I spoke with Brad Szollose recently. Brad is the author of an excellent book titled: Liquid Leadership: From Woodstock to Wikipedia - Multigenerational Management Ideas That are Changing the Way We Run Things.
From his about page:
During the Dot Com Era of the early 90′s, Brad co-founded K2 Design, Inc. which later raised over $7 million through private placement and an IPO... [The company] saw 425% growth for 5 straight years, expanded from 2 business partners to 4 partners and 60+ employees with offices worldwide and valuated at over $26 million.
For that success, he received the Arthur Andersen NY Enterprise Award for Best Practices for Fostering Innovation Among Employees.
We talked about his book and the ideas he offers, gathered and refined, with his experience leading a startup company, through growth, through turbulent economy and industry, and his later success bringing these principles to clients around the world.
You can listen to our conversation here.
Brad, thanks for being on our show. Again, congrats on a great book.
Let’s talk about this book: Liquid Leadership: From Woodstock to Wikipedia - Multigenerational Management Ideas That are Changing the Way We Run Things.
Who were you writing for when you wrote this book? Describe that person you saw as you labored together to cull all your insights and wisdom.
Baby boomers were having trouble understanding the shift in the workplace that we were making: from the industrial age and its way of thinking to the Information Age and its way.
I don’t know if you remember, but as kids we were promised that in the year 2000 technology was going to solve everything. We were supposed to be living in a dome-city on the Moon and flying around in jetpacks by now. Some listeners may think we’re crazy but us Baby Boomers were told this. We were shown this. It was in everything. Our movies, or TV shows. Even my 4th grade teacher gave us an exercise where we had to visualize life in the year 2000 and how we would be living.
But, now we’re here. And it effects everything, not just business. If you’re a teacher or firefighter or a police officer, if you’re mother a father an uncle, there’s a gap. And it’s not going to go away.
The problem is we’re in an instant celebrity universe right now. I used to teach branding workshops at Right Management. It’s in NY city. This is where top executives in the publishing industry were transitioned through Right Management into a new job.
I would go in and teach branding workshops with a buddy of mine and in the end we would still and look at each other, astounded at all the boomer executives would walk out thinking “Yeah, I get it.” But they didn’t understand they needed to be a brand today. Or why technology was important for their job.
That was the first audience. The second target audience for the book was I realized I had to create an ‘aha’ moment on every page that would bring together both Gen-Y, Gen-X, Millenials, and Baby Boomers. They are all in the workforce right and they all think differently.
You’re writing about a clash of cultures. In my case, in our case, these habits and cultures have been reinforced for the past 50 years and in Gen-Yers the past 20 years.
My father was raised in the Great Depression. And that meant so was I. I’m a Boomer that was raised during the Great Depression. My father was so cheap we didn’t buy anything. He put my whole bedroom together from the woodshop project he built during high school. He was a saver. There was always going to be a problem.
My generation, a cusp-boomer, was “Hey, we’re going to get our toys now. We saw the economic downslide from 19798 - 1984 and we saw our parents lose everything. So, as a group we became Yuppies, Buppies.
Here’s the funny part, we raised Generation - Y. “Hey you can have your dreams.” My father on my 18th birthday, came into my bedroom and said “Hey, you’re 18 now. That’s awesome. You need to get a job or go to college or move out.”
Generation Y was raised completely differently. “You stay here as long as you want. Your dad and I just bought you a brand new car for your 18th birthday. You do something you love. Don’t do what we did. We worked way too hard. We burned ourselves out. We went and worked in a cubicle. YOU...go out into the world and do what you love!”
So after about two weeks at work, most Gen-Y’s are standing up and thinking “Um, I’m not really happy here.”
They’re going to quit. I can find something better and live at home.
Corporate America knows they can’t control this generation. They don’t like it.
What common challenge, problem, of theirs were you trying to solve with this book?
I would have to say that Boomers were taught that working hard and retiring and having all these wonderful experiences was the right way to do it. We’re correct. That’s the way it’s been for 6000 years. You work hard to get ahead.
But, not a days, but there’s a lot of Boomer cynicism. Boomers are being forced to sell their toys. Everything we’ve been taught is running smack dab into what’s happening. The dollar isn’t very good. So you have that. Then you have another generation that doesn’t care about that. They have embraced technology. They seem to be getting ahead. they seem to be having so much fun doing what they’re doing. They’re at the expense of Boomer and living at home, yes.
But the reality is that a lot of the jobs being created right now, Boomers do not have the skill-sets to fill them. We’re talking about 3-4 million jobs. Boomers that have lost their jobs cannot step into those new jobs because these jobs are in new sectors like green jobs. They haven’t been trained how to let go of old thinking and how to move forward with new thinking.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Future Shock, but Alvin Toffler said the illiterate of the 21st century or of the future are not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
That’s what’s taking place right now. That’s where the gap exists.
And when I wrote liquid Leadership, Boomers have to learn what is taking place right now. And at the same time, Gen-Xer and Gen-Yers has to really understand that when Boomers do understand this new technology we see the bigger picture and can steer you out of the mud that’s taking place.
And what is your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future when you are successful with solving that?
I hope this becomes a guidebook for the 21st century. A standard-issue both at the college level and at the corporate level. I’ve had a few college professors who have read my book and they’ve said this is a game-changer, I was told.
Now, lets go back to your readers. I recommend everyone listening get a copy of Brad’s book. What is their hoped-for future with embracing the ideas in your book? How will that change their world?
Well, right now, a lot of Baby Boomers are waiting for the jobs to return. They’re waiting for the economy to kick back in gear, the government to do some things. There’s a lot of anger out there. They know things have been twisted in back rooms of Wall Street. Their retirement will not be there. But guess what, the jobs won’t be there, either.
And what you’re going to have is the perfect storm coming. You’re going to have college grads sitting in the same waiting room to interview for a job as a 48 or 58-year old with all this experience. You’re going to have Boomers and Gen-Xers and Y-ers competing for the same job.
As a Baby Boomer, I had to let go of my cynicism and my linear thinking. One of the things that helped me was I went to this seminar called The Games in Learning Society. This is where game designers meet with academia from all over the world to design games to facilitate learning.
Why would games be used at the college level? Well, imagine an economics course set up like a sim-city, simulation city? Instead of learning how taxation effects us in one class after another, instead you build a model of a small city over semester and see how it all interacts. You have zoning laws. You have planners now coming out of college having planned mock models 30 -40 times.
It’s sorta like a reverse mentorship.
As Boomers, are we prepared for that?
You have 7 Laws of a Liquid Leader. Is there one law that’s imperative? You can’t be considered a liquid leader without following it?
My number one law is Tell the truth or create an environment where it can be told.
There are three that go hand-in-hand where you cannot have one without the others.
The first one is "You have to Place Your People First". Your employees have the best ideas for creating efficiencies. That’s where the ideas are coming from. That’s where all the changes are going to be implemented.
The difference now is between top-down management and integrated management. You can go into your sales staff and they’re comfortable with you and they say we need to make some changes to our brochure. Those kind of changes get implemented faster.
I had a friend who worked at Siemens. Didn’t see the CEO for 3 quarters and he also worked at the main headquarters.
The 2nd Law is you need to "Create an environment where it’s safe to tell the truth"
Where do companies lose this environment where it’s safe to tell the truth? You start with everybody’s excited and passionate and getting things done. But somewhere along the line you lose that.
This happened with my company, K2 Design. It happens at many companies.
I wrote an article about it titled the difference between executives and an entrepreneur and an executive. An entrepreneur comes together out of passion...or frustration to change the current paradigm with one of their wonderful products or services. Netflix was started by Reed Hasting for that very reasons. He returned a video and was faced with $60 late fees. And he thought ‘You know what? I’m going to start my own company and eliminate the late fee system.” Late fees were a billion-dollar system back then.
Entrepreneurs are excited. They don’t stick to one model.
By the way at those levels you can’t help but be profitable.
The executive comes along after the company gets its first round of financing or rainmaker and says “You know what? We don’t have enough systems in place. We need systems so this can run automatically.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. A lot of businesses need systems. McDonald’s is a prime example of a company where they have systems on the front line and it works.
But, they lose the entrepreneurial spirit in some of these companies where they are always questioning the status quo.
The status quo models are great. During the industrial age they worked great at getting things done. You knew you could count on that at that at the end of the assumbly line that car would come off perfect. You had the systems in place.
But now you have an assembly line where you have modular input and customization. And if you don’t know that’s taking place, then it’s going to be tough to manage. You see companies like Dell who manage this very well. You can order online a customized PC. That was unheard of 50 years ago.
The executives with all the training and education are great. But they have to keep some of that entrepreneurial zest for breaking that status quo.
Do Gen-xers do any better with these laws than Boomers?
I think their cynicism really helps.
The 3rd Law I put in place was "Create a nurturing environment for the creative talent."
I think the Gen-Y brings that 3rd law to work every day. They’re in these results-only environment where they get the work done when they’re inspired to be creative.
Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, is a fantastic book. They did studies where when you have a simple rewards and task program set up for people. They do it. You meet your quota and get a raise or bonus.
And this worked at every single level until the pressure to create something amazing took place. And then people failed miserably. And they were willing to compromise their morals and ethics to get it done and they would still fail.
The moral is the higher reward, the higher the goal, the opposite takes place: failure.
But what they did find out in these studies at MIT and London School of Economics is that when they just took money off the table and paid people a decent salary and gave them deadlines...and let them go; they didn’t manage them.
Guess what they discovered? Productivity went through the roof.
This made no sense. Once money’s off the table we are motivated by a sense of challenge, creativity and the need to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
Too many companies are going back to the old industrial model of yelling at people , “Do your job because there’s nothing out there anyway.” And, oh by the way, the last 10 people we fired, we’re going to dump all their work on you.
The baby boomer brands we grew up with are dying because we’re retiring. They did not foresee how the internet was a completely different model. They assume they could step into the internet and be the same dominant model they were in the brick and mortar world. And, they weren’t.
That’s why Amazon is the number one bookseller in the world while Barnes and Nobel is trying to build us coffee shops.
That’s why that cynicism is important. If these companies had had an environment where they had listened to the people who were coming in right out of college, Gen-X and Gen-Y, been right there and also with the 4th Law, You have to support re-invention of your company, they would have moved very nicely into the 21st century.
Did you grow up liking James Bond?
Yeah. Yeah I liked James Bond. The Sean Connery James Bond.
My first James Bond movie was Diamonds are Forever. My parents snuck me in. I’m 10 years old. I’m mesmerized.
Guess what? The James Bond brand is in danger of dying because Boomers are the only one that have a relationship with James Bond.
James Bond for the Gen-Y is a video game.
I loved the question you posed in the chapter titled The Credo of the Liquid Leader. Who will lead us? Historical hierarchies are being dismantled. Pretty soon everyone will be a leader. Boomers, Gen-xers, Gen-yers, millennials...Why is that a good thing and not a case of too many leaders, not enough doers?
I’ll tell you why. Boomers are trained that you work hard and you hoard your knowledge and use it to get ahead and then you will earn that corner office, the big salary, the club membership and all those things that come with linear thinking.
But, today, leaders are doers. And they’re knowledge sharers.
My favorite company that I like to use is Pixar. Pixar has to create customized movies every single tie out of the gate. And they’re so impressive, every single time. They win Oscars for every single movie.
Here’s a company that has to have customized content every single time. How do they do it? Every single time they have meetings where each person that comes represents one of the other teams. That might be computer animators, sculptors, art directors...They all come together and each team is assigned one movie.
Now. You have multiple teams, A, B, C, D working on individual projects. Sometimes you need to rotate into other teams where there’s a need. There’s a support structure there.
The 2nd thing is that people get to rotate into the next one as they earn their position. You have to prove yourself on these teams.
John Lassiter at Pixar created such a great management model, he won an Oscar for his management model with Toy Story. He’ll take a star who’s worked on teams with 4 or 5 films and he’ll take them and say “We’re going to give you the Director’s seat in the next film.”
Now they don’t just shove them out there. They have a mentorship program. They support them through the whole process of directing that film.
The 2nd thing that’s amazing at Pixar is they have an university where you can go and get a degree and work for Pixar.
The other thing they have is their software is so unique and works so well they have a product to sell outside of Pixar. Renderman.
The final thing they have is, the older wiser mentors, they are always trying to pull out the best talent.
The final thing is they do a post-mortem. It’s trust-filled environment where they critique their work. Instead of looking at what wrong, they ask what went wrong and how can you improve?
Awesome model for the 21st century.
They keep fresh talent coming in and listen to them. You see a lot of these companies that are cutting edge now listening to these new members.
50% of Kodak’s revenues come from products that didn’t exist 5 years ago. These products come from young people or are used by young people.
Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and principal at Union Square Ventures, wrote a post a few years ago that said the odds were greater that the next game-changing startup would come from Gen-xers not boomers.
But statistics show more old geezers, boomers if you will, are entrepreneurs than their whipper-snapper colleagues in Gen-x. Far greater numbers and percentages.
So, who have the multi-tasking skills needed to startup a new business?
Everybody does.
I’ll give you a few statistics. Baby boomers have had 35-40 years in the workplace. When you reach a certain point in your career we’re taught you either start your own company or consultancy; you get out there and take the risk after you have the seasonality.
Yes, you’re going to see more boomers starting businesses out of frustration. This pace will pick up as well.
If you start looking at Gen-X and Y, they have been trained to act like an entrepreneur. I think you’ll see a huge influx of Gen-X and Y’s starting their own companies. It will either be formally or freelance individual or they’ll form the next big idea.
They’re moody; they can see things the way they supposed to be. They get very frustrated listening to adults while adults don’t listen to them.
These are adults who were raised on karate classes, soccer games, dance lessons. Their whole day was a day-runner and now you want them to sit in cubicles.
What most of them are doing is quitting their jobs, designing websites to make a little money.
It’s the hard work part of the equation that Gen-X and Y need to pick up.
Gen-X will start because they’ve reached the age where they have the house, the car, the family and the next step is start a company.
Ok, so now is the imagination part of the show. Let’s imagine...an email from President Obama awaits you. And it includes an invitation to the Oval Office...He’s read your book. President Obama wants you to help him become a more liquid leader. What are three things he can do before his next State of the Union address to be a more liquid leader?
He needs to realize he is about to go down in history as either the greatest president in our history or the worst.
One of the principles of liquid leadership is you have to tell the truth. Mr. President you have to stop trying to make everybody happy and tell the truth. The system needs to be upgraded and reinvented.
The 2nd thing is he has to tell people that the model we have been working with for the past 150 years doesn’t work. We can no longer work for the 20th century. We’re in the 21st century where things move much more dynamically. You can’t expect one group to pay for everybody.
The 3rd thing is he has to lead with strength and determination and the sense of re-invention; he has to wear it instead of giving it lip service. Now, we have to see the example. We’re waiting.
If things don’t change, then Gen-Y will be the first generation to march to Washington DC and opt out of social security. They will tell the President "it is a ponzi scheme. We are the first generation to say we don’t want anything to do with it."
In your chapter titled Future Shock, you remind us of our biologically limited capacity to change. And in your next chapter titled A Farewell to Kings you make a good case for the shift in leaders from being Shamans of insights and solutions to their sherpas, from changing their MO from knowledge hoarding to knowledge sharing.
Being enough of a student of history to create problems for myself, I am stuck remembering that when faced with overwhelming rates of change, disruption and apparent chaos, when the amount of information given us to process overwhelms our biological abilities we revert to form throughout history and we opt for the strong-man leader. The King. Our need for stability takes priority over our need to grow.
How will we not revert to form this time and opt for a strong-man leader in the face of all this change?
I think it’s a trust factor. We have to trust ourselves. We have to trust ourselves as a group. We the people. There’s a reason why the constitution has We The People in type a hundred times bigger than the rest of the text.
We the people are the ones in charge of our government. Whenever there is centralized power, we don’t move forward.
Look at history. Everything you hold dear, that came about from inventions over the past 235 years.
The US proved that sharing the power would create the greatest explosion of knowledge and progress in history. And we have to get back to that.
You’re a leader. Leaders are readers. Jim Rohn said that. I just quote him. And you’re avid readers, too. What are you reading in all your free time?
I’ve read everything from the Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More, Faster, Now, World by Vince Coscenti to Flip: How to Turn Everything You Know on Its Head--and Succeed Beyond Your Wildest Imaginings, by Peter Sheahan; it talks about how to flip the paradigms in your organization and science fiction.
What are you reading in science fiction?
I started reading over again Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. You grok me?
I grok you.
Speaking engagements?
My schedule’s on my website for the book Liquid Leadership. I’m always updating my website with my schedule.
I wanted to offer your listeners something more than just Hey go buy my book. If you email me, just leave your name and email and contact information, I’ll send you a free ebook with a report called Cracking the Gen -Y Code. It will teach you how they tick, how they work, and how they buy. That should help you not only understand their world but yours as well.
Where are you on the web?
My last name is so hard to spell. If you go to Liquid Leadership you’ll find everything. I also have a blog that I post to every Monday. That has all my insights and meanderings about the gap between Gen-X, Y and Boomers.
Thanks, Brad!
Comments