Marketing for Online Business

In most workplaces, there are three generations of workers.

The first group we’ll consider are the Traditionalists, those who were born some time before 1965. They are likely, at this stage of their careers, to be extremely influential and senior in their organizations.

The name Traditionalists, though, is applied because this is a group which embodies the sets of values one most often sees amongst the “old school. They will, most likely, prefer to communicate through structured and rigid hierarchies, and will certainly prefer command-and-control mechanisms in the way they distribute tasks between themselves.

As innovators, the Traditionalists group will usually come up with solutions which are consistent with an organization’s current direction of travel, and they’ll prefer to examine problems which have been laid out for them by individuals more senior in the hierarchy. This is an advantage, of course, because it makes them ideal innovators to work in teams who have adopted a Play-Not-2-Lose innovation strategy, where the main focus is likely to be incremental innovation.

The second major generation in organizations is known as “X’, and can be considered to include all individuals born between 1965 and 1983.

X-ers will work in a command-and-control environment, but they’d much rather work more flexibly. Believing that individuals are powerful forces for change in their own right, they think therefore they should be given significant liberty in the kinds of problems and challenges they’ll solve.

When faced with innovation challenges, X-ers will typically look at other industries who have faced similar situations. Their goal will be to find solutions which have worked elsewhere and which can be applied in their own contexts.

The defining factor in self-perception of an X-er is what they know and where they learned what they know. They use their broadness of experience to drive status in their organizations, in contrast to the Traditionalist group, for whom status is a consequence of tenure.

In most workplaces, the last generation to consider are the “Y-ers”. Generation-Y is normally thought to consist of anyone born after 1984, and has a very different approach to work than either of the two generations that preceded it.

Y-ers are a generation which have grown up with digital tools and online collaboration, and they find technology indispensable in any task they undertake. There is very little about command-and-control or hierarchy in a typical Gen-Y organization.

Gen-Y has the very great gift of teaming naturally. Leadership roles switch amongst members of a group depending on the skills available and the task at hand. Moreover their digital connections provide them with superior insight into the way the world works outside their organizations, and they will often have much deeper insight into these exterior factors than either of the previous generations.

This broad grasp of the real world makes Gen-Y a very powerful force when a particular innovation problem requires a radical solution. Their broadness of thinking lends itself to out-of-the-box ideas, and their lack of constraint by command-and-control makes it extremely likely they’ll recognize opportunities that x-ers will write off as “too risky” and traditionalists “impossible”.

On the other hand, Y-ers will usually not be particularly interested in incremental innovation, and when they are forced to do it, will often dream up radical approaches when the tried and true way is better. They can work in either Play-2-Win or Play-Not-2-Lose environments, but, obviously prefer the former to the latter.

Managing different generations of workers is an important aspect of Innovation Management. Much more advice on the topic is available in James Gardner’s freely available online Innovation Book.