There were three principle speakers the first morning of the World Business Forum - Bill George, Bill Conraty, and Patrick Lencioni, and they perfectly illustrate the generation-gap problem that afflicts discussions of management and technology these days.
The consensus around the Bloggers Hub was that Lencioni gave by far the best presentation, as a stand-up presenter. George had good material, although he didn't have the energy or style that Lencioni had. But Conraty was not so good, either in terms of style (a somewhat plain and boring PPT presentation) or substance (he seemed to miss the ball on CEO pay and on social media, for instance).
And if there's a central unifying theme from this morning, all three speakers do think that the predilection of businesses to focus on short-term results rather than on long-term value is crippling innovation, productivity, and growth, and will prove to be a competitive weakness for those companies that cannot shake it off. This, of course, is music to Martha's and my ears, because we've been writing about (and ranting about) what we call the "crisis of short-termism" for years now, at least since we published Return on Customer in 2005. The subtitle of our 2008 book, Rules to Break & Laws to Follow, in fact, is "How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism." And we spend a lot of time inside this book drawing out the same basic lessons that George and Lencioni emphasized this morning.
We even have a whole chapter on "recovering lost trust," in which we tell the same story about Jet Blue's heroic post-ice-storm actions that Bill George told us. What we didn't know (and I only learned from Bill last night) was that David Neeleman, Jet Blue's founder and CEO at the time of the ice storm service disaster, apparently lost his job as CEO partly on account of some members of the company's board thinking he had admitted too much fault with his apologies, making the airline look bad. Boy oh boy, talk about a generation problem! Whoever that board member was, I will absolutely guarantee it was a male, and over 50 years old - probably over 60, actually.
This "generation gap" problem was very evident in the differences between these three WBF speakers. Conraty was the older, uninformed generation of big companies, focused on execution primarily, not too sensitive to the underlying issues of CEO pay inequity, and seemingly oblivious to the implications of social media in our economy and the workplace. George is an older guy but very open-minded, focused on understanding, embracing, and "trying out" new things like social media, rather than simply rejecting these unconventional ideas as too untried. I think Bill Conraty must be a great CEO (or HSM wouldn't have invited him to speak), but my guess is he's exactly the kind of executive who would have held David Neeleman accountable for being too forthcoming with customers and giving the firm a PR black eye. I hope I'm not being too harsh on Conraty here. It's very possible (likely, in fact) that he's a heck of a lot better CEO than he is a presenter, per se.
Paul and Don,
There is one thing missing from this discussion: it is not that there is 1 or 100 people tweeting from the "wrong" generation, or that we try to understand the new model and embrace it -- it is a generational aspect. Rather than 100 Gen X tweeting (or whatever the number) and trying to see how they can adapt their life learning to it, there are 96 MM Gen Y people that have it inbred in their being. So where Don (or anyone else in Gen X) will stick out in the Gen Y crowd, the opposite will be true if you look at non-tweeting (or socially-active rather) Gen X in a Gen Y group.
From my research, the hardest thing that will happen with Gen Y entering work force and consumer forces in more numbers is going to be an overwhelming of the systems that were not designed to handle that large a number of people -- nor to interact in the manner than "they" expect.
This is what American companies must solve in the next 3-5 years: not whether Twitter works or not, but rather how to create the infrastructure to support it across the organization.
Thanks, Paul, you are so kind! But I really do think of it as a mind set, not a physical age gap, per se. I should clarify that. I think Bill George, for instance, is trying to jump that gap also.
My personal view is you're as young as you feel. This means when you begin to block out youthful ideas, you'll be aging yourself.
The thing I'm most involved with, however, is the lesson that all this has for businesses, making decisions and policy, trying to come up with new ideas, connect with customers, and beat their competitors. For that, you can't leave the youthful perspective on the table just because the folks in charge are all oldsters and not interested in it.
Is it really a generation gap or a mind-set gap. Don - you have a blog, you are twittering (more and more I might add - tough to keep up) - have done some video on youtube, etc. You are not Gen Y - you are Gen Y mindset however.
I'm thinking that our obsession with age as a determining factor of open-mindedness is become less and less of an issue as some of us late Gen X - early Boomers latch onto and in some cases - pioneer with new tech and new communication options.
Just my little rant on the generation issue... great post.