Welcome to the Metaverse

By Alexander Larsen, Originally published in Enterprise Risk Magazine (by The Institute of Risk Management)

Preparing for the cyber generation of employees. Part 2- Is your company resilient enough to survive?

By Horst Simon, The Risk Culture Builder

As introduced in Part 1, the Cyber generation kids are entering their mid-teens, those who are not already running their own companies are preparing to enter your workplace in a few years.

They do not like supervision; not because they are arrogant, but because they have not grown up with the concept and they do not need that. They have grown up with both parents working; now they manage their own time and most of them are getting through High School “on their own”. A recent study showed that

“Boys get an alarmingly low average of one half-hour of direct face time with their dads per week, but over 40 hours of screen time (Internet, TV, and gaming).”

(From Fuller Youth Institute article entitled “Guys and Gaming” by Brad Griffin)

As they do not like supervision, they are not likely to fit into the “boxes & lines” of your current corporate structure of supervisors and different levels of management and as such these will naturally disappear when these Cyber-kids come into the workplace. Their collaboration and teamwork skills that they learned through playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games will ensure their success in the workplace. (There you have it: It is a type of game genre which allow thousands of gamers to play in the game’s evolving virtual world at the same time via the Internet, a perfect training ground for today’s Global business world)

They are driven to survive and win; In Cyber- world, you are not accepted onto teams if you do not have the capability to deliver; and if you get in and do not deliver, you are quickly told to move on. I guess it is more “cut-throat”, direct and gender irrelevant than today’s business world, so changes are surely coming the day these guys and girls get to where you are today; the top chair. “Dead wood” will never grow in their companies; companies that will be just be very large networks of partners and providers.

These guys will still be living with Mum & Dad when they enter the workplace in a few years’ time, they are DOING LIFE, not gathering possessions and worrying about retirement. They are generations away from the great depression of the 30’s. They will not iron out used gift-wrap for re-use and they cannot gather all the used Christmas and Birthday cards, as they never got any “paper” ones. They do not have childhood photo albums and home videos to show, it’s all on Facebook and YouTube.

They will not apply for jobs; your Human Resource function will have to search for them on Linked-In if you want to employ some of them, remember, they are the only people who would be able to protect you against the Cyber-threats of the future, they grew up with them; sometimes creating them. If your company’s profile in Cyber- world and on Social Media is good enough; they will find you! They will walk through the door and tell you how they can add value to your business and they would expect to be adequately compensated for that value. After that, they will move on to the next place; as mentioned, they have no interest in becoming a slave to your payroll!

Will you be ready? Alternatively, will you risk going out of business by refusing to accept MMORPG- warriors and all the changes coming with them.

 “People are now increasingly being found for jobs, versus having to find their next job,” Jon Bischke said in an article on Quartz and in the same article, Jeff Zinser is quoted to have said: “To a good recruiter there is no difference between passive and active candidates”

( qz.com/242663/a-new-tool-tells-companies-when-theyre-about-to-lose-their-best-people/)

Back to the mall idea…

So, the future of work is like owning a shopping mall, you are the manager and marketer of Your Own Brand. You will have one, preferably two anchor tenants; the ones who pay the bills, and then you will be in the open market for the rest. You’ll be opening and closing the outlets as the market rolls on; to those who need a coffee shop, you will give a coffee shop and to those who need a bank, you will give a bank, or at least be able to find a bank in your network and collect some commission during the referral and introduction process. Sometimes you will close some areas for renovations and improvements.

People will focus on their key skills and develop an income stream for a steady income by applying those key skills in the businesses of their “anchor tenants” adding value and building sustainable competitive advantage as without that, your mall will close down and go to the corporate graveyard.

The rest of your time you will spend on helping other smaller outlets to do business, riding the ebb-and-flow of the market to make sure your mall stays in business.

Therefore, if your shopping mall has some really good anchor tenants and an attractive, well-kept building in the right business neighbourhood and you have a good marketing strategy; the smaller outlets will queue up at your door for space in your mall. Keep in mind that building a mall is very hard work; it will require some capital and good risk management skills, as it is very different from “just renting a shop”

“The butterfly can just look back, Flap those wings and say, oh, yeah; I never have to be a worm again”

Sara Groves, Like a Skin (Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84w8W4E9G2U )

Preparing for the cyber generation of employees. Part 1- Is your company prepared?

By Horst Simon, The Risk Culture Builder

The Real Future of Work is like a Shopping Mall, the days are gone when employees were looking for bosses and long-term employment relationships. Prospective employees are looking for customers; and they favour the ones paying the highest price in relation to their perceived total personal value. In this global war for talent, people have taken charge of their own careers and they manage their careers the way they want, focused on achieving their personal goals. Sort of their own brand managers, after all, Human Resource Directors failed for over fifty years to get to understand the top of Maslow’s pyramid—for all people, it is all about themselves!

Many people are now working from their homes and converted garages became home-offices; perhaps the layout of the family home of the future will be much different to what we have today. We see how 24/7/365 broadband connections run trillions of megabytes of data all through our quiet and peaceful neighbourhoods. Mothers and Fathers again have time to play with their children and not just exist to “keep up” with the Jones’ next door.

Chief Executives must prepare their businesses for the Cyber Generation of MMORPG- warriors; they will not apply for jobs and will not become slaves to your payroll.

The Cyber generation kids are entering their mid-teens, those who are not already running their own companies are preparing to enter your workplace in a few years; will you and your company be ready for them? Who are they? The front-runners are those born in the year after Y2K, remember that fiasco? They follow the Millennials, but are very different; for some of you, these are known as your grandchildren.

They are from two worlds; the one you and I know and Cyber- world, hopefully they have grown up spending more time in the real one, but that could be debatable. Their worldview has a few new lenses and filters added to it, lenses and filters you are not familiar with and as such, if you do not shape up, you will not understand them.

They have more friends than you do; both in the real world and in their Cyber-world, simply because they had more opportunities to make friends than you had. The early ones, before 2005, came quietly into the world; later, their brothers and sisters (and in a few cases their parents) posted their births on Facebook, it was the way to tell the family and the whole world they have arrived.

They know more about computers than you do; they are currently hacking; or at least trying to hack the High School’s computer system. Either to make a statement, or to improve their grades for re-gurgling information that they have been fed through things called books by people called teachers. The successful ones will be the ones who supplemented that learning with Khan Academy! By the time they leave school they will also know a lot more than MS Office, they will have some programming skills and most will run their own websites and blogs.

They are better at Strategy, Operations and Teamwork than you are; By the time they enter your workplace, they would have spent 30% of their lives playing MMORPGs (if you do not know what that is, ask Google) In my opinion, that is a better way to prepare for the business world than learning “outdated” information and reading historic works of corporate literature written by retired CEO’s who once had some “claim to fame”. Anything older than 5 years is outdated in today’s world, sadly some are hanging on to the thought that the degree they got in the early 80’s still means something and even more sadly- some companies still want to see the evidence of 30-year-old degrees, thinking that such historic knowledge can add value to their business today!

See Part 2 for more information…