Engage Generations X, Y, and Z
Last week I spoke at a corporate event where younger generations were getting a tongue-lashing from their Baby Boomer counterparts. The Boomers were scolding Generation Y for needing constant feedback, being unable to prioritize, and wanting to have (gasp!) fun at work. Indeed, there’s a stereotype in many offices that younger employees–especially those born since [...]
Remember when associations and other membership organizations, like Rotary and chambers of commerce, enjoyed a lock on their markets? The Baby Boomers joined associations in droves. Now, participation is changing, fueled by social changes, generational shifts, a recession-prone economy, and rapidly-changing technology. I just authored a book on this very conundrum –The End of Membership [...]
What goes up must come down. For years our society has supported membership associations and nonprofits and civic leadership. These organizations and concepts were especially prosperous in the mid-1900s. However, since the early 2000s, associations have experienced a barrage of challenges that would weaken their position in the marketplace and forever alter their futures. Is [...]
Former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan has said America’s young workforce pales in comparison to their Baby Boomer counterparts. He then suggested it would be better for America to hire skilled immigrants to counter the worrying trend. I’m suggesting that Mr. Greenspan better sit back down. He’s clearly off his rocker. Greenspan said the U.S. [...]
Picture in your mind a playground with three children fighting over a teeter-totter. The oldest child is fighting to keep the teeter-totter firmly planted on the ground. He has a content grin on his face and he’s plugging his ears. He’s plugging his ears because the youngest child, seated on the other end of the [...]
A recent report by RetirementJobs.com ranked Fortune 500 employers by the percentage of workers they have over age 50. RetirementJobs.com gathered data from public records and surveys of employers and employees, to illustrate for job seekers which industries tend to employ a disproportionately high or low percentage of mature workers. The results show that the [...]
Back in 2006, the William E. Smith Institute for Association Research released a report titled Generations and the Future of Association Participation. The report projected that the number of association members in the United States was expected to rise from 51 million in 2005 to about 55 million in 2015, with the percentage of all [...]
A friend of mine has been job hunting for the past six months. When we spoke on the phone recently she lamented about the horrible treatment employers have been doling out–from outright ignoring her to rescinding offers to sending her an email simply stating she didn’t get the job after she went through several rounds [...]
I’ve been reading with great interest about collective leadership. In fact, Deloitte‘s biggest global project at this time is in studying effective collaborations–the idea that collaborative efforts and collective leadership are more effective than a ‘command-and-control’ approach. Collective leadership is rapidly becoming the buzz as the new direction in leadership, and I think it’s resurgence in popularity has [...]
This spring, about 1.65 million young men and women graduated from American colleges and universities. That’s a staggering number. Much has been written, and rightly so, about the difficulties facing the Generation Y (also known as Millennials) graduates as they enter a troubled world. Compared with other recent American generations, this year’s grads seem to have been [...]
