Note: Author has academic degree in this change management stuff. So, until he woke up, he was selling this “resistance to change” snake oil.

Monetary cost to the US so far: $3.3 trillion. That forced one of the most powerful nations in the world to invest about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda invested in planning and executing the attacks. That’s one hell of an ROI.

Of course, we’re talking evil here. We should never forget what has been done to us and the toll it had on our nation, our lives and our souls.

But we can also flop the lessons learned. Turn evil power into good power.

In the world of today’s business: The small and nimble can force the powerful and mighty to completely change how they approach planning, executing, treating their workforce, satisfying their customers. The small, fast and nimble can win the noble war of doing more good for more customers and more employees than those businesses currently in power.

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.

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?

So far so good.

"S" for Simplicity!

Not very audience-centered. Not very simple. But…We worked through it and came up with a compromise. Fair enough… I’m pragmatic. I can adjust.

Then came the title of my session: They added onto what I had provided (so it mentioned their theme). It became a 16-word title. 16-WORD title! That’s not simple. Barely tweet-able.

The point is: This situation is not unique.

Most every call I receive from most every senior exec goes something like this: “Would you help us with making things simpler at our company?” But here’s what’s unspoken, and usually in between the lines: “BTW, I’m defining simplicity as making it easier for me to get my strategies implemented. Simplicity is really all about me and my success.” It is so rare that an executive would ever think, or say: “My goal is to truly make things simpler for the workforce, because I understand that that’s enlightened self-interest.”

It really shouldn’t be so hard to make things simpler for the people doing the work.

I recently had a fantastic sounding board experience. Someone had referred me to Mark Levy, a great guy who other speakers have used to rethink how they are positioning themselves.

A magician, a marketer, a great storyteller, but what makes Mark so special is that he is a great questioner and listener. What I thought would be a brief lunch turned out to be about 3.5 hours of fantastic and insightful conversation. Things that I thought I had figured out long ago, suddenly needed to be reexamined, possibly rethought.

Hopefully, at some point, everyone will see the results of what I learned that day — in the form of enhanced positioning and clarity and value from me. But that’s for later.

Here, now, spend a moment pondering: Who is your sounding board? How often do you check in with him or her? Should you be doing so more often? Do you have different sounding boards for different kinds of challenges and situations?

The ultimate sounding board in business was probably Peter Drucker. While he was alive, business leaders would come to sit at his feet and have him as the most simple-yet-profound questions. Among them: “What business are you in?” Most would tell you that it is so easy to answer that question…it’s always the second slide in their standard PowerPoint presentation. Yet the truly smart ones would dig deep into it, with a sounding board, like Drucker, asking many follow up questions until they truly discovered The Truth.

Who is helping you discover Your Truth?

From “anarchists” to “rule breakers” to “heretics” — because everyone knows at least one story about Black Hat Hackers, baddies who are out to steal credit card numbers or worse, they see all hacking as a malicious act. Not so.

Hacking is merely the pursuit of knowledge, trying to understand how something works by taking it apart and putting it together in ways the original creator hadn’t thought of. In business, that’s called innovation and systems-thinking. In life, hacking is actually quite Zen.

Badhidharma is considered the first Patriarch of Zen, who left India for China around 460AD. He said “In order to see a fish you must watch the water.” That is what hackers do. They observe with what Zen Buddhists call a “beginner’s mind” — freeing oneself of preconceived ideas of how things are, how they must be, and exploring all possibilities.

They also have a great sense of humor! The following is excerpted from Richard Thieme’s Zen and The Art of Hacking. I urge you to read Theime’s entire post:

Hackers are men and women who go where they must go to learn what they must learn.

Often portrayed as rebellious heretics, hackers are in fact faithful followers of three gods:

• Odin, who hung cold and alone in a windswept tree for nine long days and nights, sleepless and single-hearted, in order to seize the knowledge of the Runes. The Runes were symbols of what the Greeks called logos, the creative power of the Word, the magic of consciousness acting on inanimate matter and making it plastic.

• The trickster Coyote, who some call Pan, his wry humor a grin in the shadows, his appetites and passions a firestorm of Dionysian ardor.

• Jesus the man, the earthy Jew, a real mensch rather than a dreamy-eyed Nordic nanny-of-the-planet, who refused to knuckle under to convention or the suffocating constraints of the lowest common denominator of the crowd.

But that’s also the problem with SXSW: the only way you could see, hear and learn all there is would be to break the space/time continuum, being everywhere, all at once. Yet Ogilvy has helped out with that. They have produced Ogilvy Notes, sending graphic artist note-takers to record some of the sessions. (Alas, not mine…boo hoo.)

Here are 10 Kick-Ass Learnings that I’ve culled from those online records…

1. Agile Self Development must begin with your big vision, and is accomplished through a series of small, quick sprints to get you there. Track your progress dutifully. Keep daily logs or journals.
— Dinah Sanders, Marcy Swenson

2. Anatomy of a Design Decision must always be evaluated from the user’s perspective. What’s it like to be a user of this design?
— Jared Spool

3. How to Innovate at Big Companies: To overcome all the inevitable barriers, build prototypes of your ideas, and find like-minded people to help you prove the model…showing, demonstrating, using the prototypes.
— Gene Kim, William Hertling

4. Better Crowdsourcing: Scaling your idea means letting it go…Allowing other people to own it and do things with it that you could not have predicted.
— Daniel Honigman, Heidi Hackemer, John Winsor, Len Kendall

5. How to Sell Unsolicited Ideas: Nothing great ever happens without passion!… To change their thinking, you may have to change yours… The difference between knowing something and REALLY knowing it is being able to explain it simply, quickly… Avoid short-term compensation, aim for long-term rewards.
— Alessandra Lariu, Hashem Bajwa, John Wimsatt, Nick Parish, Ty Montague

6. Collaboration Over Competition is all about people, relationships and transparency. Collaborate with Frienemies who you can trust on a personal level, even if you have some goals that are different.
— Derek Neighbors, Jay Baer, Kristie Wells, Sally Strebel

7. Design Across Disciplines: Spend a day in the other discipline’s shoes (using and living their processes, procesdures, rules, tools, goals, etc.)
— Ben Yarrow, Elaine Wherry, Matthew Robbins, Stephen Atkinson

8. Creating Serendipitous Innovations Through Check-Ins: Keep asking “How could we make this easier?”
— Dennis Crowley, Pete Cashmore

9. Getting Past Your Fears in the Name of Creation: There is no creativity without risk. Give yourself permission to take the first step, a baby step. Try a quick fail to take away the power that fear has over you. Fear should be embraced as a motivator.
— Chris Guillebeau, Jonathan Fields

10. My Prototype Beat Up Your Business Plan: Investors don’t read business plans anymore… Get something out there! Now. Fast. Yes, it may be full of holes, but others will either make a product to fill the holes (making your product stronger, better) or they’ll help you fill the holes as you go along.
— Ade Olonoh, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Kendra Shimmell, Kristian Andersen

Want more? In addition to surfing page by page graphic notes online, you can also download the entire set:
• Download Day One
• Download Day Two
• Download Day Three

Their World is Just Like Your World: “For several decades, though, from about World War II until sometime in the last 10 years, the recording industry…” “Then came the Internet, and in less than a decade, that system fell.” Substitute your industry name for theirs and these sentences describe the sea-change you’re still experiencing.

Their Challenge/Opportunity is Your Challenge/Opportunity: Read the following, again changing industry names… “Music is getting harder to define again. It’s becoming more of an experience and less of an object. Without records as clearly delineated receptacles of value, last century’s rules—both industrial and creative—are out the window. For those who can find an audience or a paycheck outside the traditional system, this can mean blessed freedom from the music industry’s gatekeepers.” Sound familiar? It should. The massive changes you are experiencing also mean opportunities, if you’re ready to go for them.

Three Quick Tips:
1. You Are Your Brand: Everything you do creates or destroys your own brand image. See yourself as a brand. What do you stand for? How can you get that across in EVERYTHING you do?

2. Revenue Comes from Multiple Streams: If you are still dependent on just one paycheck, you’re dead career-wise. Every employee on the planet should have at least one, possibly several, entrepreneurial revenue streams.

3. Marketing Matters… Free is the New Path to Being Well-Paid: OK Go is most famous for its YouTube creations. But does that make money for them? “The quick answer is yes,” says Kulash. More important than record sales is the other revenue opportunities that their videos created for them. Same thing applies to you. For the rest of your career, you must be giving things away for free — research, presentations, advice, time, etc. — as a way of marketing for your NEXT job and additional opportunities for personal growth, compensation and more.

Only 11% of employees strongly agree that their managers show consistency between their words and actions.

Only 7% of employees strongly agree that they trust senior leaders to look out for their best interest.

And about 20% disagree that their company’s leader is completely honest and ethical, and one-quarter of respondents disagree that they trust management to make the right decisions in times of uncertainty.

Of these findings, Rick Garlick, Ph.D., senior director of consulting and strategic implementation for Maritz, said: “You’ve got to maintain credibility with your workforce as a means of getting them to totally buy in to the mission and vision of your company. Anything less fosters a disengaged workforce that puts self-interest at the top of its list of priorities.”

Net/net: We’re not trusting our execs…nor do they deserver our trust. At least not currently.