Only After Human Beings Vanish Can the Problem of Consciousness Be Solved Tom McBride 1 Connection If you follow popular science at all, you know that two common themes are when the sun will run out of fuel, and how we can solve the problem of consciousness. The two are rarely if ever connected. It is time that they were.   Scientists know that in a billion years the sun will transition to a red giant and life on earth will be uninhabitable. Multiply a billion times 365 days and watch your calculator explode. You and I have nothing to fret about.   Scientists are much less sure about consciousness. Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-founded the theory of evolution by natural selection with Darwin, once   Read on »

A Mad Man’s Mindset List®….

In both The Mindset Lists of American History and The Annual Mindset List, Tom McBride and Ron Nief offer an “indispensable” (Brian Williams) and “mesmerizing” (Associated Press) way of tracing the American past…. Here McBride and Nief offer their unique perspective on one of America’s favorite TV characters….

As AMC’s Mad Men continues in its latest season, it is time to take historical stock of its leading character: the outwardly handsome but subtly tortured Don Draper. A brilliantly successful man in the sexist, alcohol-soaked early 1960s, Don’s personal life remains a mess from which we viewers do not wish walk away.

A Little Background

Don Draper (real name: Richard Whitman) was born in the American South in 1924 and is thirty-six (36) when he begins to work as an account executive for Sterling Cooper, a small but prosperous advertising firm in New York City. (Coincidentally, an actor named Jon Hamm, born 1971, is also 36 when a new series called Mad Men began in 2007 on the American Movie Channel.)

When Don Draper was born, President Woodrow Wilson and Louis Sullivan had always been dead.

Woodrow Wilson’s dream of an internationally activist America also seemed dead, but in the end Wilson’s vision would flourish in such ventures as the war in Korea, where young Dick Whitman, then 29, changed identities with his dead lieutenant so that he could get out of the war.

Louis Sullivan died broke and disgraced, but his vision of skyscrapers survived and flourished. Don would work in a high-rise in New York City. His boss Bert Cooper, said of an elderly secretary, “She was born in a barn and died on the 39^th floor. She was an astronaut.” It’s also a tribute to Sullivan.

Born the same year as Don were

Lee Marvin (like Don, a future well-spun macho man);

Gloria Vanderbilt (like Don, a marketing genius, with her specialty of cosmetics);

Marlon Brando (who played famous movie roles seeking emotional truth, from which Don always tries to escape);

Doris Day, an actress whose identity was so well-spun that Oscar Levant would quip that he knew her before she was a virgin);

Rod Serling (who, like Don, had a fertile imagination about how to shape reality); and

Elizabeth Short, the infamous Black Dahlia murder victim in Los Angeles (like Don, she was looking for a new and more glamorous identity).

 Here’s Don’s (Dick’s) Personal Mindset List

(based on the year he was born: 1924)

1. The author Bruce Barton has always written that Christ (not Don) was the world’s first successful ad man.

2. No one has ever gone broke buying IBM, a brand new company.

3. There’s always been a media company and dream factory called Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

4. The coolest man was not the debonair Don but silent President Calvin Coolidge, as Republicans drank a new “Keep Cool With Coolidge” cocktail, consisting of raw eggs and various fruit juices.

5. Smoking ads have always been directed at women, with celebrities such as aviatrix Amelia Earhart endorsing Lucky Strikes (later spun as “toasted” by Don at Sterling Cooper) and with slogans such as “reach for a cigarette, not a sweet.”

6. A brand-new cigarette was Marlboro, touted to women as being as “mild as May” and sold complete with an ivory tip.

7. Foreshadowing the presence of talented Peggy Olson and canny Joan Holloway at Sterling Cooper, a top national issue while Don (Dick) was in his crib was whether or not women should work outside the home.

8. Anticipating the later work of Sterling Cooper and other ad agencies, there have always been national fads sold and spun by mass media, such as books of cross word puzzles, complete with attached pencils (the B&O Railroad even put dictionaries in their passenger cars for crossword aficionados).

8. The fleet football player Red Grange has always been known as “The Galloping Ghost,” another example of the new power of mass-communicated slogans and catch phrases.

9. Texas Guinan, a racy and colorful nightclub owner in New York, has always greeted her customers with “Hello, suckers”—a line that the cynical and image-selling Don would have appreciated.

10. Methodists have always lifted their ban on dancing and theatergoing—though not necessarily in the American South where Don (Dick) was born.

11. As Don was part of the last generation of American men to wear hats, he might have been amused to learn that the most fashionable hat during the year he was born was the bowler.

12. Nearly forty years before Don was decisively against Peggy’s idea that Harry Belafonte should become the spokesman for Fillmore Auto, both major political parties struggled with whether or not to condemn the powerful Ku Klux Klan, which had major influence as far north as Indiana.

13. A popular opinion was that Henry Ford had saved America by giving men a tension relieving substitute for prohibited booze: the Model T (banned liquor would not become a problem for Don, however; maybe that’s why we rarely see him in a car).

14. With a sign that sexism didn’t begin with Don Draper, a popular ad slogan said, “Thousands of men are denying their wives Packard Six cars.”

15. In an early sign of the information revolution on which Sterling Cooper and other ad agencies would later seize, news has always been overtaking dance music as the principal content on radio.

16. There has always been a Macy’s Parade on Thanksgiving: great advertising.

17. The Toastmasters’ Club has always been promoting better public speaking and impression management in men.

18. Foreshadowing Don’s later problems with the FBI’s inadvertently finding out who he really is, J. Edgar Hoover has always been the bureau’s director.

19. In a sign that image and do-overs didn’t start with Don, singer and model Fanny Brice has always been willing to vouch for the nose job her plastic surgeon did on her.

20. Cigarettes, which boosted morale between battles in World War I, have always been endorsed by everyone from Santa Claus to doctors to generals and have always been more popular than pipes and cigars. (By the time Don came to Sterling Cooper every adult American would smoke an average of 4,000 of them yearly.)

Presented to the League of Women Voters on February 10, 2013:

1. When they were toddlers, academics were talking about the “chilly climate” in the classroom for women; now that they are college students, academics are worried about the paucity of males attending American colleges and universities.

2. Although Hillary Clinton was a pioneering feminist, most of them supported Obama in 2008.

3. They fully expect the Democratic Party to be running women on the top or bottom of presidential tickets for the next decade and beyond—and think the Republicans might, too.

4. They are the least surprised people in America to learn that the Army is now bringing women into forward combat roles.

5. They have heard the word “diversity” all their lives and use such terms as “hetero-normal” to refer to refer to Super Bowl ads.

6. They are more likely to find musical programmers than guitar players interesting.

7. They are in no rush whatever to marry, but doing so by age 30 seems a pretty good idea.

8. Depending on their major, they do not expect to find rewarding and remunerative work right away and expect to acquire added professional or graduate education.

9. As their own parents also grew up with rock music and its various associations, they tend not to be estranged from their immediate forebears.

10. Exposed bra straps have always been a fashion statement, not a wardrobe malfunction to be corrected quietly by well-meaning friends.

11. A “Facebook Widow” is someone who has broken up with her significant other and announced it on the world’s most popular social networking site.

12. They are not necessarily surprised when they meet a guy who can cook better than they can.

13. They were about “minus 10” when Title IX first became a law requiring gender diversity and equality in college athletics.

14. Nurses have always been in short supply.

15. The words “Kardashian” and “tacky” have always been synonymous.

16. They are “spiritual” but not necessarily religious.

17. Altar girls have never been radical.

18. Unlike the previous generation, they think P.C. means Personal Computer, not Political Correctness.

19. All media—from movies to TV to music to telephones to the Internet—have always been migrating to smart phones the size of a large oyster shell.

20. They rarely use actual wires, but they are always wired.

21. It is entirely possible that some of their own children will live to be 120.

22. Having come to maturity with the Great Recession and talk of Social Security and Medicare going broke, they have relatively little faith in the economy.

23. They really resonate with Carrie Mathison, the bipolar intelligence agent on Homelandthat the guys don’t listen to.

24. Tattoos have always been both highly visible and very chic.

25. They’ve grown up with condoms being advertised on TV.

An Excerpt from the Keynote Address for the NCAA National Convention

Dallas, 2013

By Tom McBride and Ron Nief, co-authors of The Mindset Lists of American History (Wiley, 2011)

What have today’s young people—those between eighteen and twenty-nine—grown up with in terms of American athletics? What has been “normal” for them? What is their “sports mindset”?

There are two ways to answer this question: by offering some items off our famed, patented Lists, and by offering some analysis of a main difference between this sports generation and previous ones.

Let’s start with some List items: they supply an immediate (and comic) insight into what has always been “normal”—in terms of athletics—for the current generation of young people:

Sports bras have made underwear a fashion statement that no longer needs to be covered up.

Students today no longer need the weight room–they can get a workout playing a video game.

There has always been football in Jacksonville but never in Los Angeles.

Billy Graham is as familiar to them as Otto Graham was to their parents.

The Green Bay Packers have always celebrated with the Lambeau Leap.

Being crowned the biggest loser is no longer offensive

Barbells are not just a piece of athletic equipment but are decorative body piercing jewelry

Cheerleading has always been a controversial sport

Arnold Palmer has always been a drink

O.J. Simpson is a felon

George Foreman is a grill salesman

They’ve always wanted to be just like Kobe

LBJ has always been LeBron James

But there’s something more as well: Today’s young people simply expect that American athletics are not going to be free from larger political, economic, and social concerns. The fact that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both broke Babe Ruth’s record in a single season cannot be separated from the issue of doping, and doping can’t be pulled apart from the larger question of drugs, both legal and otherwise, in our society. When Muhammad Ali tied boxing to protesting the Vietnam War, and said he disliked Sonny Liston a lot more than he disliked the Viet Cong, this was shocking. Now, however, the link between athletics and politics is more or less usual. Even Title IX, which has revolutionized collegiate athletics, is viewed by many conservatives as government overreach and, in the words of one conservative columnist, “a train wreck.”

Yet if the relationship between athletics and controversial issues is not unusual, sometimes the details are. Who would have thought that a Ravens linebacker and a Vikings punter would have come out for legalizing gay marriage? Still, even though that was unexpected, the overall genre of tying athletics to politics is not. This is “normal” for today’s young people.

They have grown up with a Seton Hall basketball player and Chicago Bulls three-point specialist being ostracized because they opposed Desert Storm. They have grown up with Martina Navratilova’s insisting that the American public would not have gathered in support of a prominent female athlete if she had gotten AIDS, as did Magic Johnson, from living a promiscuous life. They have grown up contrasting the very brand-conscious Michael Jordon, who declined to take a stand against sweatshop cruelties in the making of shoes because “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” with Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets, who refused to stand for the national anthem because it offended his Muslim beliefs and got his Mississippi house burned down for his trouble.

Many of them remember that the women’s soccer team boycotted the 1996 Olympics in order to secure equal treatment in terms of such things as facilities. They are aware that the Williams Sisters had to walk through the dangerous streets of Harlem in order to practice a sport in which they excelled, but also a sport associated with country clubs. They remember Don Imus’ comment about the Rutgers women basketball team and the push back from the coach, Vivian Stringer—and how Imus was chased, briefly, from the air for making comments deemed racist and sexist. Some of them know that Steve Nash and Joakim Noah of the NBA protested the war in Iraq.

Some of them remember Pat Tillman, a great NFL safety, who was killed in Afghanistan and honored as an All-American hero of sacrifice. They may also recall that Tillman was killed by friendly fire—a fact covered up even from his family—and that he himself was personally opposed to the war in Iraq, if not in Afghanistan. They will not always forget that the first time poor people saw the inside of the New Orleans Superdome was in the desperate wake of Hurricane Katrina.

None of this means that today’s young people are of only one political persuasion. Like all of us, they draw different conclusions. But the melding of the business and political pages with the sports pages is normal for them. It does not surprise them.

In a sense this is not so good, for maybe sports should be a refuge from political disputes. Great athletes speak with their bodies far more eloquently than most of us do with our tongues. Sometimes we might even prefer that they not talk—just play. But perhaps such innocence, however comforting, needs to be opposed and complicated. Whether or not that is true, it is being complicated. And in another sense, as we have always insisted, the more things change, the more they don’t.

After all, athletics in the United States have never really been separate from the great issues of race and gender, as when differing people had differing ideas about the advisability of women riding bicycles or African Americans winning boxing matches. It’s just that such non-separation is out in the open now. It’s out of the closet. It’s what’s “always,” as we Mindset List types like to say, been true.

THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY

 Frequently Asked Questions Posed to the Authors,

Tom McBride and Ron Nief

Q: Why didn’t you just publish a book that included all your Mindset Lists since the beginning in 1998?

A: No one would buy such a book when they get all our Mindset Lists free online at www.beloit.edu/mindset or www.mindset.flywheelsites.com Besides, we wanted to do something larger: prove that our methods are an illuminating way to pursue historical truth, especially about American life over the past 150 years, from 1880-2030.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: We mean that an investigation of what’s normal for one generation, but abnormal for another, reveals how history is all about change. Historical change is usually slow, and it’s hard to measure or even notice unless you ask a particular generation what has always been “normal” for them. The way we use the words “always” and “never” in our Mindset List items is ironic: for history, unlike philosophy or math, is about shifting, not fixed, reality. We are always trying to dramatize that in light-hearted but mind-blowing ways.

Q: So your book is a record of social and technological change. Aren’t there any constants?

A: Sure there are. We begin the book with how, for late nineteenth century teens, patent medicine salesmen with wagons of so-called magic “elixirs” were normal. They’d supposedly cure everything from constipation to nerves. Everything’s changed, right? Not really: today’s teens find products like St. John’s Wort, never checked by the Food and Drug Administration, on sale everywhere. For that earlier generation, the cryptic telegraph was normal; for the current generation cryptic texting is normal. Texts are electronic telegraphs. For that earlier generation pocket watches were normal; no one wore a wristwatch. For the current generation smart phones are their watches. They don’t wear wristwatches any more either. Things move in cycles; the more things change, the more they don’t.

Q: What else doesn’t change?

A: Human nature. It’s hard to define exactly, but we all know what it is. If members of the college class of 1902 came back to the U.S. today they’d be bewildered at first with all the new technology, but then they’d realize that love, jealousy, envy, greed, war, and bravery haven’t really changed at all. Our new world would soon become recognizable.   

Q: Yet surely your book is mostly a record of bewildering change, isn’t it? Look at your last chapter: a futuristic one about how much different everything will be by 2030.

A: That’s right. We predict newspapers will be delivered only three days a week, and then mostly in Braille. We predict that the new generation will never fold up a map or write a check. We predict a digital, paperless world—and that’s just the start of it. Again, however, change is slow; and, lived every day, it doesn’t seem all that dramatic. It’s when you tell the whole story of change in American life over a century and a half from the viewpoint of kids growing up—as we have—that the fun and wonder come into play. That’s why so many people, such as Brian Williams, have liked the book.

Q: Is there any ultimate reason you wrote this book?

A: Yes. We want generations to talk across the divide. If just one person reads our book and begins to interview and archive the memories of parents and grandparents for future generations (before it’s too late), we’re a couple of happy guys.

FROM THE MINDSET LIST®….

The Challenging Y Chromosome:

 Five Mistakes Managers Make

With their Gen Y Employees….

 Preview:

#1: Managers fail to recognize that the high-tech savvy of this generation—unparalleled in history—masks their lack of low-tech skills.

#2. Managers fail to perceive the nuances of Gen Y work habits.

#3: Managers associate giving new employees what they want with an inevitable and perilous loss of authority.  

#4: Mangers become overly impressed with the widespread meme about Gen Y: that they expect to change jobs many, many times.

#5: Managers will try to tell, not show, Gen Y worker what to do.

•••

In some ways Gen Y is like any other young generation. It’s provincial, for instance—not in the sense that its members have never left Fargo or Manhattan but that they are overly smitten by the events of their own lifetimes. This isn’t surprising. The Kennedy murder or Pearl Harbor or the Challenger blow-up “defined” many of us oldsters. We get irritated when the young and restless don’t know about or understand these things. So when a young person says that the 9/11 disasters were just like Pearl Harbor—“our” Pearl Harbor, they say–we shouldn’t be surprised, even though the parallels between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are strained.

So young people were provincial before; they’re provincial now. When we were young, the country was arguing about health care, immigration, and the size of government. It still is. So tell me something new. But there is something new about Gen Y—we could call it the Gen Y Chromosome—and managers will err if they don’t take these things into account. Yet Gen Y will also be in error if they don’t take into account the reality of the workplace, a world most of them have never confronted much before. Sure, they’ve had internships, but they aren’t the same thing as becoming a workaday stiff for the rest of your life.

What are the common mistakes made by managers in dealing with this bunch, and how can they be prevented or rectified? Let us count the ways.

#1: Managers fail to recognize that the high-tech savvy of this generation—unparalleled in history—masks their lack of low-tech skills.

Yes, they can probably fix the company computers all by themselves, but can they write (or speak) in ways that the organization should deem effective? For that matter, are their writing norms in the company? Are they explicit or just part of the folk culture? And what should Gen Y need to learn about those norms?

Here managers might recall how their own professors urged them to follow simple advice in writing a college paper: Tell us what you are going to tell us; tell us; and finally tell us what you have told us. It’s a great formula and a wonderful courtesy to readers looking for maps and road signs. But how many of us followed it? And for that matter how many of our professors even told us to do that? So we have a group of new Gen Y workers that a. may have written their share of long, disorganized term papers; b. may have walked on the wild side by writing entries into their personal “blogs”; and c. may have tweeted and posted on Facebook or texted short messages on their smart phones.

The point is that none of these is applicable to the sort of writing required in the company or agency. So the generation that can reprogram your call phone for you probably can’t write well within an organizational context.  

This has been true of previous generations, but this time there are differences. First, this is a generation that comes into an office demonstrably ahead of older workers in high-tech savvy, and workers younger and older are likely to be overly impressed with that fact while failing to see that the new kids are not ahead in more obvious, low-tech abilities. Second, Gen Y has done the sort of quirky writing (blogging) and instant writing (Twitter, Facebook, Smart Phones) that they might be tempted to transfer to the company. They have never written in bullets, for instance; and they may have little understanding of the elegance of parallel construction. They have written in college, where professors are paid to read what they write. They have never written in an organization where no one in particular may want to read what they write. They have never written in a milieu in which there is already a huge traffic of memos and reports—an environment in which they will have to work with skill in order to get their communication read. They have had scant experience with the concept of “need to know,” that some communications need to be written so that different readers can take from it as much detail as they need.

How do they write in order to make that happen? What are the possible formats? What are the standards? Thus an excellent place to start with Gen Y is to focus on their decidedly old-fashioned communication skills, but that won’t happen unless managers recognize that they will likely come into their new setting lacking these skills. 

#2. Managers fail to perceive the nuances of Gen Y work habits.

This is a generation that has developed staggered and informal work habits for a very simple reason: because they have been able to. They have been able to work anywhere, and they are the first full generation that has not been chained to the library or wherever their typewriter happens to be. They have been able to carry their libraries around with them—yes, of course they still read and consult books and journals—but they also carry around with them on the I-Pads much more information that is contained in the Britannica and World Book encyclopedias combined. And they can process papers anywhere. It’s no wonder that they take lots of short breaks; they can afford to. Gone are the days when you a. had to devote four hours to the library because that’s where all the info was; b. could then take a couple of hours off for dinner or some sports or maybe even a quick game of gin rummy before c. heading to your room and typing the whole business out. Now they can literally jog while checking out data sets on their Droids. It’s not that they’re likely to do so, but never low-ball their ingenuity in multi-tasking.

Yet the office is in many ways back to the 1980s because they are expected to stay in one place for a long time. Their on-campus work habits–perhaps more than anything else–prompt the desire for flex-time on the job: heading to the gym at 4 (an hour before quitting time) because they can always telecommute after dinner, perhaps for not one more hour but even two or three. In their view managers will get 9 or 10 hours a day out of them—just not consecutively. It’s not that they’re lazy or don’t want to work. It’s that they’re used to working in shifts, some of them “alarmingly” short. What’s a manager to do?

The problem is compounded even if managers, having decided that they’re actually getting more work out of their Gen Y employees this way, have to deal with older employees who don’t work this way. Charges of special privilege may never be made openly, but they will be in the air. Morale can easily decline. Still, there are ways around these dilemmas. First, managers might explain to their Gen Y employees that they have to manage a multi-generational work place. A frank declaration that “I cannot give you all the flex-time privileges you want, at least not right away” will help. And then there is the advantage of younger employees developing a track record. Older employees will less resent a younger employee who has played by the existing rules for a year or so, made good company in the workplace, done some effective collaboration, and achieved some real productivity. Only then should managers broach the subject of “different work styles” on the job. Only then might the manager wish to invoke the “bottom line” as his real measuring stick—and not whether hours are consecutive.

Part of the desirable picture here is educating the new employees about the problems and responsibilities of managers, and that can come informally from the managers themselves or, perhaps even better, from a solid orientation session. So many companies assume that new employees can figure out organizational customs on their own, but while it is generally true that folks must live “ways of life” in order to understand them, a road map never hurts and often helps.

Bottom line: The flexible working habits of Gen Y present both challenges and opportunities that managers can handle in order to minimize the challenges and maximize the opportunities, even if they cannot finally resolve all the tensions.

#3: Managers associate giving new employees what they want with an inevitable and perilous loss of authority.  

Nothing strikes more fear into the hearts of managers than worry that they are pushovers. Managers are supposed to manage, and that would surely seem to involve bending people to their will, not being bent to the will of others. Now comes Generation Y, a group that has grown up with Helicopter Parents who often overscheduled them in activities from soccer to violin lessons and who encouraged their teachers and coaches to compliment the little tots on just showing up. This is a generation that tended to grow up with two-career parents who often “outsourced” them to day care, summer camp, and the aforementioned various lessons. (Life Coaches have not been out of the question!) These were parents who, perhaps insecure about their own lack of hands-on parenting, hired it out. It became consistent with the self-interest of those who had been hired to make the offspring of those who had hired them feel good about themselves. So Gen Y has grown up with lots of regular, positive and “quality” feedback.

The first thing to understand is that such feedback hasn’t been totally bad. There is something to be said for building confidence. The second thing: This doesn’t mean that Gen Y has subsequently been spoiled rotten. This is also the generation that has faced enormous pressure to succeed, with visits to campuses in the junior year of high school not unusual. Still, they like and expect this feedback. Managers are often anxious about giving out compliments. Won’t this mark me as a pushover? Won’t they come to expect this all the time? What will older workers think if they cath wind of this? On the other hand, managers also want their workers to be happy and productive, and Gen Y presents a special challenge here.

So how can managers steer between the need to manage with authority and the need to offer constant and encouraging feedback? One answer is to resist the myth that good management involves treating everyone the same. Dick Marannis’ study of Coach Vince Lombardi reveals that the coach did not treat all his Packers stars the same because he realized that each of them had a different motivational zone. This does not mean that Lombardi flaunted different treatments; he tended to apply them in private. But he recognized in the Upper Midwest, long before “diversity” was a buzzword in the rest of the country, that diversity was important.

Another answer: Do not confuse persistent feedback with always positive feedback. Rather, make all feedback relatively non-dramatic. Managers who veer from effusive to angry will perplex and demoralize workers from any generation. So give Gen Y employees their incessant assessments, but don’t make the positive too high or the negative too low.  Thus, managers should play within their own zone, and by example encourage Gen Y workers to do the same. Remember, too, that they can take negative feedback, but they like lots of feedback and like it delivered in a friendly tone. One can say, “You must do better” in a friendly tone. Remember, you’re still the boss. It might be said with wisdom that the successful manager is not the one who knows when to raise his or her voice as much as the one who rarely needs to do so at all.

And keep the feedback private, because that’s the context in which Gen Y is used to getting it.

#4: Mangers become overly impressed with the widespread meme about Gen Y: that they expect to change jobs many, many times.

Gen Y has grown up a world where the face of constant change has revealed itself to them every day. They have likely grown up with parents who were mobile. The days when Dad got a job in the bank in Zanesville, OH, while Mom stayed home and was always sure when it was Westinghouse have long gone. This has been a generation of movers. Mom and Dad have themselves changed jobs. They have switched on computers every day with different home pages on the same websites. The new new thing, or new next thing, has always been around. Even those as young as thirty-one say that the websites—especially the blog sites—of twenty-one year olds make them feel ancient. They just cannot “relate.” So flux is a given for Gen Y. They believe that the economy will require constant updating and job changing. They do not expect the permanent. They prefer to rent not just because owning a home isn’t the same good deal it used to be but also because they want to be able to get away quickly to Charlotte or Fresno or wherever the next job might be.

But suppose you are a manager who identifies a young employee whom you really want to stay with the company. Is it possible to convince her or him to do so? It is, but managers have to work at it. What can they do?

One answer: At the right time, approach the subject explicitly. Tilt against the idea that this is only a short-term deal. Second, depending on the nature of the organization, explain that there are tracks for career advancement and diversification of tasks—all under the same roof or at least under the same organization, even if locations may change. Third, because Gen Y is very civic-minded—they also tend to be liberal and to think that American life has improved since the 1960s—emphasize your organization’s public service, if you can. Give them time off—paid if you can—to perform such service. Gen Y believes in volunteerism, so stress that aspect, if possible, of what the company does. And here is one other possibility, even if it might be a long shot and takes a very skilled manager to pull it off: Converse with them about how the distinctions between private enterprise and public service are often exaggerated. Building a better e-chip is a public service. It creates jobs and makes money that can be taxed, the revenues to be used for the sort of activist government that Gen Y believes in. This sort of viewpoint will not suffice as a substitute for a company that emphasizes civic virtue and volunteering, but it can complement such an emphasis.

In sum, Gen Yers may well stay with organizations that stress advancement and job variety; that emphasize new challenges; that (in time) can offer more pragmatic work schedules; and that have a significant public service component. Good management helps, too. Many Gen Yers with good managers report that the loss of that manager may be the most traumatic moment in their short work lives. At that point, of course, the manager herself has departed, so the whole project has become moot!

#5: Managers will try to tell, not show, Gen Y worker what to do.

Gen Yers think of themselves as creative, and while this may be a self-delusional myth, it is an understandable one and it grows from their being Digital Natives. Many of them have almost grown up knowing how to program. They know, either by dint of practice or just by way of intuition, how to design websites. They are aware that Facebook came from a college campus.  Many of their friends are actually making a living as free-lancers, consulting on such projects as website design or e-publishing. Thus the idea of adhering to strict guidelines is something for which they will have less patience than older generations have had. They have something of a free-lancer’s attitude.

Once again managers have a choice: put their foot down and show them who’s boss; or try a little finessing. If the latter is the strategy of choice, then there are definite steps that can be taken in the care and feeding of bright new Gen Y employees.

One such step is to define, even at first in the abstract, the meaning of the word “parameters.” Make these limits as wide as possible. Explain that they provide focus and discipline, but that while some activities are clearly “beyond the pale,” many other approaches are not. This is a very difficult and artful thing to manage, but the idea that there are many ways to serve the aims of the organization—some of them not yet thought of—is well worth considering and promoting.

Second, after managers have communicated to Gen Y workers that parameters are definite but also rather wide, the next step if a frank admission that “how wide” probably cannot always be written down in advance with any great assurance. The tension between creativity and company aims and policies is one that will be played out of a case-by-case basis. But here is where the good, nuanced manager of Gen Y can play a huge role, for regular feedback and conversation can demonstrate, over time, the “way of life” in the company to the point where young workers will begin to “know” what is or is not wise or permissible creative initiative. This is also where showing, as opposed to telling, is central. We learned multiplication by multiplying, not by learning abstract rules. Someone “showed” us how to multiply. The same is true for managing, and most especially true for a generation that thinks of itself, often if not always rightly, as creative initiators.

***

In American literature there are two great stories about the workplace. One, “Bartelby the Scrivener,” written by Herman Melville in 1850, is about an employee named Bartelby, hired to copy legal documents who decides one day that he prefers not to copy any more documents. His boss, a risk-averse lawyer, is utterly defeated by Bartelby, whom he cannot convince to return to work but cannot bring himself to fire either. It is a great cautionary tale of poor management, and it has the virtue of showing that for all the ways in which Gen Y is different—and there are lots of such ways—the problem of good management is perennial and timeless.

The second great short story about the workplace is John Updike’s 1960s “A&P,” about a sack boy in a grocery store who quits one day because he cannot stand how his boss humiliated a young woman who’d appeared in the store in a bikini. Sammy’s decision to resign in anger on the spot is a foolish decision, because the young woman’s hauteur is a function of her money and upper class status, while Sammy is lower middle class at best. She doesn’t even notice that he has stuck up for her. He himself admits that quitting is a stupid idea. But we can speculate that it happens partly because his boss never paid any attention to him before and never helped affirm Sammy’s identity about who he was and what was the value of their common work. What a manager would think of this tale—whether the manager would blame Sammy or the boss more—would be revealing as we ponder the problems of managing human potential, whether in the grocery store or the big company.

The problems posed by the Gen Y chromosome are quite new–and very old.

—Tom McBride, co-author of The Mindset List and The Mindset Lists of American History 

MINDSET LIST AUTHORS ISSUE 2013 ADVISORY FOR NEW PARENTS

Beloit, Wis. – With only days remaining until the announcement of the first child born in 2013, two authors who have dealt for years with the world of the 18 year old, have some advice for new parents.

“Start taking notes and preparing for those questions you will have to answer as they graduate from high school in in 2031,” suggest Ron Nief and Tom McBride, creators of the Beloit College Mindset List and authors of The Mindset Lists of American History.

“Time will sneak by quickly,” they warn, “and soon they are going to want you to explain yourself and your generation. They will force you to show your age with quizzical looks as they ask you to tell them about the “olden days,” when you were young.”

To assist these parents in preparation, Nief and McBride  have assembled this year’s Parents’ Advisory, 25 questions to anticipate from your offspring as they head off on their own.

“They may seem odd now, but just wait.”

THE 2013 PARENTS’ MINDSET ADVISORY:  25 QUESTIONS

TO PREPARE FOR WHEN YOUR NEW BABY TURNS 

1. Why is so much of what we have made in Cuba?

2. What did you use paper dollar bills for?

3.  Did you actually throw away computerized robots without their permission?

4. How did they ever finish a hockey game with all that fighting they used to do.

5. How did you survive as a kid without your own 3-D copier?

6.  Don’t you think there should be a few male Supreme Court justices?

7.  Why did you have to know how to type words. Couldn’t you just talk to your computer?

8. What did they use all those stadiums for before they were filled with non-stop soccer games?

9. You mean the streets weren’t always canals at Disney World?

10. Why did you have to connect your phones into a wall?  Couldn’t you just use the heat from your shirt to charge your smart phone?

11. How long have folks been placing videophone calls on the refrigerator door?

12. When did you start downloading thoughts onto your pocket computer?

13. Before you had anti-steering locks built into bicycles, weren’t they stolen a lot?

14. Did you vote for both of Vice President Clinton’s parents – Bill and Hillary – for president ?

15. How long have there been grocery carts that monitor your caloric intake and dietary restrictions when you grab the handle?

16. Is there a reason why all those shopping centers and concert halls look like they were once big churches?

17. Did they have to x-ray your mouth all the time before they installed the Dental Health Sensor in your cheek?

18. Do you remember when the National Anthem was only sung in English at sports events?

19. Were employers always required to provide robo pets for employees with anxiety problems?

20. Why, when you were in college, did teachers lecture in classrooms instead of on the computer for homework?

21. What were all those metal keys in the box in the garage used for?

22. Would you say that you and Dad have more actual or virtual friends?

23. Weren’t there a lot of accidents when you had to actually drive your car  when you were my age?

24. Was Venice real or just another imaginary place like Atlantis?

25. When you have to retire at 80, what are you and mom going to do for the next 50 years?

    THE 2012 PARENTS’ MINDSET ADVISORY:                                                              20 QUESTIONS TO BE PREPARED FOR WHEN YOUR BABY TURNS 18. 

1. What was “software” and what was soft about it?  

2. Why do some universities fund minor-league football and basketball teams now instead of regular student athlete programs?   

3. What were “websites” and why did people visit them?  

4. What are those small metallic disks I keep finding in the attic?  

5. Did you ever actually change a light bulb?  

6. Where did all those European countries get the dumb idea of having just one currency?  

7. Is it true that once upon a time you actually had to type instructions into smart phones?  

8. Wasn’t it pretty weird when you had to wear nerdy dark glasses in order to watch 3-D television?  

9. Have those old people with salt and pepper ponytails occupying Wall Street always been there? 

10. How did people learn to play the guitar before their fingers were computer programmed?  

11. Do you remember when you first felt virtual wet or cold on your computer screen?  

12. What do you mean, our house was “under water” the year I was born?            

 13. How did people remember the sketches on the backs of napkins without smart pens to plug into their e-pads?  

 14. When are we going to put solar siding on the house?  

15. Did you actually communicate on Facebook when you were my age?  

16. Don’t white males want to become president any more?  

17. What did people in Qatar do about the heat before they put up all those artificial clouds?  

18. How did folks find their stray pets before insertion of GPS microchips became a part of getting them neutered?  

19. Do you think I’ll live long enough to ride in a space elevator?  

20. If we stop burning coal do you think they will stop building that sea wall around New York City?  

Looking for Great and Time-Tested Public Speakers? 

The Mindset Team is now booking speaking engagements for 2014-15….

Tom McBride and Ron Nief, co-authors of The Beloit College Mindset List® and The Mindset Lists of American History (Wiley, 2011) speak frequently about the generation gap around the country and to a wide variety of organizations. 

We’ve spoken, led workshops  and delivered the keynote addresses to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) national convention, to library associations, museum staff, and to educators at all levels, to state retirement fund administrators and to to educators and specialists dealing with youth and financial literacy,   And all this is but a small sample.

We work with our clients and custom-design our presentations about any and all aspects of the generational divide as it relates to the particular interests of specific groups.

If you’re interested in a witty and informative presentation, described by attendees as “interesting…engaging…directly related…offering a completely new and interesting perspective,”  for your own organization or conference, you may need to look no further than us.

Here are FAQs and Answers:

Who Are We?

 Tom McBride, For 42 years Tom taught English at Beloit College, and for 23 years he was Keefer Professor of Humanities there. Now an emeritus professor, he’s an  expert on Milton, Shakespeare, and critical theory. He has team-taught a variety of interdisciplinary courses with both classicists and anthropologists. His interests in comparative discourse have most recently led him to an extensive project on Darwinian approaches to the study of literature. With Professor Shawn Gillen, he is co-founder of the department’s new program in Rhetoric and Discourse. He has published both critical essays and creative non-fiction in journals as diverse as Texas Studies in Language and Literature, The Baker Street Journal, and Two Cities. For four years, he was a popular commentator on language for Wisconsin Public Radio. On campus he is known for the twice-yearly Keefer Lectures on a variety of subjects. Most recently he has authored essays for britannica.com on Raymond Carver and Allan Bloom, and for open democracy.net on Saul Bellow. He is an editor of the Beloit College Mindset List.

Ron Nief is emeritus director of public affairs at Beloit College in Wisconsin, stepping down this year after 14 years of service. His work at Beloit concludes four decades communicating the work of higher education starting with his alma mater, Boston College, in the late 1960s and including Brandeis and Clark universities, and Middlebury College. He is the editor of several books and has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the Gannett Newspapers and National Public Radio’s Marketplace. The recipient of a Silver Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America he also received a Distinguished Service Award from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. He created the Mindset List in 1998 and joins Tom McBride in many media appearances and talks around the country throughout the year.

As co-creators of a famous and mind-bending List from Beloit College, and an acclaimed new book about American history through the eyes of eighteen year olds, they’re a one-stop shop for America’s generation gap.

They tailor their comments to individual audiences as they examine how understanding the mindsets of eighteen year olds can

Promote more successful education, workplaces and other organized endeavors,

Revolutionize the nature of teaching, especially instruction in history,

Foster inter-generational dialogues within families,

Improve the current younger generation’s financial literacy, and

Help the older generation understand how to communicate better with the younger one.

What Are Our Most Popular Presentations?

They’ve Never Dialed a Telephone – Retelling American history from the viewpoint of eighteen year olds is a mind-bending way of revisiting the past—and re-investigating the present.

How to Transform Teaching By Helping Students Think Generationally – In government, literature, history and the social sciences, students take to subject matter much more avidly if they can link it to themselves as part of a generational parade.

Financial Literacy: How to Read a Dollar Bill – Young people become financially literate by studying eighteen year olds who lived back in the days when paper money was still visible.

The Five Mistakes Managers Make With Gen Y In the Workplace, and How to Avoid Them –mangers can manage new workers better if they understand what makes this generation different.

The Epitaph of Generation Y--The current younger generation is on its way to becoming a blue-ribbon panel generation that forges the compromise that their elders have found elusive in order to solve mammoth national problems

From IOUs to ATMs–By studying how previous generations have handled the challenges of financial literacy, today’s young people can discover how better to manage their own dollars and sense.

Where Have We Spoken?(Selected List)

 Library Associations: The American Library Association; The Missouri Library Association; The New England Library Network

Charitable Organizations: The Rotary International North American Youth Exchange Network

Professional Conferences: NCHELP National Debt Management; National Association of State Retirement Administrators; The Independent College Bookstore Association

Educational Organizations: ACT National Compass Conference, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin College Admissions Counselors; Framingham (Mass) State, Utah State and Murray (Ky.) State Universities and Northeast State Community (Tenn.) and Highland (Ill.) Community Colleges; Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society; Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction; Madison (WI) Area Technical College; National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); Jump$tart Coalition; National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA: Goodard Space Flight Center)

 Where Can You See Us On-Line?

 Paste any or all of the following into your browser:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx3vBnn5GQY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFg11pE20LQ

http://hosted.mediasite.com/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=5b3d0e89a4894eddb81a6fcb2c72c3c01d

We’re also on internet radio:

http://www.prx.org/search/pieces?q=Mindset+Moments&x=20&y=14

What Do They Say About Us?

“It was a wonderful mix of humor, nostalgia, philosophy and thought-provoking content — just right for a dinner speech.”

 “Overall, an interesting and inspiring program.”

 “I walked away with a better understanding of student library users and their expectations based on culture and circumstance.”

 “The President’s Program [at the American Library Association] was a wonderful experience for me, a highlight of my year as President, and one I will always remember. Best wishes to you.”

“Thank you for an excellent [workshop] presentation. My surmise is that there will be a call for a return visit next year.”

“The sense of humor and trip down memory lane”

“Interesting, engaging speakers, interesting idea for social history project”

“Love that the speakers directly related their project to the collections!” 

“Offering of a completely new and interesting perspective on teaching history.”

“Excellent ideas for work with students”

 How Can We Contact You For Further Information?

For information about our fees and for references, you can reach us atmcbridet@beloit.edu or 608 312 9508 (Tom) or at niefr@beloit.edu or 608 770-2625 (Ron). We’ll be happy to furnish you with contacts at organizations we have served.