An aging workforce case study: When clowning isn't cool anymore

I've posted a few times over the last year or so on the blog about the really interesting and important demographic changes happening in the American workforce. Mostly, these changes break down into two, related areas. One, the workforce and the population overall is aging. And two, the overall US labor force participation rate is falling, due in large part to the increasing number and pace of retirements of baby boom generation workers.

But those posts of mine I've linked to above, and honestly most of the 'Econ' type articles on these trends (and their implications for workplaces, companies, and policy), tend to be pretty dry and mostly academic and not really the kinds of pieces that really make anyone think for more than a minute or two about them. Bar charts with fancy shading or graphs with some trend lines can only move you so much. None of seems all that real if you get my meaning.

So for this re-set and take on the aging workforce and what it might mean for you, instead of dropping another chart and trying to convince you that this stuff matters, I want to point you to a short, but fascinating piece from the NY Daily News titled National Clown Shortage May Be Approaching, Trade Organizations Fear that illustrates just how these trends are playing out in the real world, (if 'clowning' could be considered the real world that is).

Turns out there aren't enough people, especially younger people, taking up professional clowning as an occupation. Check some quotes from the NYDN piece:

Membership at the country’s largest trade organizations for the jokesters has plunged over the past decade as declining interest, old age and higher standards among employers align against Krusty, Bozo and their crimson-nosed colleagues.

“What’s happening is attrition,” said Clowns of America International President Glen Kohlberger, who added that membership at the Florida-based organization has plummeted since 2006. “The older clowns are passing away.”

“The challenge is getting younger people involved in clowning,” said Association President Deanna (Dee Dee) Hartmier, who said most of her members are over 40.

“What happens is they go on to high school and college and clowning isn’t cool anymore,” he said. “Clowning is then put on the back burner until their late 40s and early 50s.”

Right there, in the micro-micro world of professional clowning you can see just about all of the major issues with much wider swaths of the workplace and jobs landscape today.

The job has been around a long time, but kids don't see it as cool anymore, and not enough of them are entering the field.

The incumbents are all getting older, retiring, even dying off and shortages are manifesting.

But the job, believe it or not, has higher standards for entry than in the past, so at the same time that interest in the field is falling, the barriers to entry are rising. And customers, the end customers I mean, are demanding more and more for thieir dollar. According to Ringling Bros. Director of Talent David Kiser, “Our audience expects to be wowed. No longer is it good enough to just drop your pants and focus on boxer shorts.”

Ok, at this point, if you have not already bailed out, I want you to think past the scary clown shortage, and consider the roles and people in your organization.

There is almost no doubt you have some of these kinds of 'clown' roles in your shop - ones that are important to the business, but for some reason do not attract enough of a pipeline or candidate flow to sustain once the incumbents trail off. But at the same time as these jobs get more important and pressing to fill, business or technology changes make the qualifications you are looking for even more difficult. Finally, these are still 'clown' jobs after all, they are not the best paying, most socially desirable kinds of gigs.

Oh, one last thing - in the 'If my suitcase doesn't show up in baggage claim within 5 minutes of touching down I am going to tweet about how terrible this airline is' age of the social media enabled customer, the demands for service and performance of this clown role (that you can't fill) are just getting worse.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon I think, you will have to face the same kinds of challenges that are facing the circuses. 

What are you going to do to prepare for when (Insert whatever it is your company does) isn't cool anymore?

Dog food, champagne, and Email

I am grinding through about 12,000 speaking proposals for the upcoming HR Technology Conference in October 2014, and in a recent review call, a rep from one of the vendors made almost a side comment about their own internal use as a company of the HR solution that they are offering in the market. The context was a discussion about a newer recruiting application the vendor was advocating and the vendor rep sort of off-handedly mentioned something like 'And we used the tool to source and help assess candidates for the 15 developer positions we needed to fill last quarter'. 

Not a big deal right, that a HR technology company would use its own HR technology to help it solve its own HR problems and challenges. You would, as an observer or a potential customer of an HR technology solution sort of expect that the actual developer of a solution would have to naturally want to and be strongly motivated to use their own solutions in house. click to see what I am talking about

This concept of a supplier company and its employees using the technology, products, or services that they produce is refrred to as 'Eating your own dog food' or for more sophisticated suppliers, 'Drinking your own champagne.' And typically, and especially in the minds of potential customers and prospects, when a company 'Drinks its own champagne' it is a sign that one, they are committed and passionate about the product, and two, the product actually works.

This 'dog food/champagne' issue was in the news again recently when the President of PayPal, David Marcus, came down hard on PayPal employees who had refused to install the PayPal payments app on their phones, had forgotten their PayPal passwords, and essentially were not advocating for the product and brand by using the product (and using it publicly). 

Here is a short excerpt from Marcus' email to the PayPal team to give you a feel for just how serious 'eating your own dog food' is from this Exec's point of view:

As a matter of fact, it's been brought to my attention that when testing paying with mobile at Cafe 17 last week, some of you refused to install the PayPal app (!!?!?!!), and others didn't even remember their PayPal password. That's unacceptable to me, and the rest of my team, everyone at PayPal should use our products whenever available.

Marcus goes on though, and this next part is even more interesting:

In closing, if you are one of the folks who refused to install the PayPal app or if you can't remember your PayPal password, do yourself a favor, go find something that will connect with your heard and mind elsewhere.

Boom.

Marcus moves from, 'You really need to be an advocate for our products while you work here' to 'You probably should not be working here if you are not going to advocate for our products.'

Lots of commentators came down pretty hard on Marcus for the tone and message (maybe it was a bizarre set of !!! and ??? mixed in), but I think I am with him on this one. Wouldn't you expect someone who worked at PayPal to actually use PayPal?

I would. Just like I would expect a big payroll provider trying to sell payroll technology to my company to actually use that same technology to pay their own employees.

If a company doesn't internally use their own stuff (where applicable) or can't convince its own employees to adopt their products, to me that is a big red flag about the viability of the product, the commitment of the employees and the long-term chances of a successful partnership with their customers.

Postscript - If you click on the thumbnail image on the right side of this post, it will expand a 1977 advertisement for corporate email technology from Honeywell. If you read the fine print, (and it might be hard), after the copy that describes how wonderful this new email service will be, your 'Contact us to learn more' information contains a phone number and a postal or physical address. No way to contact Honeywell via email, even though that is precisely the service they are selling. Sure, in 1977 maybe none of the prospects would of even had email themselves, but to me that is not really the point. Honeywell would have looked really sharp and progressive if indeed, they offered email as a way to contact them about using email.

Postscript 2 - I am a Diet Coke fan. Last year at a vendor conference I was about to moderate a panel that included a participant from one of Coke's competitors. This panelist noticed my Diet Coke and asked me kindly but seriously, if I wouldn't mind leaving the Coke behind as we took the stage. And I did.

Have a great day!

Minecraft for the Enterprise

You probably have over the years heard various business-focused collaboration and knowledge-sharing software solutions like Yammer or Jive described as 'Facebook for the Enterprise.' The comparison was almost always more about the way that many of these business tools resembled Facebook in that they had a similar news or activity feed, had concepts like 'friending' or following, and possessed other features similar to Facebook like groups and in-app messaging. Over time these comparisons, and even that descriptive 'Facebook for the Enterprise' phrase seems to have fallen out of fashion.

There are at lease two reasons I think for that, one being that the market for these enterprise collaboration tools has matured to the point where most corporate prospects understand the basics of what they do without having to invoke Facebook as a point of comparison or reference. The other reason, and this is totally my opinion, is that most of us have realized that almost nothing truly productive (in the classic organizational collaboration context) ever gets done on Facebook. By continuing to compare their much more serious minded tools to Facebook, the providers of these tools are basically saying 'Take a look at our software solution that will remind you of the single biggest distraction and time suck that has ever existed.' And that probably is not good for business in the long term.

So since 'Facebook for the Enterprise' is seemingly drifting out to sea, I'd like to offer up an almost equally interesting and unexpected replacement - how about 'Minecraft for the Enterprise?'

You probably are familiar with Minecraft from its massive popularity, and if you have children between the ages of about 8 and 18, it’s almost certain that they have at least experimented with the game. If you are not familiar, the simplest way is to think of the fame as a kind of virtual Lego, an open-ended world where the player can build, create their own worlds, engage in battle, and even farm. Minecraft is a true worldwide phenomenon, and part of its appeal to more serious players is the ability to modify (‘mod’) the game, adding new materials, monsters, and other elements to the basic game.

These player developed (and shared) mods extend and enhance the game in many ways, and perhaps one of the most unusual, (and the one that could intrigue folks that design and develop enterprise systems), is the mod described in this post on the Salesforce developerForce blog titled Visualizing Salesforce Data... In Minecraft?

In the piece the author and developer of a mod that essentially connects the classic Salesforce CRM system to a new Minecraft world, describes just how (and seemingly how simple), it was to not only visualize sales, accounts, contacts, and other classic CRM data inside the familiar to just about every 11 year old world of Minecraft.

Check the video below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through) to see how your sales and sales funnel data looks rendered in Minecraft, and I will have a couple of comments afterwards.

Pretty cool right?

Re-set a sales status in Salesforce and boom - the corresponding lever in the Minecraft world that represents that status flips from up to down. Make the same type of change in Minecraft and the CRM is updated as well. Lose the sale and suddenly in Minecraft it gets dark and starts to rain. 

You get the idea. And while it is a pretty basic kind of interface at least at first glance, I think what it suggests about the potential future of enterprise systems, gamification, and the eventual personalization of user experience is what is really interesting.

Take the average Minecraft enthusiast and plop him or her in front of a Salesforce CRM screen and I am sure their eyes will begin to glaze over in about 30 seconds. In addition to the fact that it (and most other enterprise tools) just don't look very appealing to anyone, much less the generation that is growing up playing (and modding) Minecraft, the enterprise systems tend to be one size fits all. Beyond some simple personalizations like moving or renaming fields, significant modding is just not possible. And lastly like most mass appeal video games, playing Minecraft is simply fun. You can create, win rewards, defeat the bad guys, etc. Is 'playing' Salesforce ever fun?

I love the idea of one day having the abiltiy to welcome a new user of an Enterprise system to the organization and giving them the option to engage with and interact with the system in the way that they feel most comfortable, productuive, and even fun.

And I bet, most Salesforce admins would say they would be for anything that would encourage their users to keep their account information more up to date. 

If updating the customer account status was as fun as playing Minecraft, I bet more of them would.

And last thing, if you think the concept of 'Minecraft for the Enterprise' is silly, well, all I will say is that 'Facebook for the Enterprise' also seemed silly initially. Now, being social and collaborating on Facebook-like platforms is pretty mainstream. And we don't like that phrase any longer.

Perhaps playing Minecraft as a proxy for interacting with HR, CRM, or Finance systems will be too be pretty mainstream one day.

Have a great week!

Big Data - on the basketball court today, tomorrow in your office?

Super piece over at Grantland the other day titled The Data Flow Continues: NBA D-League Will Monitor Player Heart Rate, Speed, Distance Traveled, and More, about some of the steps that the NBA, (and its affiliated minor league the D-League), are taking that leverage wearable tracking devices to monitor player movements, player vital signs, and evaluate things like player fatigue levels and stress during the course of play.

These new devices, ones that go beyond the already in-place sophisticated video technology that records player actions like direction of movement, speed, acceleration and deceleration, and move into more precise measurements of a player's biological and physical status and condition, seem to offer NBA teams a rich and copious set of information that can inform in-game strategy, (Is LeBron really tired, or does he just look tired?), and off season training and conditioning plans.

But of course the potential backlash for the NBA and its teams is that no one, not even highly compensated NBA players, will be terribly excited about not only having their actions tracked, but also their physical reactions tracked as well.

But if we move off of thinking about this kind of physical tracking as something that is limited to jobs or activities like playing basketball we could easily see how this kind of technology and data collection and mining approach could have applications in other domains.

Wouldn't you like to know, Mr. or Ms. HR/Talent pro, how a given manager's team members physically react when they are in a performance coaching session, or getting any kind of feedback on their work? Do the team member's hearts start racing when their boss enters the room or begins one of his soliloquies? Do certain team members react and respond differently to the same managerial techniques? And wouldn't that information be valuable to feed back to the manager so that he or she could better tailor their style and approach to fit the individuals on their team?

I know what you are saying, no way are employees going to agree to be wired up like subjects in some kind of weird biology experiment. Too intrusive. Too much potential for the data to be lost. Too many chances for the data to be held against them.

The NBA players are probably going to make similar arguments, but eventually they will succumb.

I will leave with a direct pull quote from the Grantland piece, and as you read it, think about how naturally you could substitute 'organizations' for 'NBA teams'.

Bottom line: None of this stuff is going away. Data of all kinds are already piling up at a rate that is overwhelming NBA teams, and the pace and variety of data available will only increase. Teams are going to have to change hiring patterns, and likely hire additional staff, to mine anything useful out of all this information. And the holy grail, to me, remains what these tracking devices can tell us about health — about preventing injuries, predicting them, monitoring players’ training loads, and keeping them healthy.

Have a great weekend!

Why do old coaches get fired?

Taking a (needed) break today from the seemingly endless series of 'Robots that are coming to take your job and destroy everything you love' posts and getting back to something far, far more important - sports!

I caught an excellent piece on the AJC College Football blog featuring college coaching legend, and the current head football coach at my alma mater, the University of South Carolina, Steve Spurrier. Spurrier, also known as the Head Ball Coach, has has a legendary collegiate playing and coaching career. He won the Heisman Trophy as the nation's best college player in 1966, had a 10-year NFL playing career, and then has had a stellar college coaching run starting at Duke, then Florida, (winning a national title in 1996), and finally at South Carolina. At Carolina, Spurrier has led the Fighting Gamecocks to three consecutive 11 win seasons and become the most successful coach in school history.

But now, at 68 years of age, some observers are wondering just how much longer Spurrier can continue to put in the work and successfully compete at the highest level of college football, and in a position that is notorious for insanely long hours, tremendous pressure to win, and significant demands on ones time. Or, said differently, some are asking, 'Is Spurrier, or any coach of more advanced years, still able to get the job done?'

To that, in a recent AJC piece, Spurrier offered what I think was one of the sharpest observations about age and on the job performance, and one that resonates and applies just about in every field.

Check out the take below:

“I will tell you what is neat. You look around at college basketball now, and there’s Jimmy Boeheim, who is almost 70 years old. He has got the only undefeated team in the country. Larry Brown is at SMU. He’s 73, and I think they’re a top 10 team. Mike Krzyzewski is in his upper 60s and so forth. Coaches don’t get fired for being older coaches. They get fired for not winning. 

Love that take from the Head Ball Coach. 

Coaches, (or usually pretty much anyone working in a company/industry that cares about winning), don't get fired solely because they seem too old or that somehow the game or business has passed them by. Coaches (young and old) get fired because they don't win. Winning makes everyone look better, younger, smarter.

More from the HBC:

"It all comes down if you are winning and losing, if you’re recruiting well, and if your program is on the upbeat and it’s positive. That’s what we all shoot for and obviously it’s not that easy to do.

“But the age of a coach really has nothing to do with it.”

This may seem like a kind of throwaway concept, or just something really obvious, i.e. keep performing at a high level and usually anyone's job is safe. But as I know I have posted about on the blog here, and has become an increasingly prevalent dynamic in many US businesses, employees are getting older and older, and the percentage of people age 55 and up still in the workforce keeps climbing.

We could all do for reminding ourselves from time to time that unless there are some really specific and challenging physical elements to the job, that often age, by itself, simply does not matter when evaluating performance. And we have to get used to working with, learning from, and leveraging these older employees.

Old coaches get fired not for being old. They get fired for not winning. Which is the same reason young coaches get fired.