Gen Y to cities: Don’t ignore us

Update: A version of this post was published here as an opinion editorial, and another version was featured here on Brazen Careerist.

The pull Madison has is inexplicable, but powerful. It is this magic that sleeps in the winter, and then explodes in the spring like confetti on your twenty-first birthday, that makes me love the city. Even the winters become part of the voodoo that creates the vibrant mix of people and food and ideas and lakes.

Madison defines who I am. My career, friendships, and relationships are delivered to me from the city stork, like they were birthed directly from this intoxicating energy.

My affair with the city is an epic romance. But the city doesn’t know it.

Madison isn’t alone. Despite consistently placing in the top of every list imaginable – from Playboy to Forbes – Madison, like many other cities, is ignoring one of its most competitive advantages. That is, young people.

See, as cash cows go, Gen Y is a big one, and cities are ignoring us – the young leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals and creatives – in their plans for economic development.

Partnering with Gen Y should be of the utmost priority for cities since we are uniquely positioned to stimulate economic development. For example:

1. Good jobs come from good people. Economic development starts with human capital. The war for talent is one of the most interesting and challenging issues that cities face today. Young people actively promote and contribute to the high quality of life in cities, and need to be able to connect to both people and ideas. We are the quality workforce that is indispensable to basic sector job growth. Without a strong cadre of young talent, employers will be unable to expand.

2. Competitive advantage starts with entrepreneurship. More than any other generation, young people today are entrepreneurs. To meet the small business owners, the tenants of research parks, and other key entrepreneurs in cities is to meet an under forty demographic. There is ample opportunity to provide dynamic support for young entrepreneurs and the talent coming out of universities. Young entrepreneurs are a powerful determinant of a city’s future economy. They cannot be an afterthought.

3. To new customers, cities have no legacy. Gen Y knows little about the negative perceptions that have been prevalent within the business community. We don’t know the history or the mistakes. This is an opportunity for cities to build positive goodwill through superior customer service for this new generation. Young people can help cities to think innovatively. Cities can then borrow that energy and willingness to change to jump-start a perception shift in the existing business community.

4. Spiky should be funded. Place is extremely important to Gen Y and largely determines our destiny in today’s spiky world, to borrow a term from Richard Florida. To become a taller spike in the world’s economy – to compete – cities needs to attract young talent. In turn, young people will develop businesses and new markets. Cities should allocate money to young talent groups that promote and build upon the city’s strengths and spikiness to create the competitive advantage that allows us to expand business.

Cities must proactively reach out to Gen Y. Young people represent growth, and must be engaged in a city’s future development. We are a natural partner and ally in stimulating economic development.

Talent city.

Trust, loyalty, and the happy ending

Big Brother and I talked a couple weeks ago perched atop Bascom Hill, the steepest hill in Madison, and I wore my steepest heels. The sun was bright with the resigned smile it holds between summer and fall, and I held on to the edge of my wrap dress, dangerously flirting with the wind. Big Brother stood simply, calmly.

“I make you nervous, don’t I?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. My weight shifted from one heel to the other. “I feel like you don’t trust me yet.”

“No. I trust you. I have no reason not to trust you,” he said.

I nodded and he nodded and we looked at each other, smiling. When Big Brother smiles, you smile too, like a game of telephone, passing the message on. It’s charisma and it’s indefinable.

Big Brother and I are still figuring each other out. We’re figuring out the trust thing, and the loyalty thing. We’re building it. Because you can’t just say “trust me,” and believe everything will work out. That’s a movie ending, not a business decision. Trust has to be earned. Loyalty has to be created.

Big Brother knows this. He doesn’t use his success to shepherd me into trusting him. He expects that I’ll earn his trust and he’ll earn mine.

Trust and loyalty are big deals when you’re in a position of leadership, because everyone wants to be your friend for specific reasons. And everyone else doesn’t like you, for much of the same reasons.

“Don’t take it personally,” Big Brother told me as we sat across from each other after work. A glass of water sat in rings of sweat in front of me.

“Okay,” I said, running my fingertips along the table and through the water. I was thinking about the meeting I had in an hour, because after work is never really after work anymore.

“No. Look at me in the eyes,” he said. I looked up, amused. He was not amused. “Do you understand, truly? Don’t take it personally.”

“Okay,” I said. I nodded, looking directly at him, holding his gaze until he was nodding back, satisfied that I understood.

Big Brother and I are still figuring each other out. Because real trust and real loyalty takes time. These exchanges put another stone in place. Information is the foundation. Honesty is the mortar holding it together. There is no other way if you want to build a business relationship that can stand the cycle of the game.

There is no happy ending. The game cycle is a constant push and pull of what you build, and what you tear down.

Measured excitement.

Advice from top Executives, Presidents, and CEOs

We won’t all be Steve Jobs, but many of us will be the top executives in our respective cities. I recently met with seven of the top Executives, Presidents and CEOs in Madison, Wisconsin. Here are their keys to business and leadership success—

Share your success. It is incumbent on the person being promoted, according to Mark Meloy, President and CEO of First Business Bank, to pull others along with them. Make sure that as you become more successful, your leaders feel that their careers are moving forward as well.

Network to problem-solve. Finding groups that help you problem-solve will save many a headache, according to Brett Armstrong, CFO of the IT company Trident Contact Management. Like if you’re being audited, the group will have your back. But choose your involvement wisely, Armstrong advocates, since you only have a certain amount of time and need to spend it wisely. If you’re only half-involved then that is how people will know you.

Balance… well, it’ll all even out in the end. First, you have to decide if you want a job or a career, according to Mark Meloy. If it’s a career you decide upon, make sure you’re engaging in a two-way street. Work and life won’t always balance out that day, week, or month, but equilibrium will be found. Eventually. Meloy walks the talk at First Business Bank. When his employees go on vacation, they are not allowed access to email and have only limited access to voicemail. The company gives vacation, he says, for a reason.

A vision can’t just be a pie in the sky. A vision must be a concrete vision, according to Donna Sollenberger, President and CEO of UW Hospital and Clinics. To create the right vision, you must find the right direction for your organization to take. To do this, look at the industry trends and listen to your market. Then build a case, a good solid argument, and back it up with data to demonstrate where you need to go.

Entrepreneurs – socialites, control-freaks, risk-takers, and self-promoters. So says Curt Brink, a successful real estate developer. You must not only deal with a wide range of people in entrepreneurship, he argues, but you must also follow through on getting things done. Don’t be afraid to try something new, because once you’ve done it, you then understand how to do it better. A successful entrepreneur likes being in control, but can delegate fully. If you don’t, no one will grow. By the way, Brink was unconsciously promoting his current and past projects the entire time he was talking. That’s called passion. Get some.

Do a lot, and make sure everyone knows. Don’t let anyone pigeon hole your talents, says Annette Knapstein, Vice President of Office Administration at American Family Insurance. Stretch yourself, develop new talents and volunteer for different committees. And then, make sure everyone knows it. If they don’t know, it doesn’t exist.

Leadership is lonely sometimes. A good leader and manager makes effective decisions and communicates clearly, while putting the right people in the right spots. Not always easy, according to Gary Wolter, President and CEO of MGE. To illustrate his point, Wolter told a story about a receptionist he saw year after year. Each morning, the receptionist would say, “Hello, Gary.” Yet, when Wolter was promoted to CEO, the next morning was different. “Hello, Mr. Wolter,” the receptionist said. Leadership fundamentally changes relationships and people expect different things of you. People who were your peers, you now supervise, and while you can still be friendly, you can’t talk about the boss anymore because you are the boss. The support group that you had developed, who had remained loyal to you, and helped you along your journey has changed. Be prepared.

Throw an open door party daily. Reaching out to younger people for fresh air is essential, according to Richard Lynch, President of J.H. Findorff & Son, who had a great sense of the upcoming workforce. He recognizes that young workers are entrepreneurial, and need a flexible and honest environment to work in. He has an open door policy for this purpose and subsequently attracts the brightest young workers.

Speaking of honesty… Surround yourself with people who will tell you that you’re an idiot, says Gary Wolter. Look both inside your organization, and outside, for individuals you can bounce ideas off of, and who can communicate with you effectively and honestly.

Follow the Leader.

Skip grad school. Life is better with experience.

A few weeks ago, I met a twenty-something pursuing an advanced degree in Political Science to become a professor, although he had no real-world experience in politics. I listened to Mr. Poli Sci and then I said, “How can you possibly teach something you haven’t experienced?”

Mr. Poli Sci became quite defensive at this point claiming he had objectivity (!) since he wasn’t personally involved. I tried to think of one successful person in politics that attempted to stand on both sides of the fence. Politics is about having an opinion. It’s the very definition of passion.

In talking to Mr. Poli Sci, I realized he had committed two common Generation Y sins. One, he had a vague interest in a topic, but no passion, fostering an apathetic approach towards life. Two, he went to grad school to fix it. Life is better with experience. Here’s why:

1) Grad school is good on paper, but barely. An education doesn’t allow your competencies to be realistically measured, or allow you to be differentiated among other candidates. An education simply signifies that you have completed a degree. It doesn’t provide the full picture of your marketable skills.

Moreover, an advanced degree may bring you more money, but it’s not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is the extra stress your additional student loans will create and the regret you’ll feel for wasting your efforts when you don’t end up using your degree. Seems barely worth it considering “grad school is a confidence-killing daily assault of petty degradations.”

2) Employers look for experience, so should you. Real-world experience reigns supreme over schooling. Every time. Your experience in the real-world interacting with real people and real situations allows you to be uniquely suited towards a particular position. Of course, you need education and knowledge to put places on a map. But then you have to go live life to arrive at a destination.

Sure, Mr. Poli Sci would be a good professor, but never great. Great professors have fervent opinions, they know intimately the subject matter upon which they speak, and they have formed a deep respect for the other side. Most importantly, they’ve formed these opinions as the result of real-world experience.

3) Objectivity gets you nowhere. It’s easy to be objective when you haven’t risked anything. But success in business is not objective. Decisions are based on the relationships you have with others, and the emotions of how you’ve lived life up until this point. The facts can be laid out in front of you, but it is ultimately the experiences you’ve had that determine an outcome.

4) It’s better to do something, instead of just learn about it. Why, exactly, are so many of us in such a hurry to re-institutionalize ourselves? I spent years in college yearning to be done with school. Especially the flash card part.

Going to grad school is not having the guts to get on with life. You’re not telling corporate America anything by indulging in a larger map. You’re just making it harder to figure out which road to take. Want to give the finger to the establishment? Go blog. Go start your own business. Go to work every single day and rock every single day.

Preparation is hesitation. Action is change.

Women are the new men

This post was also published at Damsels in Success.

I know a lot of awesome Gen X and Gen Y women. In fact, the city of Madison, WI ranks in the top ten of both female creative class, and female super-creative class percentages in the nation (Charlottesville, VA and Bakersville, CA, rank first).Generation Y women, Hannah Seligson argues, are “making one of the fastest and unprecedented career ladder ascents in history.” Here are some observations about one of the most powerful groups of women in history:

Women are more business-minded than men… Springboard Enterprises reports that “women in the United States have an ownership stake of 50 percent or more in nearly half of all privately held businesses.” In fact, women are starting businesses at a rate of twice that of men, attracted to the flexible lifestyle of being your own boss.

And we’re successful at it. The gross sales of women-led companies grew 39 percent compared to 34 percent for all firms. Barron’s predicts that by 2010 a woman has a one in seven chance of having a powerful job post. In Australia, studies show that “women-led companies on average outperform those where there is no female leadership at the top,” while “law firms with more female partners have a higher per partner income than those with fewer.”

… but women don’t always want a man, or children. While men in leadership positions often have a family to support them, Gen X and Gen Y women put careers ahead of settling down. While this can be a lonely proposition, many Gen X and Gen Y women are not in a huge rush to find a man, get married and start popping out children.

In relationships, the men increasingly stay at home or hold a less stressful position. If we’re even in a relationship. Many of us are doing just fine without a man as a result of our highly independent lifestyle.

A lot of us aren’t even sure we want to have kids. And if we do, we want to adopt (anything to avoid having a foreign object pop out of our fitness-club bodies). The vast majority of women that do plan on having kids also plan on staying in the workforce.

Women are natural leaders. The millennial woman brand of leadership is more about changing the world than our own egos. Moreover, we’re change makers willing to defy the traditional structures of “command and control” leadership for a more collaborative and inclusive model.

Anna Quindlen writes, “by its very nature women’s leadership is about redefinition, while men’s leadership has been about maintaining the status quo… You’re less wedded to the shape of the table if you haven’t been permitted to sit at it.”

I’m not surprised to learn that women and men are switching roles. I see examples all around me of women embracing the power of now to lead the next generation. The more young women that get others to not only look past their age, but also any perceived inequities, the better off our world will be.

One last note. Over in the UK, academics have dubbed young women leaders as “’the Monstrous Army on the March’, women who cannot, will not be stopped.”

Well then. March on ladies.

These boots are made for leading.