and deliver results.

I applied the action steps that Ertel and Solomon spell out in the book to look back at a recent small team project that I helped to lead that had a truly impactful result on customer service. Without realizing it I had hit on utilizing strategic conversations with the small group that I was later able to roll out to the wider organization by working in concentric circles and expanding the scope and the impact the group had created.

The “Starter Kit” that is included in the book is a true road map to accelerating real change that can be adapted and applied to any business model.

 

Rage With The Machines

The Second Machine Age – Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies – Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (W W Norton Books)

Authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, a pair of MIT business technology gurus offer up interesting perspectives on how technology impacts not only our lives, but also the economics of it all in The Second Machine Age – Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.

The pair make the case that not only is there the tangible impact of the improvements on our lives that technological advancements in many fields have brought us, but also that technology has elevated the level of even the those at the lowest end of the economic scale.

While politicians and many economists have argued that the widening spread between the haves and the have-nots is somehow a fatal flaw of capitalism, Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit the theory of “the bounty” that technology has delivered to us all in that “spread.” They also offer up some suggestions for policy makers to address some of the problems created in society by the rapid advancement of technologies as we prepare for what will continue to be an evolving workforce, that we are merely in the early stages of currently.

One problem that the authors do not address is the valuation of many of the technological “advancements” that we have seen rapidly create new millionaires and billionaires while not really creating much in the way of new value. Websites and apps that allegedly “improve” our lives, really don’t have the same impact as say the creation of the automobile or the refrigerator from a prior machine age. We aren’t taking base raw materials and creating something of greater value with the advent of Facebook; where rather than creating an increased value, we have further diluted a static pool of dollars. The size of the pie hasn’t increased, there are just more people looking for a slice and it’s only natural that some will take a larger hunk while others are left with crumbs.