Nearly everybody who’s utilizing the Internet in one way or another is aware of the sociological  differences of generations. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Just watch your kids, and their friends. At the moment impatient generation Y rules (hey, what’s different to the European 68ers?:

• Experiencing life through machines
• “I want it all, and I want it now” attitude
• No respect of what has gone on before, or for the usual corporate pecking order, and therefore continuously clashing with older colleagues
• Little tolerance for lines of authority and proper protocol
• Constant need for praise, entertainment, and instant gratification, without seeing a need to earn recognition
• Great, sometimes unrealistic, expectations

Is that bad? Not at all, and the more important question should be on how to seize the benefits resulting from this generation’s juvenile rebellion. HBR Ideas in January had provided some great concepts supporting this thought. But how about blending these ideas into a useful concept to get generation Y back on track?

• Harnessing social pressure: Noah J. Goldstein explains how a publicized behavioral norm turns into a “magnetic middle”.
• Nicholas A. Christakis concludes that people are influenced only by those up to three degrees away.
• Alex Pentland uses the example of humble bees to show how to use social networks – specifically oscillating patterns of communications between central institutions and social networks -  for optimizing information discovery and information integration.

Combining these ideas into one blended concept could result in the following scenario: If I’d want to launch a new business idea, I should first drop my idea with few carefully selected GenYer networking contacts, asking them for feedback on where to land the idea. Then I’d rephrase my idea, enhanced by the feedback, into a revised value proposition specifically targeting GenYers. I should drop that new proposal with another set of – also carefully selected “friends”, asking them to collect ideas on how to expand beyond my proposal through their ‘friends’. And I’d then collect their feedback, which would originate from their interaction with their network, into a final business plan.  Success should be guarantee by this carefully drafted manipulation.

And how would approach then differ from the ancient Delphi-Method, aside the moral aspects? Simple: I wouldn’t talk to any of the persons involved, but rather use the viral distribution capabilities of Facebook, LinkedIn, and alike – thus accelerating both adoption and feedback by magnitudes. The only potential concern: How to judge on quality of all these so-called experts (some of them promoted by my idea)? One wouldn’t: If enough people support an idea, then the idea must be the right one. This was true in ancient Rome, and it still is true today. But: In past times, without social networks it was much more difficult to build trust and credibility, as the adoption of break-through ideas was primarily depending on face-to-face interaction.

Anyway: The Democrat’s 2008 presidential campaign seems to have proven my point.

"We can't have meaningful discussions or try to solve the world's problems using blogs and 140-character Tweets. What we need more is calm, prudent thought - more expertise." (Russell Wilcox, CEO E Ink)

"The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone." (Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People)

What happens to a General who stands behind his troops while they fight an uphill battle? He usually receives an additional star. And to the leader of these troops? MIA, in the best case. The dry-aged personal trainer in the Peabody Athletic Club awarded me a gold star - cool. That was more motivation than any other ‘help’ recently offered.

"The future is now". (Hasso Plattner, Visiting Professor, Stanford University) During today's computer science lecture at SAPPHIRE09 SAP's chairman made a point for Columnar Storage as a means to reap the benefits of paralellization thus boosting the performance of OLTP application. Referring to his colleagues Codd and Date he made his point by fighting some myths: Myth #1: You can't fit all data into memory. Myth #2: You can tune a traditional DB to achieve the same performance as columnar storage. Myth #3: Changing or adding large amounts of data will kill columnar storage. And during his marketing lecture he promised to answer any question of a company in less than a second - if the data is in the system. This requires the removal of the redundancy and of today's layers of abstraction.

"If you've got 30 minutes with a customer, you may use 5 minutes for talking. You may explain how good your product is, or anything else. But after 5 minutesyou have to shut-up. You stop talking, and start listening. You have to listen to your customers. That's how you will be successful." (Rob Enslin, SAP North America)

"People tend to think that my success, or whatever you want to call it, has been because I'm a really good decision maker. I think it is actually because I'm less confident in making decisions. So in other words, I never know anything really. Everything is a probability." (Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates) "It's better to be approximately right than precisely wrong." (Warren Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway)

It’s sad to loose friends, even more sad when it’s not completely their own fault. During this weeks organizational restructuring a whole business development team was let gone: Their management had refused to assign them measurable sales goals, had changed their title from sales executives to business development managers. Terrible mistake at times when only sales revenue matters. And of course the manager is still around, preaching sales, sales, sales …

At Microsoft’s Las Colinas town-hall meeting Steve Ballmer said:

“… maybe people have ever seen a movie called Annie Hall by Woody Allen ... There’s one scene where he’s talking about relationships between men and women and he says ‘Relationships must be like sharks. They move forward or they die.’”

And he then made an analogy to subject matter experts who abandon learning, don’t move forward, and therefore continuously loose their competence. I' really liked how he used that image to describe the competitive scenario in the IT industry. This morning I was looking-up the quote, because I had forgotten the title of the movie” – and found (through the other search engine): Keynote Address of Steve Ballmer at The European Forum for Science and Technology Prague from May 2008. Well, executives need to apply this tactics – it’s a job requirement. Good to see that he knows the basics of his job.

During my return flight yesterday I listened (again) Dr. Moira interviewing Robert Sutton on his recent book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. I should read his book when I have some more bandwidth.

And when I told my MSO, her response was: "Why don’t you read one from the staple on your desk first?” Hm, two dozen professional books on my desk, half a dozen on my night drawer, four in the living room, plus the novels in the library? I guess she’s a point.

Now I’m considering to leave my laptop at home, and spend the next week in Florida unleashed. But then I would act like the managing director who trashed his directs and now blames the economy, his superiors, his alliance partner, his field counterparts, and basically everybody else on the world: Jerk Factor 23.

I finally managed to complete reading Fortune’s April edition, and once again I had to compare Stanley and Dilbert: Gil Schwartz must be Scott Adam’s boss. Anyway, the company that contributes a little to my livelihood is now on track to change their expense policy on a weekly basis, and here’s Stanley Bing’s column (Fortune Magazine - April 27, 2009 – illustration by Jason Schneider) on that topic. It’s pretty close to reflecting the thoughts of my VP’s business manager:

Good that I left the executive suite some time ago, otherwise I might even miss some of the perks.

During these turbulent times I hardly have any bandwidth left for documenting the thing that keep my brains turning. So what happened recently?

• We had an earthquake yesterday – nearly got me seasick, but didn’t cause any damage.
• A long-term friend joined IBM, his second employer after 22 years at HP. And while doing some research I found that nearly nobody from my old leadership team is with HP anymore these days. Still wondering what had caused that seismic shift.
• An entertaining lunch chat on Friday with Miha, Mike and Warwick, creating new strategies and (new) roles: Warwick contributed CBA (competitive-based architecture: If there’s no competition you design and deliver the usual crap, if there is competition you design something that looks a little bit better than the competition and which actually may work). Miha added CBO (Chief Blaming Officer – quite self-explanatory isn’t it?). This was exactly the kind of humorous, high-flying, nonsense, causing lots of laughter, that I need for stimulating my creativity. Haven’t had very much of that in the last three years :-( It reminded me of the night when the “three of us met in thunder lightning and rain” and created the “winds of change” event". (Don’t waste your time with searching G*****: That event – by invitation only - happened in 1992 :-) but I’d be happy to let you listen to the CD we produced back then)
• Once again I am upset with the organizational entity that’s supposed to administer our human resources; At the company which partially contributes to my livelihood that organization is completely useless: Head counters, complimentary to the be hated bean counters. Despite Lisa’s best interest – which I admire – I believe that one could let go that whole organization without causing any severe damage. That’s a pity given the extreme importance of human resources. Walk as you talk? Not there, where chief split-tongue rules.
• Some 20+ years ago the McK’s and I agreed that we’d not be a good fit. Resulting from that conclusion I started my own company, using them as the benchmark to beat. Back then we succeeded,, by building on the following principles: Provide competence to our clients which adds measurable value to their business. And: Deliver our services below the industry average cost module. The strategy turned out to work quite well: Today I’ve a bunch of McK’s working for me :-)
• My MSO and I have both received our admission to stay in the US as permanent residents. According to my lawyers they had never seen such fast proceeding of the AOS before. Maybe the intelligence background from my previous life helped a bit. Although it’s nice to know all HLS agents at SeaTac it’s great that my transit time will now likely be reduced by 2 hours – at least.

There would be much more to tell, but that’s either private, or confidential. My most important advice: Laugh more (Thanks, Miha!).

Maybe I’ll find some time to share my impressions from visiting AZ – we’ll see.