As always, I reserve the right to go off-topic, although I’m not sure what “on-topic” for me would be…

Is the Millenial generation shaping the future workforce?

The Millenial generation is creating a bit of generational tension as they bring their cultural imprint to the workforce. Employers realize Millennials are a large part of the future work force, but employers (namely Boomers, and to a lesser degree Generation X) are concerned about the generation’s desire to shape their jobs to fit their lives rather than adapt their lives to the workplace.

It may seem obvious that employees should show up on time, limit lunchtime to an hour and turn off cellphones during meetings. But those basics aren’t necessarily apparent to many millennials.

Seriously? Why is that obvious? [1] Why are we – all generations, not just the Millenial generation – bound by the old standards? How are the standards of “professionalism” being rewritten?

Why shouldn’t / can’t Millenials shape workplace rules and expectations rather than merely adapting to existing conventions?

John Hagel:

[Shaping] strategies use positive incentives to mobilize and focus thousands of participants in shaping specific markets or industries

Three key elements come together in these strategies – a compelling shaping view to provide focus for investment by participants, a powerful shaping platform that provides economic leverage for participants and a set of acts and assets by the shaper to communicate conviction and capability to potential participants.

Does the Millenial generation have enough of a shared view and platform to shape workplace conventions?

Will the Millenial generation just drop out of Boomer corporate culture and employ themselves by creating their own companies and workplace cultures?

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More: How might workspaces adapt to aging generations?

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[1] Granted, the third one is obvious, simple human respect.
[2] For more on shaping strategies download the full article (PDF) from Harvard Business Review: Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption.

It’s always great to see past clients continue to progress. ClearCount Medical Solutions has raised $4.1 M in Series A financing from Draper Triangle Ventures:

ClearCount Medical Solutions, a developer of RFID technology used to detect and track the location of surgical sponges. The Pittsburgh company just brought in $4.1 million in first-round financing, earmarked for the wide release of its commercial product next year. The round was led by Draper Triangle Ventures and included unnamed angel investors.

What the news reports and press release leave out is that ClearCount was founded by two friends of mine (Gautam Gandhi and Steven Fleck) from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business MBA program. They took an idea and worked on it during school, winning business plan competitions and raising angel capital before committing to it full-time after graduation. This Series A financing comes after years of their hard work to develop the product and the business, including winning patents, educating people about the problems and inefficiencies of current methods of tracking surgical sponges and instruments during surgeries, working with medical institutions to test their product in the field, clearing FDA approval and tirelessly promoting their solution.

Congrats…

More news:

• ClearCount Medical Solutions receives $4.1 million in VC funding

Sample Financial Model created by Taylor Davidson Right-click to download. Zip file, 230 KB. See more details below.

Summary: Focus on what you can control. Download this Sample Financial Model (Excel spreadsheet) to help you explore and understand the key drivers of your business model.

There’s been a tremendous amount of discussion lately around a potential “startup depression”, highlighted by Sequoia Capital’s presentation to their portfolio company CEOs.

I’ve commented throughout the web on many angles of the subject; the general gist breaks down to a) most of the the actions startups need to take in recessions they should have been doing anyway, and b) recessions can be great opportunities to start companies. Paul Graham agrees.

The important takeaway from the “startup depression” conversations should be to understand how macroeconomic conditions could impact decisions and expectations made by your customers, investors, partners and employees. But the focus should remain on what you can control: creating value, solving problems, finding solutions, staying in the game.

What should you do first?
Take a hard look at your business model: not just the “revenue model”, but the entire equation: customers, revenue, costs, balance sheet, cash flows and financing.

• Do you understand your key assumptions?
• Do you understand the key drivers of your business model?
• Have you estimated the impact of varying your key assumptions? (univariate and multivariate)
• Can you estimate your financing needs and sources and uses of funds under multiple operational and macroeconomic scenarios?
• Do you understand your burn rate and where your cash is going? (“Cash is King”)
• Do you know what you can control, what you can change, and how it will impact your bottom line?

Download this Sample Financial Model to help you understand how reach those important insights about your business. This model won’t solve all your problems, it’s not customized to your business and it doesn’t do the analysis for you: but it should help you start thinking, and if you have questions or need help on the analysis or customization drop me a line.

Sample Financial Model created by Taylor Davidson Right-click to download. Zip file, 230 KB. See more details below.

• © 2008 Unstructured Ventures, LLC | created by Taylor Davidson
• License: This Excel spreadsheet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. What that means to me: use it, share it, edit it, simply provide attribution to me as the creator; but don’t sell it.
• Warranties, guarantees, etc.: View Excel file for statements of legal warranties, representation, guarantees and liability.
• Microsoft, Windows and Excel logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

The Schedule Grid at BarCampDC2 | Washington, DC, USA | Oct 2008

After beCamp, SocialDevCamp, Startup Weekend and BarCampRDU, I figured I knew what to expect from BarCampDC2 this past weekend in Washington, DC.

Thus, in the spirit of learning new things, I decided to go to the presentations and discussions that I knew very little about: Political community-building using social media (Shireen Mitchell and Jill Foster), C-SPAN’s Debate Hub, web education (Jeff Brown), design (Samantha Warren), iPhone development (Dave Troy) and geo-tagged data mapping. It was fun to get outside my little corner of the world and participate in discussions where I didn’t understand all the issues, know the references and get the inside jokes.

Even better, it was good to get the chance to meet and talk to people that I usually only interact with online. BarCamp is an interesting experience, and after having gone to a couple I’m curious: I know BarCamps have expanded to other countries and industries, but how does the experience differ, how does the interaction and organization model work in other cultures and countries, how well do the events “work” in other industries? Any stories to share?

More about BarCampDC2:

• What is a BarCamp?
• Details about BarCampDC2, held at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University.
• Photos: everyone’s photos on Flickr.
• The conversation on Twitter. [Updated 10/20 for multiple hashtags]

Umair Haque: Not a Great Depression, a Great Rebalancing:

The striking thing about today’s economy isn’t that lame, soul-crushing industrial-era business is imploding into a black hole of economic nothingness. That was predictable. Rather, it’s that while the so-called value created by, for example, investment banks, is proving to have been largely an illusion, revolutionaries bringing new DNA to the table are able to create authentic, durable, meaningful value. [Umair's emphasis]

… As numerous observers has rightly pointed out, we face a great deleveraging — a tsunami of debt is being sucked out of the financial system, as confidence in counterparties implodes.

… The great deleveraging is really a great rebalancing: a rebalancing of the roles of equity and debt in the global economic system. Though in hindsight, it’s easy to see that debt was unsustainably cheap, it’s the flipside that reveals a source of tremendous institutional decay: equity has been unsustainably costly. [Umair's emphasis]

My comment:

There’s also the consideration of how companies started to use equity as a replacement for cash compensation: making the cost of equity even more expensive and changing the incentives and relationship between the company and it’s equity-compensated owners-managers.

Given how equity became an important part of compensation it’s not surprising that managers use their positions (of power, of information, of asymmetrical information) to use whatever capital structure fits their individual benefit. Imagine all the ways we’ve seen this issue crop up: stock option expensing, stock option backdating, golden parachutes, change of control payment clauses, accounting and earnings manipulation, etc, etc.

It all points back to institutional decay: the financial phenomenon we’re living through is a result of how we all acted according to the incentive systems we face very day. Many, many small decisions to maximise end up leading to global minimisation.

How do we fix it? Create institutional systems that force more interaction between inter-linked parties and their economic streams, increased information and decision transparency, greater interaction with customers?

Companies can choose not to participate in that system or not, maybe they need it, maybe they don’t: but their choice sends a signal.

Change incentives, change the system, change the DNA, change the game.

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Is it lame to quote yourself from a comment on another blog? Given how much value exists in blog comments scattered across the web in splintered conversations, I don’t think so. Follow me using Disqus Web / RSS (just comments using Disqus) and Backtype Web / RSS (all comments) if you’re curious to see what I’m commenting on around the web…

With so much interest in the “How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned through Failure” post, I thought it would be valuable to revisit the lessons to point out underlying themes. Perhaps eventually we’ll be able to condense the twenty-five lessons (thanks for Matt for the thought)…

One of the core lessons behind “How to Fail” concerns our quest for optimization; we regularly grossly misjudge the costs and benefits of attempting to optimize our decisions. We use too much data, spend too much time planning and misjudge the opportunity costs of optimization. We regularly analyze data, structure decisions and make plans without benchmarking our past decision-making processes and results. We spend too much time answering the questions we know and too little time considering what questions we aren’t asking. Far too often we make unrealistic and unpractical attempts to foresee the future; even worse is that we create create plans without the flexibility to make easy changes or the redundancy to survive.

We regularly over-optimize even though we are usually wrong at predicting the future; and we attempt it again, and again, and again.

We are seeing the results of over-optimization crop up in the current economic environment: over-leveraged businesses, over-leveraged consumers, short term decisions and quarterly-focused profit maximization, all shaped by our incentives to optimize and the timing misalignments between risks and rewards. [1] Our attempts at local maximization create global minimization.

Can we develop better guides and practices to help us identify over-optimization? Can we learn from our mistakes?

I’m trying to learn from my mistakes and heed my own twenty-five lessons. In your experiences, what would be your #26?

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[1] I’m not saying it’s the ultimate cause, just one of the factors….

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How can you read “How to Fail”?

• Read on the web.
• Read (and download) the PowerPoint presentation on Slideshare.
• Download the eBook PDF.

Also…

• Just two more days to vote on my “Questions, Answered, Again” project.
• Right now I’m posting a series on the future of the photography business on my other website. The first two posts are up: Five Lessons: How Photographers Can Create New Business Models and Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition.

As always, if you want to get updates on this projects and others, follow Unstructured Thoughts by RSS (as posted) or Email (max once daily).