Teach Them How to Manage Themselves, pt. 1 – chapter seven of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy

Not Everyone Gets a TrophyThis is the longest chapter in Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y so far, so I’ll be splitting chapter seven into three parts with this being part one.

Chapter seven focuses on helping Gen Yers learn to how to manage themselves at work. Bruce Tulgan says lots of Gen Yers come into the job having an advanced set of skills having developed their specialties at a young age. He cautions today’s managers who insist they didn’t have their hands held when it came to doing things like showing up on time, dressing appropriately or refraining from cussing on the job. Managers will have to do what they can to help Gen Yers fill in these gaps of maturity they also bring along.

Tulgan says managers need to teach them to care about the basics, teach them to be more aware of those gaps in their repertoires. and to fill those gaps one at a time. Continue reading

All Marketers Are Liars – my recap

All Marketers Are LiarsI read a lot of Seth Godin on the Internet, mostly at his blog, but I’ve never bought one of his books. For my birthday and Christmas I asked for two of them:

  1. All Marketers Are Liars
  2. Meatball Sundae

Godin wrote on his blog a while back that all the information in his books are also available for free on his blog, all you have to do is sift through the posts to find it. While that is true, it’s like saying all the ingredients to make mushroom risotto are available in the grocery store and all I have to do is buy them and prepare it. Going to a restaurant is quicker and easier so for the same reason, I asked for these two books.

I only received All Marketers are Liars and I haven’t picked up Meatball Sundae yet but I think a combination of watching Seth on the TED Web site, reading numerous reviews and keeping up with his blog, reading the book wouldn’t add much value to what I’ve already discovered. All Marketers Are Liars is an older book and wasn’t discussed on his site as much as his newer titles so giving it a read seemed like a good investment. In all I read it over two weekends and his style of writing is very conversational which I enjoy. Continue reading

Bugs + Streetlight + Long Exposure = very cool

Found this on the Make Magazine Web site. I buy Make in the bookstore every couple of months and dream that I would have the time or even the aptitude to tackle even 10% of the projects. Same goes for the reason why I’ve been subscribing to Canadian Home Workshop for several years and get all giddy when the Lee Valley Tools catalogues show up. The good news about this is I actually could probably replicate it! Yeah, I can use a camera and tripod!

flight patterns from Charlie McCarthy on Vimeo.

The Age of Speed – my recap

The Age of SpeedA few weekends ago I picked The Age of Speed off my bookshelf. I usually read one book at home, one on audio book in the car and then one at the office. I had just finished reading Here Comes Everybody and while I have been thinking of reading The Starbucks Experience, this one had been sitting on my shelf for a while.

Author Vince Poscente’s overall theme is there are four type of businesses today, Zeppelins, Balloons, Bottle Rockets and Jets, but only one of them will lead to continued success.

Jets are the companies that recognize speed is a natural phenomenon of today’s society, grasp hold of it and align their business with characteristics of the speed economy will be the only ones who realize true growth and success. Continue reading

How to treat and inspire them – chapter four of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy

Not Everyone Gets a Trophy, Chapter 4I worked from home on Friday and enjoyed the long-weekend off. I actually read another book, The Age of Speed that I’ll be discussing in a later post, but for now, back to Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How To Manage Generation Y.

The fourth chapter focused on how to treat, or interact, with Generation Y workers. The second half of the chapter specifically dealt with creating a reward system for Gen Yers.

Chapter four is titled “Practice In Loco Parentis Management,” which is Latin for in place of the parent. It has traditionally been used for a place where a school or a ward would be in charge of care for the child, but author Bruce Tulgan likens it to taking over the tutoring aspects of your Gen Y employees without taking over the emotional growth responsibility that is definitely reserved for the actual parent. Continue reading