Let’s start out the new year with the fortunes of the so-called 13th generation, the decried Generation X (born 1961 to 1979): you are totally screwed.
Let’s turn today to some more generational dynamics, this time to how they influence the economic state of the U.S. and thereby — since “when the U.S. sneezes, the world gets a cold” — the globe. You’d not imagine perhaps that the mood of a bunch of cranky old people could keep the globe down, but it’s true! Here’s how!
The Baby Boomers, as many of you know, are reaching retirement age. This makes them rather nervous, especially after the collapse. It probably didn’t have to be as bad as it was, but the Boomer and Silent generations wanted to get those giant retirements. That led to them developing policies that led to this meltdown.
Which they, of course, blame almost entirely on GenX.
More on that later, perhaps.
Boomers get this big shock as they enter retirement, showing that the unsustainable practices that they demanded were, in fact, unsustainable. This makes them very skittish about investments and new things. They are also becoming worried about legacy: how is the world really any better now? They look back and see that the age of Aquarius never happened. Something has to be done, now! Their fervor (or “blowhard hot air that never leads to real action”, perhaps) will start rising again because they don’t want to die seeing the world unchanged.
Last, they are terrified that the world is going to be run by those horrible, valueless GenXers and not those very pleasant, shiny Millenials.
Jim has run the numbers to show effective tax rates (including Social Security and Medicare taxes) over the past 60 years or so. It’s a fascinating look at how taxes have changed over time.
Interesting to look at.
It seems weird that the total effective tax rate on Jim’s median family was lowered during the Carter administration to only rise even higher during the Reagan administration before falling again at the end of his second term. The Bush Jr. tax cuts were indeed tax cuts: Jim’s definition of a “median” family is indeed paying less in taxes.
It turns out that Medicare and Social Security make a big change in what total taxation looks like, at least for this median family.
Some thoughts on Movements as described by Warren Kinston. I can’t imagine that they are interesting to anyone else, just here as notes for the future.
Kinston, Warren. Working with Values: Software for the Mind. SIGMA Centre: London. From Chapter 10 : “G-35 Ideals” : “Social Processes”.
Ideals have the power to awaken people permanently to possibilities of social life at its best. So ideals find their natural home, their locus of responsibility, within social movements. A movement is an endeavour pursued by a loosely bounded and minimally organized collection of people. It develops and spreads new values spontaneously and has the potential to transform groups to which its members belong (see G-53: Ch.12). Its elites — self-proclaimed spokesmen, ideologues, academics — conceive, document, defend and disseminate the ideals for the wider public. The ideal, initially, is incomprehensible but vaguely appealing to many. Only through much discussion, explanation and exhortation does its nature emerge. Managers, for example, were at first confused by the phrase ‘total quality’; elderly women wonder what ‘women’s liberation’ means; and I still puzzle about the ideal of the ‘social market’. [emphasis mine]
Movements aren’t headed by someone, or even an organization. A movement is amorphous and in many ways leaderless. They must be at best minimally organized. People who say that they have an organization that is a Movement are simply deluding themselves.
I’ve been reading some of the futurists materials. They improved since the old days: now they admit that most of details and technologies are pretty unknowable. And then they predict them anyway!
George Friedman — “chief intelligence officer” and founder of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., a private intelligence agency who is sometimes called the “shadow CIA” — weighs in with his opinions in The Next 100 Years. It’s reasonably interesting, although it seems like he is much more interested in the U.S.–Turkey/Japan war of 2180.
The interesting thing is that he, along with Strauss and Howe, believes that there is a coming crisis that is not the current financial collapse, as bad as it really is. (Like the Great Depression, it’s really not that bad as long as you have a job.) He is honest that it’s going to be something that can’t necessarily be predicted beforehand.
In fact, his book starts out with how unthinkable the current state is twenty years prior, whether looking to 2030 from 2010 or to 1930 from 1910. The future works out like that. Things that were unthinkable or even “impossible” become the current state.
Not a bad lesson, and worth the price of the book. There’s more of course.
read more…
“But I’m not GenX; I’m a late Boomer!”: Who Is, and Who Ain’t, Generation X in America
No, not those X-ers!
Who is this “Generation X” or “GenX” that I keep talking about? Surely, it’s not you, right? And isn’t this whole generations stuff just invented to sell products?
The first question comes from the idea that “God, please don’t make me a part of GenX”. Even people who are in it don’t want to be identified with it.
Which is telling.
I’ve been talking about generational issues for the last 22 years, focusing on the Baby Boomer-[next generation] war. I say [next generation] because 22 years ago, it didn’t have a name. When I started studying this in the late 1980s, we referred to the post-Boomer births as “baby busters”, which simply defines them negatively against Boomers. Bill Strauss and Neil Howe tried out “The 13th Generation” and “13th-ers”, which didn’t catch on. Douglas Coupland popularized “generation X” in his novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which he took from Billy Idol’s old band, Generation X, which Idol had taken from the title of Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett’s 1965 book on British youth culture.
Generation X stuck.
read more…
You’re a GenX-er who has, since the 1980s, done your time waiting for the Baby Boomers to die off so that you can be invited into the corporate office. You’ve worked hard, done the things you were told and waited on that rung of the corporate ladder, stuck while the Baby Boomers ahead of you sat, Peter Principled, fat and happy.
I’ve got bad news for you, Leroy: you’re not going to get that invitation. Baby Boomers look at GenX-ers as evil or frightening. They are going to give those jobs to the kids younger than you.
I recently wrote an appreciation of Wilfred Brown, the Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company, accomplished management author, and government servant. I wrote this for the recent GO Society summit in Toronto, as a part of their new CEO Honor Roll. I had written the Wikipedia article on Lord Brown ages ago and have intended to do more but haven’t.
Well, I did a YouTube video on my currently stalled series “Ask Mr. E!”, for what it’s worth.
And here’s the good Lord Brown himself from a Glacier Institute of Management film series on the Glacier management methods, the complete series of which is available online at the GO Society website (signup required).
Trust, it seems, is the glue that makes organizations sing. But you don’t necessarily need much of it to succeed. And you can simply eat off the store trust (social capital) built through long years of hard work by those who came before.
Come to think of it, it doesn’t take long to eat through a century’s worth of social capital.
I’ve been thinking about this as a result of reading Fukuyama’s Trust (1995?) and reflecting on some of the goals of the Glacier Metal Company methods. Both Wilfred Brown and Elliott Jaques talk about trust and trust-building as why you need to create a requisite organization; that is, an organization where people have “real bosses” who can actually judge their work and set context for it, and compensation that is decently aligned with what people feel is fair (“felt-fair pay).
There’s a lot more to trust, of course. Let’s look at a couple of things that impact how people don’t trust Hidden High Potentials. read more…
Just some notes for today:
If you have been reading the site through a browser, and not an RSS feed, you may have noticed that we’ve been changing quite a bit. There’s a great deal left to do, so please do email me if you see anything strange happening. The goal is to make it much easier for you to read, and to more clearly show the services that The Manasclerk Company offers through our various brands and partners.
When I wrote about how the Glacier Model Builds Trust, I mentioned some articles by Johan du Toit, Managing Director of Decipher Consulting (South Africa). They are now available at the Decipher website. Click the “Publications” link in the top menu. They are the impetus to much of this reading list.
I spent months of my life working on this, bringing to full realization the many and varied lands, peoples and beasts of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth!
And I did not — not — do this so that five minutes into the game some players could, and I quote, “Open an evil can of hobbit butt-whup on those Rivendell pretty boys.”
John Kovalic, Dork Tower
But were they gamers? (CCAttribution to me)
Did you ever think that your work history is a lot like a role-playing game gone mad? I got to thinking about this over the weekend. It was the annual geek conflagration called DragonCon, which I once again didn’t get down there. But I started musing over role-playing games, things like TSR’s classic Dungeons & Dragons, and realized something.
It’s a great lens through which to understand hidden high potentials’ job history.
read more…
Lord Wilfred Brown, the Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company, was insistent: Behaviour is as much defined and limited by the role that a work inhabits as his personality and the quality of his relationships within the company. You can even take this farther than he did: the social role you inhabit (or are forced into) will make you behave in certain ways. This may comes as shock if you’re like most Westerners and see the world entirely through the lens of personal responsibility and psychology.
I thought about this when I recently reviewed a video promo that I put together for the Glacier Management Institute’s (GMI) Explorations In Management film series. My promo isn’t that great (bad editing) but it gets a couple of key ideas across, including the idea that behaviour is defined by your job role.
It’s worth thinking about, especially in light of my discussion last time on social capital, trust and requisite organizations.
Wilfred Brown speaks about requisite organizations: Exploration in Management films
I put this together to advertise the Exploration in Management film series by the Glacier Institute of Management, now FREE at the GO Society (registration required). It’s no longer available as a DVD, only through the web: I should update my video.
Hear the most important CEO you’ve never heard about, Glacier Metal Company’s Wilfred Brown, talk about the Glacier model for himself.
I’ve been sick and tired of my website for years now, and with the change in how I do business, I’m moving off this look into a new one. Expect a pretty simplistic look on the website for about a week as I introduce the new layout for the site and the new business model.
Also, have you taken a look at my YouTube videos? Ask Mr. E! on the Manasclerk channel.
There’s a fascinating paper at the IMF by social capital guru Francis Fukuyama (Social Capital and Civil Society – Prepared for delivery at the IMF Conference on Second Generation Reforms) that covers his reasoning behind social capital being called “capital” at all. Besides being interested in how to create societies, I’ve always found him a lucid writer who discusses a topic that relates to the Law of the Real Boss — Elliott Jaques’s “requisite organization” (RO) and Stratified Systems Theory — because it touches on the importance of trust. read more…
I recently tweeted that “As long as you advocate leaderless groups, the power-hungry will control you. The answer is more complex.” Asked to provide some more, I figured I’d do it here since it ties into some of the workplace stuff we’ve been talking about (from when Wilfred Brown was MD/CEO of Glacier) and the new model of Evangelical church organization.
I’ve talked about this issue before and it’s been contradictory. I’ve written about “Leaderless Groups and Why Wilfred Brown Was Brilliant“, The Single Leader Fallacy and employee participation in policy making through representative democracy. I’ve even talked about fascist pastors. and my thinking has been changed a good deal by the work of Warren Kinston on movements and purpose. That makes this worth going over.
When I went to Vancouver, I was castigated by a family friend for having a company name that doesn’t make any sense. If you haven’t kept track, although I use a few Brand Names, my company name is “The Manasclerk Company”.
“It makes me think of deranged sales associates at Sears,” he said, not a little derisively.
I pointed out that between Lands End and Craftsman (and, let’s be honest, Kmart), I buy a lot of stuff from Sears. Didn’t make him happy and he proceeded to berate me for not doing this other thing. He bought dinner, and I’ll put up with a lot for sushi, so I shut up and nodded a lot.
Still, I suppose it is true enough that I’ve not done a good job saying what “manasclerk” means. If you’re interested, this post will let you know what it is.
Let’s take another gander at how a hidden high potential can either get or stay in a that low-level job. It’s counter to prevailing advice you get, so you may want to pay attention.
Before I start, I have to emphasize that I’m only talking about Hidden High Potentials (HHPs) and not Normal People. Normals give HHPs advice which is lousy because it’s the advice that works for them (other Normals, that is). They can’t imagine that this Slacker / Underachiever / Idiot to whom they’re talking is in a completely different league, workwise. Heck, y’all aren’t even playing the same game.
Let’s do this by looking at the advice you get and what you really should be doing.
From Organizational Participation: Myth and Reality by Frank Heller, Eugen Pusicć, George Strauss, and Bernhard Wilpert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 294 pp.
These experts (Heller is from Tavistock) have a brief mention of Wilfred Brown’s participative management at Glacier Metal Company.
In some individual cases the transition from autocracy to a variety of organizational forms where influence is more widely distributed can be achieved by deliberate intra-organizational processes, as for instance in the formation of the Scott Bader Commonwealth (Hoe 1978) or the democratization of the Glacier Metal Company (Jaques 1951; Wilfred Brown 1960). In the case of Scott Bader, the founder of the business was a devout Christian who, after a prolonged strike of his workforce. came to the conclusion that he no longer wished to be the sole owner. In the Commonwealth he created, every employee became formally a part owner and two potentially participative decision-making councils were set up. The Managing Director of the Glacier Metal Comapny, Wilfred Brown, was a very unusual person. He combined intellectual and socio-political interests (he was for a time a Minister in the British Labour Government with a very sympathetic attitude to social science which led him to engage a psychoanalytically oriented consultant, Elliot [sic] Jaques from the Tavistock Institute in London, to help introduce a participative-humanistic organization (Jaques 1951).
These two well documented cases, while not unique, are examples of substantial structural and to a lesser extent behavioural changes consequent on a policy decision by a Chief Executive Officer (CEO). In both cases the CEO stayed on the scene for sufficiently long to consolidate the structural changes and in both cases these changes survived the death of the founder for a number of years. [145-6]
A few years ago, I was talking with Naga Kumar, who had been a colleague of David Cooperrider at Case Western when he was developing Appreciative Inquiry. He told me that while he like and used a lot of AI in his work, he parted ways with Cooperrider, who believed that AI was value neutral: there was something to appreciate in any organization.
Which always brings up the Nazi question: can you do AI with the Gestapo?
“Some organizations,” Naga told me, “should not be appreciated.”
The story came back to me as I was working with several different psycho-social tools (read: things that help you understand how people work together). It struck me that they were value neutral, that there was nothing stated explicitly about the values or value choices you should make.
And that’s possibly troubling.
