Life-Sized Business Home

People who quit their jobs with flair are the new folk heroes. The overwhelming public support for both the JetBlue flight attendant and the young woman (Jenny with no last name) who supposedly quit her brokerage job with a series of bold messages on a dry-erase board is a not-to-be-ignored sign that the wind is beginning to shift direction.

A year ago, the employee trend was to put up with anything,  just to keep a job. Companies were undergoing massive layoffs, freezing salary increases and eliminating employer funding of 401(k)s, all with little complaint from the employees who managed to remain on the payroll. The CEO of a global consumer goods company we were pitching, when asked if he were concerned about low employee morale, replied, “Where else are they going to work?”

They’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. It doesn’t matter what made airline attendant Steven Slater crack or whether Jenny the HOPA was a hoax. What’s noteworthy is the way the American public has responded with such fervor.

This is a signal to the corporate employers who are paying attention. The economy will improve, sooner or later. Meanwhile, Boomers are retiring, and the Gen X generation following on their heels is not large enough to fill all the positions they’ll leave behind. It won’t be long until the tables are turned in the workplace and the jobs outnumber the people available to fill them.

The companies that will win star talent in the coming competition will be the ones able to create high employee engagement. Does your company have a clear vision at the top? Is that vision communicated to and embraced by employees? Do you have a strong corporate culture that makes the company a good place to work? Have you actually managed to turn rank-and-file employees into brand ambassadors? Otherwise, you’ll need to keep a close eye on those emergency chutes. Not to mention the beer.

I looked up one day and realized I was following over 1,500 people on Twitter. And I could count the ones I actually knew on two hands.

There’s no logical explanation for most of them. Why would I be following the guy called something like Wisconsinjobs? Or so many people in India? Or some very glamorous Parisian woman who only tweets in French?

So I decided to start fresh. I set out to unfollow every single person I didn’t know or have some real interest in following. Nobody in my office could figure out a way to mass delete on Twitter (if you know how, please do tell). So I started plugging away at them, one by one. The first day I deleted 500, mostly while I was on the phone. I went home with a headache. The next day I deleted 300. Again, the headache. So I turned the project and my twitter password over to my assistant Amanda, who knocked out the last 800 for me.

The next step was to decide who I did want to follow. When I first started using Twitter, not many of my friends or business contacts were on it. The great majority of the people I knew who did use it didn’t know what they were supposed to use it for. Most of the people out there tweeting regularly seem to think the point of Twitter is endless and shameless self promotion. But my friend Aliza Sherman, who was probably one of the very first people to tweet in the history of tweeting, says Twitter is a conversation.

What kind of conversations did I want to have on Twitter? More to the point, what did I want Twitter to do for me? To my mind, Facebook is for keeping up with friends far and wide. LinkedIn is how I stay connected with business acquaintances. But any nerdball knows you don’t post random day-to-day updates on LinkedIn. That, I decided, would be a good use of Twitter. I’d love to read 140-character comments from my LinkedIn brethren.

Twitter very helpfully provides an easy way to find which of your LinkedIn contacts are on Twitter. Just click on Find People and then on Find Friends and you can scan your list of contacts in LinkedIn or the major email services. Click the ones you want to follow and you’ve got yourself a whole new bunch of old friends on Twitter. Suddenly, Twitter looks like fun again.

Could the iPad be the presentation tool your business needs? That’s what I’m wondering every time I find myself in a client’s conference room with the Tribe team racing to set up the projector for our presentation.

Setting up the projector feels a little too much like a scene out of Apollo 13, where the astronauts are struggling to repair a sensor malfunction. One person is crawling under the table to reach the electrical outlet and another is connecting cables and cords as fast as humanly possible, while the rest of us stand around urging them to hurry. Then we complain about the projected image looking so washed out and we adjust a few things, none of which ever work.

Lately, I find myself spending that pre-meeting time mentally calculating how much it would cost for enough iPads to go around. I imagine how crisp and rich our presentations would look on the iPad, and how satisfying it would be to have clients follow along with a finger swipe to move to the next screen.

We could walk into a meeting ready to begin instead of making our clients wait around for us to hook up the technology. We could spend those initial minutes chatting about the weather instead of digging around for extension cords. We could focus on the business at hand instead of worrying about whether the projector will work. It sounds like a much more relaxed way to start a meeting.

Ellen Madill, the founder of Home Stages in New Jersey, is also considering an iPad. Her company consults with clients on cosmetic updates and simple changes to make their homes sell faster and for money. With the iPad, she could sit down with her clients on the couch or at their kitchen table and take them through her sales presentation, and then also upload photos of their rooms and show them how she might rearrange furniture or what paint colors she would recommend. Sure, she could do pretty much the same thing on her laptop, but the iPad would make it a lot more fun.

The best business presentation use of the iPad I’ve seen is by Harry Wood, a leading Atlanta hair stylist. Harry uses his iPad to show clients his portfolio. Touch on the  ”Long and Straight” button, for instance, and you can swipe your way through a dozen photos of gorgeous long and straight looks. He sometimes uses the iPad to show clients videos of his television appearances or his how-to videos on YouTube. Now he’s added an app from People magazine that allows him to instantly pull up photos of celebrity hairstyles. You say you want to look like Charlize Theron? Harry will swipe you through a series of photos with Charlize wearing her hair different ways, asking, “Which of her looks?” You want hair like Brad Pitt? He’ll pull up another series of photos and ask, “From what movie?”

Maybe the iPad is just the latest cool new thing. Maybe it’s no more useful in business than any of the tools we already use, from laptops to cell phones to projectors. Perhaps something else even cooler will replace it soon.

But I’m thinking it could help us serve our clients better, and that’s a product benefit that never becomes outdated. Although I can see us now, walking into a meeting with six iPads, worried that seven people might show up. Impressive as it is, even the iPad can’t completely eliminate that pre-meeting stress.

The thing about being the CEO, or any level of top management, is that it’s very difficult to know what your people really think. Lately, I’ve noticed high-level executives in large public companies speaking with confidence about how a certain program or change was going over.

In one case, an exec involved in communicating a major organizational transformation talked about how excited people in the company were about this new vision. When we interviewed employees outside the exec’s inner circle at that Fortune 100 company, they seemed surprisingly in the dark about the transformation plan and concerned that there may not be a focused vision guiding decisions at the top.

In another example, the senior VP of HR was commenting on a recent decision to freeze the company’s retirement benefits. “We really didn’t hear anything negative about it,” he said. Considering the strong culture of that company, it’s certainly possible that they did such a good job at communicating the reasons for that difficult decision, and the big-picture, long-range employee benefits of maintaining the company’s financial soundness, that the change was easily accepted. But I think it’s more likely that employees are reluctant to complain to management when they’re surrounded by layoffs, if not at their company then at those of their family, friends and neighbors. It’s also likely that the people around that SVP act as a buffer to protect him from negative feedback, in a well-meaning version of the emperor’s clothes.

I remember a CEO commenting once about what her former boss, the CEO who preceded her, told her to expect. When she asked him how things would be different after she assumed the mantle of CEO, he said the thing that would surprise her the most would be how funny her jokes would be, suddenly. I know my employees at Tribe are enormously generous in listening to me talk about my son’s inventions, my puppy’s housetraining, even my mother’s health. That’s just human nature, to be a good audience for the ones in charge. We tend to tell the ones at the top whatever they want to hear — and not give them the feedback they don’t.

That’s why it’s so important to look for other ways to learn what employees really think. If we labor under the assumption that employees are being brutally honest, we’re deluding ourselves.

One of the points we stress to our clients is that internal communication needs to be a two-way street. You can’t just talk at your employees; you need to provide them with a way to be heard as well. Many companies are afraid to open that can of worms, fearing what they’ll hear. But just because you don’t hear it, doesn’t mean your people aren’t talking about it. And you can’t address those difficult issues unless you know they exist.

This is where the rubber meets the road. Every year, when we launch our annual fitness competition at Tribe, we all start out gung ho. Week after week, everyone hits their goal. But two or three weeks from the finish line, which is about where we are now, some of our toughest competitors begin to drop.

The rules of the competition are simple:

• The first rule of the fitness competition is that everyone’s welcome to play but nobody has to.

• Everybody makes up their own weekly fitness plan, but you have to commit to it up front. No changes allowed once the contest is underway.

• Your weekly fitness plan has to be ambitious enough that the rest of us won’t make fun of you.

• The prize is $500 cash money, funded by Tribe.

The weekly fitness plans vary widely, depending on each person’s interests, schedule  and fitness level. Lindsay combines hockey and the gym. Miles runs and does pull-ups and push-ups. Michele does cardio machines and weights (at 5 am every day). Jennifer works with a trainer twice a week and does an hour of intervals on weekends. Beth does kick boxing classes, runs stadium stairs and tackles hilly trail runs with her dogs.

We also work on the honor system. If you say you made your goal, then you get an X in that week’s box on our master chart. If you somehow fell short of that goal, you’re the only one who can tell us that.

In the meantime, life happens. Lindsay, who was our first year’s finalist in a sudden death that stretched out for well over a month, dropped out immediately this year because she decided she’d rather have a social life. Miles had a period of super-tight deadlines and long workdays that stretched out too late for running after work, so he missed his goal for a few weeks and fell out of the front runners. Beth pulled her back out  midway through her sprint work at the track the other day and was writhing around on the ground in pain, mad that she wouldn’t be able to count that workout towards her goal.

If Beth were anybody else, we’d assume she was out of the competition. But knowing her, it will probably take more than an injury to keep her from somehow managing to hit her goal this week. Come to think of it, just last week she tripped on a root during one of her trail runs, ripped off a toenail and had her shoe filling up with blood. She kept running.

Still in the running for the $500 prize are Alexis, Michele, Jennifer and (I’m proud to say) myself. So depending on Beth’s speed of recovery,  it looks like we’ll have either four or five competitors with flawless records moving into the final two weeks.

We’re still a little iffy on our tie-breaker policy. One year we had the famous sudden death that was painful to watch. Another year we all voted for our favorite finalist, which means it basically became a popularity contest. This year, we’d sort of settled on the vote system again, but now Beth is trying to raise support for a round robin that requires each finalist to do the hardest workout of every other finalist and then vote on who was strongest in each. The logistics alone make me tired.

If you have a suggestion for a better way to decide a winner, we’d love to hear it.

Ralph Emerson  McGill Jr. didn’t pen the famous Blackgama campaign at left, but it’s the kind of smart word play he loved. He could write a line like that in about five seconds, although he wouldn’t get around to doing it until several hours or days past his deadline and only after continued hounding by account executives and traffic people. When Ralph died on June 1, he left the Atlanta advertising community bereft of one of its most legendary figures.

Ralph was a legend for many reasons, but what I admired most was his ability to thrive professionally without working very hard. His old friend Dianna Edwards was quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution saying, “There are people who work hard at their talent and there are people who are born gifted. Ralph was one of (the latter).”

Ralph was a fantastic role model for not making things more difficult than they needed to be. When I worked for him back in the early ’90s, his office would usually be filled with a handful of people sprawled on the couch and armchairs while he held court from his round table. There would be a lot of laughing and telling of stories. By the end of the day, the concepts would be ready, the headlines good to go, the copy complete. But it never seemed much of a struggle.

If you wanted someone to sweat over his work, it wasn’t Ralph. I remember  him telling me once about a hotel client who wanted the agency to consider alternative copy for their paper toilet strip that ordinarily read “Sanitized for your protection.” The AE came to brief Ralph on the job and asked, “Can you come up with something better?” Ralph thought about it for a couple of minutes, said, “Nope,” and crossed that job off his list.

Ralph was famous for his habit of disappearing. If he said, “I’m gonna go get a Coke,” you could assume he wouldn’t be back for hours. Years ago, the story goes, he actually worked full-time for two agencies at once. He was offered a job at McDonald & Little and started work there before he got around to quitting his job at Burton-Campbell. (Some versions of the story have him employed at Cole Henderson Drake and accepting a job at Burton-Campbell.) Either way, both agencies were conveniently located in the same building, so he’d go into one agency in the morning, hang his jacket on the back of his chair, and then run for the elevator to make an appearance at the other agency. He’d do a little work, leave a half-empty coffee cup on his desk and head back up to the first agency to take care of business there. Knowing Ralph’s ability to whip out a headline at a moment’s notice, it’s not hard to believe that this ruse succeeded for several weeks.

When I worked for him, he’d sneak home for naps. He’d return a few hours later, rested and refreshed, while the rest of  us were still toiling away through the afternoon slump. He’d stroll down the hallway of the creative department, hollering about how it was so quiet, it was “about as much fun as a Christian Science Reading Room in here.” One afternoon I noticed that he came back to work wearing a loafer on one foot and a Bass Weejun on the other. Apparently he’d just stepped out of bed into the first two shoes available and hadn’t realized they were from different pairs.

In the beginning, I had Ralph confused with his Pulitzer-Prize-winning father. I tiptoed into his office my first or second day working at Austin Kelley to ask his opinion on some finer point of grammar or phrasing. He looked up from his Playboy, scratched his head and said, “Elizabeth, it don’t matter none.” When people used to ask him if Atlanta’s Ralph McGill Boulevard was named for him, he’d say, “Nope, my father is the boulevard. I’m the alley out back.”

When you brush up against a legend, you can’t help but take away a few lessons. This is what I learned from Ralph:

• A good idea comes in a nanosecond

• Getting it done is sometimes more important than getting it perfect

• Sometimes it doesn’t need doing at all

• Working can look a lot like sitting around talking

• Being good at what you do doesn’t have to be hard

When us Boomers were growing up, technology was the enemy of the environment. All that progress is exactly what we saw as the cause of pollution and other issues that threatened the planet’s health. As Joni Mitchell sang (on that old-timey thing called a record), “They’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Generation Z kids, on the other hand, seem to view technology as the solution to world issues. At Tribe, we’ve been interviewing this generation (kids from 8 to 15) to learn more about how they’ll impact the future workplace. Gen Z expects technology to endlessly advance, and to be key in solving issues from the environment to world hunger to international relations.

One 14-year-old respondent told us,“Technology will make it much easier. I think technology will advance enough that (environmental issues) will be something that can be solved. Like energy needs can be solved. (We’ll have) easy ways to make energy. Then we can move on to things like world hunger.”

A 10-year-old who is currently designing hovercrafts and other alternative-fuel vehicles on his iPad said, “If we just keep going on this path for another 50 or 100 years, it could be really bad. I think we can help the environment by making designs of things that can help it. When I grow up, there’ll be even more technology than we have now, so it will be easier.”

This generation also may approach international issues differently from their parents’ generation. A 14-year-old girl who maintains email relationships with friends in London and China explained, “I think we’ve learned from our parents, so we won’t make the same mistakes. Like in the Middle East or in Korea. I think we’ll approach the issue differently. Probably less aggressive, not as demanding. I think we’ll make more alliances with other countries and not like over power them.”

When these kids hit the workforce, they’ll bring that same belief in the power of technology to solve difficult problems. As opposed to Boomers, who sometimes view technology as cold and inhuman, Gen Z feels it enables them to:

• Bring creative ideas to life
• Gather knowledge on any topic
• Build and maintain human relationships
• Solve problems

In other words, they believe technology allows them to be more human, and to maximize their potential as human beings. Knowing the problems they’re likely to be up against when they’re the grownups in charge, I think they’ll need all the technology they can get.

That being said, it’s encouraging to see how Gen Z kids view the future. They seem to expect technology to continue advancing, major problems to be solvable and the world to be a better place than it is now.

Sometimes what you need to maintain work-life balance is to make a trade-off between two different kinds of work. My posts here on this blog have slowed considerably since sometime before Christmas. I went from averaging three posts a week to something like one a week — or less.

The thing is, I started a novel over the Christmas break. I wrote 12 and 14 hours a day, slipping it in between Santa Claus duty and cooking for our annual New Year’s hoppinjohn party. When I went back to the office after the holidays, I began working on the book in the early  mornings before work and on weekends. Which is exactly when I used to work on my blog.

Whenever you take on another work commitment, you might want to think about what you’re NOT going to do to make time for the new priority. That’s easier said than done. Usually those new commitments sneak up on you as a new client assignment, a special request from your boss, or an irresistible opportunity for advancement, recognition or visibility. They’re generally not the kinds of things you want to turn down. In an ideal world, you’ve got the capacity to take on more.

But if your plate is already full, you can’t keep piling on more and more without dropping something. Most of us have figured out by now that we can more consistently perform at higher levels when we avoid letting ourselves get completely exhausted. Also that reaching absolute exhaustion requires an inconvenient recovery time when we’re just not our sharpest.

Like they say, we all get the same number of hours in the day. Einstein didn’t get more than 24 of them, and neither does President Obama. Come to think of it, you can fit a lot into 24 hours. Most days, I feel like I have a fairly balanced life. But it stays that way only if I say no to some things, or at least put them on hold for a time while something else takes that priority spot.

Have you had to make choices in what work you can take on when? I’d love to hear what other people have experienced with work-work balance. Or if you tend to just take that extra work time out of your personal life hours.

Recent college grads looking for jobs right now certainly have their work cut out for them. The unemployment rate among people in their twenties is now nearly 20 percent. The other day a young jobseeker told me that even the good jobs waiting tables have all been snatched up, so that old standby of a fallback is no longer a sure thing either.

Applications to grad school are way up, often as a strategy for postponing entering the work force until the economy improves. Our 21-year-old, a rising college senior, has started mentioning how cool it would be to have a PhD. (We’re thinking how cool it would be to be done with paying for higher education for a while.) Even the grown-ups seem to be adopting that strategy. A single mom I know with four young sons was recently laid off from her job and went straight back to school to get her masters the following week.

Back in the recession of 1991, frugal spending was the highly touted solution to the economic downturn. Ken Kurson, in his article in this month’s Esquire titled “Saving Money Won’t Save You,” reminds us of the Tightwad Gazette approach to living on less and also writes ‘Too many people ignore the other solution — Increasing revenue.’ Most of Kurson’s article, however, was about  a 20-year-old entrepreneur who had somehow wriggled his way into an appointment to show him his version of the better mousetrap, a dorm-room seating solution called the Slouchback.

I predict we’ll see a large wave of 20-something entrepreneurs in the next few years, partly because when you’re making nothing, spending less is not much of an option. But also because Gen Y is wired from birth to believe in their ability to start and run a company. Many of our large corporate clients complain, in fact, about Gen  Y’s unwillingness to pay their dues like the generations before, and their assumed presumption that they could take over from the CEO right this second.

Launching a startup and running it successfully requires a mindset that’s not easily swayed by reality. Most entrepreneurs tend to be extraordinarily optimistic people, even in the face of crippled cash flow, client budget cuts and other inconvenient business developments. They have to be, or they would never be able to weather the emotional ups and downs that are part of the entrepreneurial life.

Gen Y is often characterized as having been raised with helmets on. Their parents, mostly Boomers, are said to have brought an entirely new level of intensity to parenting, and that as a result, Gen Y kids have been protected from the experience of losing, insulated with an amazingly high sense of self worth, and bolstered with the belief that they can achieve anything they can imagine.

I’d say that happens to be a perfect recipe for creating an entrepreneur. Judith Warner, in her New York Times Magazine article titled “The Why-Worry Generation” asks “Did Boomer parents actually do something right?” She points out that many Gen Y kids have seen their parents deal with layoffs or at the very least, fear of layoffs, so they don’t view the corporate life as the sure thing earlier generations once did. More importantly, she suggests that “their sense of entitlement and lack of  humility” may actually make them well adapted to cope with adversity. Their unstoppable optimism and high self regard provides them with unique resilience.

If you’ve got both resilience and optimism, then maybe all you need to be an entrepreneur is a big idea. Fortunately, Gen Y seems to be good at that those, too.

At Tribe, we conduct ongoing research on the new generations in the workforce and what Gen X and Y need to be successful employees in companies large and small. But I’m feeling a new fondness lately for my generation, the Boomers, many of whom are in the midst of the most fruitful and rewarding part of our careers.

New research indicates that our brains actually hit overall peak performance only after age 40. In her recent book “The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind,” science writer Barbara Strauch cites new neurological studies that indicate that it takes until middle age for the hemispheres to “suddenly begin acting in concert.” So we Boomers will manifest powerful bursts of creativity, faster understanding of complex situations, more sound judgment, and better regulation of our emotions.

Even better, Strauch references brain studies that actually map that welcome by-product of middle age: wisdom. With the brain hemispheres collaborating more seamlessly, not to mention the impossible-to-fake benefits of life experience, Boomers are living proof of those twin traits of age and wisdom.

I often tell younger people that hard things get easier with age. Not just the ability to generate ideas, plough through work and operate at a high level with greater stamina, but also the resilience to absorb life’s blows and keep going. Boomers I know and love have lost jobs, companies, marriages, breasts and beloved dogs and come through the other side intact, if changed.

I once watched two men, a son in his 20s and his father in his 50s, run the Chicago marathon together. Although the son had a much higher level of fitness, he finished far behind his father. At the time, I thought it a striking demonstration of the benefits of life experience. The father came across the finish line exhausted but composed. The son staggered to the finish almost an hour later and looked like he’d been through the wringer of emotions and not fared well in the process.

Of course, it helps to keep the brain sharp. Being engaged in our work, exposing ourselves to new situations, people and ideas, taking on the daily crossword puzzle or a waiting-room round of solitaire or Scrabble™, and maintaining that passion for living all contribute to robust intellectual powers in our later years.

But it doesn’t hurt to know that science supports the notion that we Boomers are just hitting our stride.