(Full Disclosure: Headline applies to all of us…Including us here at Hacking Work…So it’s always important to seek out diverse views on any subject, and then make up your own mind.)

Information Week recently claimed, “Millennials Aren’t The Little Devils IT Imagines: Research suggests 20-somethings think highly of IT organizations and don’t flout IT conventions as often as some of us might expect.”

They cite new research by GigaOM Pro and IT support vendor Bomgar — (Warning: Go back to our headline, then look at what Bomgar does) — that suggests the Millennials have more respect for the IT organization than most of us give them credit for.

They cited that while about 80% of IT managers think Millennials’ tech expectations are very different than what they provide (…We agree!…), and up to one-third disregard corporate policies (…We found it to between one-third to two-thirds, when including all workers of all ages, an including all types of workarounds…) — yet only 10 out of 400 Millennials described their actions this way.

Duh!!!!

Does a fish describe being in water as being “different” or swimming in his own way as “disregarding Neptune’s policies”????

The data collection and interpretation still assumes a Corporate’s Way/Good, Not Corporate’s Way/Bad way of thinking.

Corporate CIOs: Your Ass is Still Grass
How about asking Millennials something like “Since childhood, is it normal and acceptable and good for you, when using any tech device, to quickly work around it if the device/system didn’t give you what you wanted immediately?”

They’d respond: “Duh. Of course. Workarounds are not ‘different.’ That’s just what we do. Whatever Corporate supplies us with will always be just a starting point. Then we take it from there.”

Also: Doesn’t it defy both logic and common sense to find that 80% of a group of people have different expectations from you than what you’re supplying…And then conclude that all is A-OK…No problems? There’s a lot more benevolent hacking going on out there than is captured by any IT vendor’s surveys!

Think long and hard about which lens you use when interpreting Millennials views and behaviors. Which lens you use could be the difference between a very engaged workforce and a very disengaged workforce.

All of our technologies have Off buttons. Are you using that button enough?

Are you texting or gaming or talking on the phone while you’re walking on the beach? Do you take time to truly hear the rhythm of life in the fwap-fwap-fwap of the waves and hear the call of life in the seagull’s caw-caws?

Is your family dinner conversation an amazing moment filled with deep connections and meaning, or are you taking texts at the dinner table?

These are the kinds of questions MIT professor Sherry Turkle asks us to explore in her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. (Also see here for podcast interview w/ Turkle.)

Each of us must stop and think where technology fits in our lives. It is neither good nor bad. It is our choices that make it one or the other.

Our job is to make choices. Ones that help the world and us grow. Are you making the best choices for you and others right now? Are you sure?

FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO COMPLETELY CHANGE HOW WE ALL WORK

1. Seek two mentors: One twice your age, one half your age.
Technology is changing unbelievably rapidly. Each generation has wildly different tech experiences even within the generation. But tech isn’t the reason. It’s what that’s doing to create wildly different attitudes about personal productivity. With each new tech NextGen, each segment within the population is becoming more bold and cocky about asking for what they need to be their best. (Positive things!) Learn from them. Also, with age comes some wisdom. Do seek out the aging sages in and around you. They will temper that cockiness with ground truths that do not change over a lifetime

2. Question your leaders, often: “Explain to me again how you’re adding value in how my time and energy are being used?”

3. Question yourself, often. “Am I changing enough to demonstrate that I respect and trust people? How much value do I place on other people’s time.” Time and attention are today’s most precious assets that can never be replaced. Most people in today’s knowledge and service economy get their job done by using a portion of someone else’s life. How well do you do at that? Are you mindful, concerned and respectful about how you use their life to get your work done?

4. Get your fingernails dirty, often: Experience your company’s systems, tools, and processes from the user’s perspective. A guaranteed eye-opener! Our rules, tools and infrastructure are becoming more bossy than our bosses. Today’s infrastructures drive everything. Look at what you are handing off to people to use from their perspective. Change the rules, tools and procedures based on what you learned. And if you’re not empowered to change them, hack them… benevolently, of course.

5. Share Open Source, social media and crowdsourcing measures, tools and philosophies with one main goal: Changing the conversation. Before actual change, usually comes mindset change. And the key driver of mindset change is changing what we all talk about. If everyone starts having conversations like “why isn’t it as easy to get my work done here as it is at home, when I get to use my own smart device, when I use the cloud more freely?,” etc. Change the conversation to “How easy is it for me to do great work?” That one conversation will change everything!

(Here’s one conversation starter: The SimplerWork Index. Download it. Share it. Change the conversation at your company.)

THE NEW WORK CONTRACT
OUR VIEW, FROM THE WORKFORCE TO LEADERS

DEAR LEADER:
A funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.

Your emphasis on productivity and cost-cutting forced us to change how we think about the war for our talent. For that, we thank you! Your ability to stay focused on the bottom line has inspired us.

We had gotten lazy about controlling our own destiny. We figured if we focused on customers and profits, continuously changed and grew, drank the corporate Kool-aid, and did great work — we’d be the masters of our own fate. Boy, are we glad that the 2008-2010 financial crisis woke us from that fairy tale. Wasn’t a fun way to get it, but get it we did.

So we watched what you do. We studied how you constantly push for greater returns on investment to ensure your own future. Based on what we learned, we have rewritten our work contract. You are not effectively managing the assets we provide, and we’re calling you on it.

Decent pay, appropriate benefits, great culture and leadership — all are givens in this contract. Important… but baseline issues. After that, it gets interesting, and personal.

This new covenant between us cuts to the heart of who owns, controls, and sets the rules for productivity. Specifically, how much value you create for us when you organize our work.

It’s pretty simple, really.

More and more, a big piece of the working capital you leverage to get stuff done is ours. You want us to spend our assets — our time, our attention, our ideas, knowledge, passion, energy, and social networks — on work that you think is important. That means, more and more, we’ve got to think and act like investors.

We are students of the marketplace, have learned quickly, and need to audit your efforts: Are you making productive use of our assets? Would an hour invested in a competitor’s firm provide a better return? Are you creating better communities than we can find outside in the networked world?

We were becoming slaves to your infrastructure: That which was supposed to help us now dictates too much of what we can’t get done. The tools we have outside of work are leapfrogging past what we have at work — your love of lingering bureaucracy, legacy technologies and deeply embedded procedures are killing us.

Throw out much of what you thought you knew about creating a “great place to work.” A new work contract is hitting your shores. We call this new covenant Work 2.0. Our relationship with you must return more value on our working capital.

And here’s the thing: Don’t treat us like investors and we’ll hack our work. We’ll join the underground armies of top performers who are bypassing your sacred structures and breaking all sorts of rules just to get their work done. Like them, we’ll take matters into his own hands to increase our own productivity and achieve better results that way.

Universities are falling down on the job. They are failing to teach America’s college students the critical thinking skills they will so sorely need in the marketplace. This according to a recent study by the Social Science Research Council.

SSRC tracked several thousand college students’ performance on a critical thinking test from their freshman year to their senior year. About 45% showed no significant improvement after two years of college and 36% didn’t improve at all by the end of their fourth year. Woah!

Those who conducted the study as well as its critics all agree that we should be careful not to inappropriately interpret the data. A lot more work needs to be done to fully understand what these numbers mean. But the basic conclusion is undeniable: Today’s incoming workforce will likely be very challenged when it comes to critical thinking.

Industry and government gurus are concerned about high-level impacts like our country’s ability to compete in STEM fields (graduate-level work in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). My concern is far more pedestrian, widespread and horrific in its impact.

In the corporate workshops I conduct, I meet the huddled masses that work in our cubicles and shop floors. According to research by the Jensen Group, they each get about 325 pages of information every day…And to do their jobs they only need about five pages of info every day!

This is where the Critical Thinking Skills Gap comes in big time. How do they know how to scan all that fast? How do they know how to synthesize it into manageable groupings? How do they know how to compare, contrast and prioritize all that? How do they know how to 1.6% useful stuff (5 pages) from within the 98.4% noise and crap? Nobody knows how to triage their info!

Academically Adrift? Hell. Try this on for size: Business’s Daily Triage Crisis…That ain’t getting’ any better.

There’s much buzz among the digerati about PewResearchCenter’s latest research findings on Gen Y: Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit.

Important findings, yes. But not earth shattering in newness. Digital natives have been on this track for some time. What we found more intriguing was one quote buried among the me-too-ers in the report who all declared that digital natives will stay heavy digital users. (Duh?)

Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, went futher. Like Hacking Work, he tapped into this generation’s need to go beyond being heavy tech users and to start taking control.

Searls: We have much left to work out. For example, take ‘terms of use.’ Sellers have them. Users do not — at least not ones that they control. Wouldn’t it be good if you could tell Facebook or Twitter (or any other company using your data) that these are the terms on which they will do business with you, that these are the ways you will share data with them, that these are the ways this data can be used, and that this is what will happen if they break faith with you? Trust me: user-controlled terms of use are coming. (Work is going on right now on this very subject at Harvard’s Berkman Center, both at its Law Lab and Project VRM.) Two current technical developments, ‘self-tracking’ and ‘personal informatics,’ are examples of ways that power is shifting from organizations to individuals – for the simple reason that individuals are the best points of integration for their own data, and the best points of origination for what gets done with that data. Digital natives will eventually become fully empowered by themselves, not by the organizations to which they belong, or the services they use. When that happens, they’ll probably be more careful and responsible than earlier generations, for the simpler reason that they will have the tools.

The power is shifting from organizations…Gen Y has the tools and desire and reasons to become fully empowered by themselves.

That’s why we see hacking work as such a major force: Power…Control…Risk…those are the real issues. And that these digital natives have back-of-the-hand knowledge of how to use their tools for completely new outcomes. We ain’t seen nothing yet!

Certainly not when Lou Costello is one of them! Here he demonstrates for the boss how 13 x 7 = 28!!

Abbott: Did you ever go to school, stupid?
Costello: Yes sir, and I came out the same way.

As part of our research for Hacking Work, we conducted hundreds of sets of online and in-person conversations exploring, among many issues, how Gen Y’s hitting critical mass will affect the design of work and how it gets hacked. For the summary of our findings, see Gen Y Conversations Download.

Here is just one thread of those conversations…

VIEWS ON GEN Y by Gen Yer Matthew:

Q1. What are the top three work issues that are most critical to attracting and keeping most workers under 30? I want to caveat that my answers apply only to workers WORTH KEEPING. Such people have intrinsic motivation to do their work, and thus are full of creativity, energy and vision. Others care only about money. In my experience, the overlap between such people and lifeless cube drones is high. So while the below strategies won’t do much to retain these people, you needn’t worry about that, because drones are easily replaceable.

1. Our jobs should keep up with our evolving interests. We are young. We shouldn’t be expected to know exactly what we want to do for the next 40+ years. This is especially true of dynamic people who are curious about all sorts of things. When we tire of our current jobs and want to explore something else, find a way to accommodate that desire.

2. Have an open door. This may be obvious if you work in technology or engineering, but it is not at all universal. Leaders at my first job were obsessed with the chain of command, meaning that a middle management buffer lay between newcomers’ ideas and the executives who could enact them. You should always be willing to listen to an underling’s ideas, no matter the disparity in rank. This openness to new suggestions is necessary not just to fulfill #1 above, but to keep people happy with the day-to-day of their current job. The creative people are different from the drones, and nothing is more insulting or discouraging to the former than being treated like the latter. When you don’t listen to your people, you’re essentially telling them to go sit at their desks and shut up.

3. Keep salary and job level in line with achievements. The reason we want access to the boss is in part because we believe we can contribute at a higher level, and that we are going places. We believe in the storybook mailroom worker’s rise to the top floor. The only difference is, we want it to happen now. We believe less in “putting in one’s time” than in being rewarded proportionally for our contributions. This is more about fairness and equity than simply money. Just like teenagers want to be treated like adults, rookies want the same respect afforded to veterans.

Q2. For the top three issues you’ve listed above: What must we Start / Stop / Change?

1. Placement procedures must change. For people to be happy at work, you must give them work they will enjoy. For large organizations, stop letting HR place new hires. (The fewer hiring decisions HR is allowed to make, the better.) Also, start letting people explore other areas of your organization, especially in their first few years. If they come across an office they never knew existed but sounds interesting, make it easy for them to try it out. And every few years, go to your good people and say, “You’ve been doing a great job in strategy/customer support/user research. What do you want to do next?” They’ll love the challenge you’ve given them and the commitment you’ve shown.

2. Start having open calls for new ideas. I realize you can’t attend to every single person’s harebrained ideas. And being too congenial with your employees means that you’ll be fighting off the wrong type of people: suck-ups and crazies. Often, the best ideas are in the minds of people too shy or considerate to bother you with them. So give them an opportunity to be heard. Sponsor an essay contest or start a prediction market for ideas. On top of finding good ideas and fomenting creativity, it will also help you identify bright new employees, which is pretty hard if you have a few thousand people under you.

3. Stop having arbitrary time-in-position rules that keep a worthy employee from being quickly promoted. To say that everyone must be an assistant for three years before becoming an associate is the equivalent of saying that everyone learns at the same pace. This works only for drones, and as I said earlier, we aren’t interested in satisfying them. The same goes for minimum degree requirements. I have two of them, and I readily admit that they mean pretty much nothing, aside from the Clay Shirky-social fact sense. We ask for them on job applications because that’s all we have to go on. we know absolutely nothing else about one another. But when it comes to promoting them, that’s no longer true. We have seen them in action and we know their character. Choosing people based on their stock seems so impersonal. Besides, I would much rather have a self-taught engineer than one who was simply fulfilling curriculum requirements.

4. Bosses must stop considering the continuity of their company/service/unit as a must-do.

5. Fire more bad performers. Hard workers don’t like putting up with bad ones, and one of the best ways to make great people happy at work is to surround them with other great people.

As part of our research for Hacking Work, we conducted hundreds of sets of online and in-person conversations exploring, among many issues, how Gen Y’s hitting critical mass will affect the design of work and how it gets hacked. For the summary of our findings, see Gen Y Conversations Download.

Here is just one thread of those conversations…

VIEWS ON GEN Y by Kate: What a great topic! I love the discussion we are starting to brew. This topic is one that is near and dear to my heart both personally and professionally.

For me, the question of “what’s wrong with work” is not as relevant as what’s wrong/right in my relationship with work. In working with various generations, especially Gen Yers, I have learned as a borderline Boomer/Xer to challenge my own relationship with work and I have come to the conclusion that I am truly fully accountable for my relationship with my work.

The older I become, the more options I envision for myself and welcome the competition globally as it makes us all better and the work much more interesting.

I am accountable for my relationship with what I do, when I do it, why I do it, how I do it and most importantly, who I work with. I choose to do work that is meaningful. I choose to work with interesting colleagues and that I can learn from. I choose to work in a culture of trust, innovation and shared values. I choose to have a healthy work/life relationship.

After 25 years with major Fortune 500′s in various leadership roles, I am finding myself heavily influenced by this bold new generation and I am trying to figure out how I too can have it all. Currently, the concept of “Me Inc.” feels like a pretty good way to get what I want as it provides a much faster way than trying to change an archaic culture.

So, what’s wrong with work…nothing. What’s wrong with our relationship with work? That’s up to each of us. What’s wrong with Corporate America….don’t get me going!

I personally think it is time we all become more accountable for our relationship with work and then start boldly start to evolve the institution.

As part of our research for Hacking Work, we conducted hundreds of sets of online and in-person conversations exploring, among many issues, how Gen Y’s hitting critical mass will affect the design of work and how it gets hacked. For the summary of our findings, see Gen Y Conversations Download.

Here is just one thread of those conversations…

VIEWS ON GEN Y by Gen Yer Takisha: I think there are so many things wrong with work, particularly in this country, that it’s hard to know where to start. I am specifically speaking from the role that I have been socialized to consider every time I apply for a job, attend a job fair, network, or do all the other things we do as Americans to get work. I am a black female living in a world that is very racially segregated, especially in the workplace.

One of the biggest things that is wrong with work is the way in which people work. Most jobs claim to be collaborative, but I have found that this is largely untrue. People are assigned mindless activities by gatekeepers. Then they are expected to report to someone higher up, someone who does not work nearly as hard as those who report to him or her. I think that this mode of “collaboration” results in unnecessary competition and a certain degree of resent from workers. This is one of the clearest reasons most people are terribly unhappy with their jobs.

Another major problem with work is the degree to which companies expect their employees to be completely alike. This is more than just assimilation (which in and of itself is a problem). This is akin to workers enduring a process of “zombification” to make them more appealing to each other and to the “higher-ups.” It is a process that erases every sense of who one is (or would like to be) and it, too, contributes to the perpetuation of mindless work. It is also a means by which race and sexuality issues are dealt with (or not dealt with). It’s not that we have to deal with these issues. It’s the way we think about these issues. We think that race and sexuality have to be dealt with and so one of the ways that we deal with such issues is to make everyone alike so that the issues are less apparent. Making the issues less obvious keeps companies from being responsible when workers do something that could make companies civilly liable. Making the issues less obvious also creates a sense of homogeneity, a comfort zone where no differences are tolerated.

I believe we are terribly overworked. One of the best books I have ever read is The Overworked American which deals with the gradual increase in work hours as well as the simultaneous increase in spending and housework. It is a detailed (but short) account of how we spend our time at work as well as how we are socialized to believe work is all there is while at the same time, paradoxically socialized to despise going to work. It is a sad cycle. Our commitment to “overwork” has left us unhealthy, both mentally and physically, as well as prone to neurotic impulses and increasingly isolated.

As part of our research for Hacking Work, we conducted hundreds of sets of online and in-person conversations exploring, among many issues, how Gen Y’s hitting critical mass will affect the design of work and how it gets hacked. For the summary of our findings, see Gen Y Conversations Download.

Here is just one thread of those conversations…

VIEWS ON GEN Y by Gen Yer Johan:

MY TOP THREE
1. How meaningful or purpose driven the work is.
 I think we are a purpose driven generation. We look for deliver something more than job’s tasks. This make it difficult, because everybody has an specific passion or internal mission in life.
2. Life/Work Balance. What does the company offer to help us to achieve it? 
We love outdoors, we love friends, we love doing and get involved in other stuff (anything that contributes to our purpose finding in life).
3. The WIIFM the WIIFU (What’s In It For Us?) factors. 
This generation wants to grow. By trainings, by daily interactions, by doing always something new and not just a repetitive task, by being creative, by being supported in their college goals.
We want to grow not only as professionals, but as human beings. We want our tribe (our circle or partners, friends / co-workers) growing too.
 We want to develop our own companies and business, how does your job offer is going to help me to achieve all that?

DEGREE OF CHANGE ON…
1. How meaningful or purpose driven the work is.
 Volume: A lot
. Velocity: Right now! Many under 30 workers leave their job because they didn’t find a sense of purpose (plus it wasn’t well paid). 
Newness: Companies needs to do a really breakthrough on this. It is not easy. However some philantropy programs are starting to do some changes
2. Life/Work Balance. What does the company offer to help us to achieve it?
Volume: Medium
Velocity: Into next 3 years
Newness: Some companies needs to learn from zero. However, other’s just need to adjust official programs on this, and not just leave it in their managers’ criteria
3. The WIIFM the WIIFU (What’s In It For Us?) factors. 
Volume: A lot (Extrinsic factors are not enough (money, health insurance). 
Velocity: Into next 5 years
 Newness: This is totally related/attached to the efforts on Number 1 and 2.

WHAT MUST WE…
1. Start…:
 Thinking how your processes, services and business add value to your employees life
….Understanding which are the intrinsic motivations for this generation
….Creating social spaces in your business sites
2. Stop…: Thinking that we’re just interested on money….Managing as the industrial revolution era — we are people not machines
….Firing experienced people from companies because they’re not too young — this generation needs mentors!
…Hiring just based on technical skills
3. Change…: The current economic models used to run operations in our companies (I know this is not easy, but let’s try to think about it)
….The way companies hire people
….Recognition programs

As part of our research for Hacking Work, we conducted hundreds of sets of online and in-person conversations exploring, among many issues, how Gen Y’s hitting critical mass will affect the design of work and how it gets hacked. For the summary of our findings, see Gen Y Conversations Download.

Here is just one thread of those conversations…

VIEWS ON GEN Y by John: I think that people under 30 are fundamentally different in ways that will impact every workplace. The way people interact with the world, the way they get things done, is completely different than the way Baby Boomers learned to do things. I still feel guilty when someone walks in my office and I’m browsing Facebook — then I realize that it’s part of my job. And for those Gen Y employees, it’s one of the tools they use to get things done. Browsing the Internet used to be seen as slacking off. Nobody I work with could do their job without being connected to the Internet. For that matter, the days of chats by the water cooler have been replaced with Instant Messaging. In fact, it’s rare to see some co-workers with less than three IMs going on at once. And yes, they’re usually about work.

I don’t think Gen-Y employees are less motivated or have poor work ethics. However, I think they behave in ways that are hard to understand. As a parent of four pre-teens, I see some things that really make this evident….

> Information At Your Fingertips. Every resource is available at any computer connected to the Internet. I see my son spend all his time researching an assignment for school on Google, rather than at the library. I see him going right to the source, NASA, or the Smithsonian, or a company website. I see him sharing ideas with friends over IM while he’s writing a paper. Employees expect that everything they need should be available to them. That’s the way the world works for them.

> Timelines are compressed. I get email from my daughter at work, and she expects an answer while she’s still online. Since everything someone needs is available right now somewhere, finding it is the assignment, not creating it. And starting early doesn’t offer much of an advantage. A two-week long deadline for a one-hour assignment will usually mean the person will start on day 13.

> Timeshifting is prevalent. Tivo means you can watch a TV show when you want (and skip the commercials). Email means you can ask a question anytime you want, and maybe get an answer in minutes, but definitely in a half-day. Voicemail and Caller-ID means you don’t have to ever talk to someone you don’t want. Employees are going to do less “face to face,” even in a meeting. They’ll want to gather information, then do their part on their own time. Between IMs with their friends, or perhaps an occasional game of Bejeweled.

> Multimedia is the message. Gen Yers have gotten a lot of their information in pictures, audio clips, video clips. And strangely, they think it’s normal to reply to a video clip with a video clip of their own. We need to give employees the tools to communicate the way that works best for them, not the way we think it should be for us.

> Relationships online are just as real as in-person. IM means you really can be in multiple places at once, at least having multiple conversations at once. And you can have a friend across town, or across the world. It’s not uncommon to flirt on IM, argue on IM, break up on IM. Employees are better prepared to have a battle in email, or solve a problem with a co-worker or client in email, rather than face to face. Boomers will see that as unprofessional. Gen Yers don’t. The good news is that management can use these same tools to build relationships. At [Company Name Withheld], our VP of HR has an internal blog. Our company meetings are often held as webcasts. Even management training can be done online.

Mind-bending open-source goodness – a freely available, DIY, inexpensive to create laser cutter is being designed by our friends Addie and Stefan. They’re asking the community to pay for the R&D (through kickstarter.com) so that more of us can make more cool things.

This is how giving something away can be more profitable than the sum of it’s parts – it’s unlikely that a company would pay for them to make a DIY laser kit. What’s more, in making their design available they’re creating contract and consultancy work for themselves in the future, as well as a chance to sell future designs. And their up-front costs are covered by a community of interested folks who will all benefit enormously.

It’s a pretty amazing example of the hacker mentality pulling the rug out from under big industry (low-end laser cutters run in the tens of thousands of dollars), to everyone’s benefit.

Part 2 in Wake Up! Series
I learn so much from mulitple LinkedIn discussion groups. One just asked: What will be the biggest leadership challenge in the next five years? Quickly, a common theme emerged: The upcoming generation of workers…their expectations, their abilities, their ways of dealing with the economic crisis.

From Martin, head of a firm specializing in leadership issues: “The next generation inspires me each and every day. They have a lot to learn from us, but we have just as much to learn from them.”

From Joseph, a CEO: “Some [in the workforce] will not take risks…Many will try to stay under the radar….Our best and brightest will begin to look for alternate career choices [instead of] climb[ing] the corporate ladder.”

From Christine, the head of Org. Development at a Fortune 750 firm: “Demographic/generational changes will challenge current talent strategies (recruitment, total compensation, development).”

From Tarun, a manager from New Delhi, India: “The generation gap [between GenY as middle managers and older generation as senior managers] may affect the function of business because of differences in opinion and style of functioning.”

The consensus: GenY’s needs, skills and beliefs will be among the top leadership challenge over the next five years.

But here’s the wild card: Most everyone is assuming the same power/control structures as we’ve seen in the last five years. What if GenY changes that? What if they just hack anything that doesn’t work for them? How will that change the discussion? How will that change our workplace? Hmmmmm.

Hey Leaders, Wake Up: Part 1

How many times have we heard some figurehead espouse that cliché: The children are our future.

Sounds great when the feelings that evokes are puppy dogs, rainbows and supporting improved education. But what about when those darn kids are telling us inflexible old farts that the world has to change? Do we still accept them as our future then?

According to research by Tufin Technologies, almost half of New York teenagers they surveyed thought hacking into systems was OK and one in six had already tried it. Then they jumped the pond to the UK and surveyed university students. About one-quarter of UK university students survey have hacked into IT systems, 28% considered it easy, and “an entrepreneurial 15% revealed that they hacked to make money.”

What we find interesting is how Fast Company headlined their story about this: “Fear the Children” Sorry… Wrong lesson gleaned, guys.

Nay, nay we say: Embrace the children! Learn from them! Realize that they are hacking systems that were designed to ensure their institution’s success, but not necessarily theirs. They hack all infrastructures and tools because a) they can…it’s easier than you think, and b) they are forced to by the designs they were handed. They’re corporate-centered, not user-centered.

Leaders, wake up. These students are your incoming workforce. If they’re hacking to make stuff better before they show up on your doorstep, do you think they’re gonna stop once under your employ? If you hand them tools and infrastructures that don’t meet their needs, what do you think they’re gonna do?

Leaders, the kids are our future. Deal with it. Now. Please.

To those who say that the youth today are presumptious milksops, I cite www.theseventeenmagazineproject.com, a critique of Seventeen Magazine by a 17 year-old who is living according to it’s advice. The results are both obvious and suprising, and her ongoing analysis is perceptive and entertaining by turn.

It’s always a pleasure to see dry wit used to deliver insight, but getting it from a teenager who is both leveraging it as a platform (you’d better believe her big-media interviews are going on her resume) and educating her peers is pure gold. After all, who doesn’t want to know what a seventeen year old thinks of seventeen magazine – especially when trying to live by its edicts?

It’s a damn clever hack that benefits everybody – even Seventeen Magazine, for whom editorial accountabilty to their ostensible readers is sorely lacking.

Many of us remember when we were collectively scratching our heads around who should be able to link to whom about what – at least until Google turned it into the best possible way to monetize our online social and financial capital. But some companies are still fighting the good fight, shooting at the only target around: their feet.

Case in point; The Edinburgh Fringe Festival website. They insist that reading their site constitutes a binding contract (not true in any country I know of) and that opening up their platform to others to share, remix, and distribute would cost them significant revenue. Nevermind that most other festivals go out of their way to do just that.

There are plenty of other examples; Vodafone, Ticketmaster, Easyjet – they all prevent deep-linking. That is, the ability for others to link to webpages that are NOT the front page is forbidden.

That means that all their carefully-curated content cannot be shared. Information about their sales, their special offers, their services – all private. Not a very smart way to run a company, is it? This is 2010, and yet the hacks most of us thought had gone mainstream in 1997 still prevail in places – which is exactly why people like us need to boostrap our businesses: they aren’t going to do it themselves.