Washington, Your Vote and the Business Next Door

This week in Business has been particularly focused. The Business Council of Alabama hosted noted political contributor, author and speaker, Fred Barnes, for their 2010 Annual Meeting and Luncheon held at the Harbert Center. As a Beltway Boy who also is the Executive Director of the Weekly Standard, Barnes was the usual great choice by BCA to bring cutting edge, real time information to the business community. I look forward to enjoying the signed copy of his book The Rebel and Chief about his behind-the-scenes look at the George Bush Presidency.


Barnes positioned his discussion of the election outcomes by recalling Reagan’s Washington assessment, as an “island surrounded on all sides by reality.” As Barnes noted, you don’t always get what you expect during an election, and this year was no different for many and exhilarating for others. He noted that interestingly our very conservative state of Alabama had similar election outcomes to the very liberal state of Wisconsin. My goodness, New York even picked a lot of Republicans. According to the Hoover Institute, we are indeed a much more conservative country than we were a few years ago and our concerns over healthcare, spending and debt are more important now than ever. This may not be a welcomed message to remind our Washington front office about at this time, but certainly someone has to break them the news. According to Barnes, it is of striking interest that the Republican Party has emerged as the party of “Hope and Change,” and it is incumbent on the party not to blow it.

Barnes posed the question, “Can the Republican Party maintain the coalition?” Time will certainly tell, but a good beginning will be stick to the drivers that business is recommending which are: putting the break on spending and loosen up on the healthcare demands on small business for a good start. Citing Germany as an example, he revealed that not surprisingly, our current economic policies are to the left of many European countries. Germany has unemployment on the decline at 7.8%, and they did it by decreasing spending, decreasing the length and generosity of unemployment, and decreasing the size of government. The big message here that Washington just seems to have a tough time getting the old brain around is that the New Deal did not work. It did not work for FDR and it will not work for the current administration. All it achieves is creating a stronger government power base.

We know the answer, and it sounds easy at least. Tax cuts and incentives work. Just ask any business owner who is trying to keep the doors open. Looking at business founders from across the globe with at least $1 million in annual revenue, Sally Ernst working for Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) tracks their attitude. These are the business leaders whose hiring and layoff decisions are most likely to drive the economy. Her findings are interesting. U. S. businesses were doing more hiring and making more money in the period from May to October 2010 than they were prior to the last Global Indicator Survey, released in May by EO. It seems that business isn’t bad for U. S. entrepreneurs with over half in the survey reporting a higher profit. However, Ernst said, “Things are improving in terms of their businesses although they see things around them as quite dire.” Continued difficult credit conditions and huge uncertainty over whether the U.S. economic recovery can sustain itself have left entrepreneurs worried. Compare this to half of global entrepreneurs who expect that it will be easier to obtain credit in the coming months. A full 57 percent of American entrepreneurs think it will become more difficult to obtain bank loans.

So where are the most excited entrepreneurs in the world today then, if not the U.S.? According to Ernst, we should look to the East. In the Asia-Pacific region, 78 percent of entrepreneurs are optimistic about the economy, 50 percent plan to increase their borrowing, 70 percent have seen profits rise since the spring, 60 percent have been creating jobs for the past year, and 79 percent expect to create still more jobs in the next quarter. And as we have discussed here  before, their Millennial Generation kids don’t mind doing the tough work, are ready to work and less concerned with work/life balance (NJNews 11/13/10).

So what’s a gloomy U.S. entrepreneur to do? Certainly you can look abroad, but let’s not forget to do a little house cleaning here at home. Work to prevent those Bush tax cuts from expiring by contacting your representative or congressman. That would be a nice start. Get informed, stay involved, and remember, take care of your customers, or someone else will.

Millennial Generation: We raised these kids, why can't we manage them?

“We raised these kids, why can’t we manage them,” was the salient quote from the recent lecture by Ron Alsop at the quarterly breakfast meeting provided by the Samford Brock School of Business. Alsop is certainly a noted and long time writer, and you may recognize his name as the business editor for the Wall Street Journal. He speaks frequently on the topics of corporate reputation, business education, and career development, but on this day, we learned about the “Millennial Generation.”


In his book entitled, “The Trophy Kids Grow Up,” Alsop writes at length on his research concerning the dynamic known as the millennial generation. Millennials are young adults born between 1980 and 2001. They are heralded to comprise a full 35% of our workforce in the next three years. Now is the time to appreciate how this huge driver of our workforce has been formed and what they have to offer. But first, take a pause and appreciate how they are different, and it doesn’t take long to see that the differences are marked.

Looking back since the early 1920’s we have seen several transitions in workforce trends. The Traditionalists (born 1925-1945) are clearly some of the most patriotic of our work force. The Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are those workaholics like me who take on way too much and wonder why there is so little free time. We love the effort and enjoy the output of our labors. Following the Boomers is the Generation X’ers (born 1965-1979) and they have a trend to tech savvy and latch key independence. Enter now to the workforce and the playground, the Millennial. This group has high self esteem born in the “they all get a trophy” competitive environment. Tech savvy? Please. They are tech savvy, multi-tasking super geeks with limited work place loyalty, but a parallel high civic mindedness. Dutifully watching over their millennial off spring is the seemingly ever present Helicopter parent. The Helicopter parent has been known to not only arbitrage for grades on behalf of their child in high school, but to attend a college interview when the child had a sporting event, and even ask to sit in on a job interview or two. Alsop reported parents that had requested that their travel to their child’s job interview also be covered, and how about an occasional “Parent Day” at work for good measure. This is truly an amazing shift as Alsop reminisced about us Baby Boomers being dropped off for college with a kiss, a wave, and a “see you at Thanksgiving.”

The young millennial in your office or home that are now nine years of age to thirty years of age are a force to be reckoned with as they are driven to succeed, prone to job hopping, and yet have very close parental ties. They seem to be less cynical at work than their predecessors, and because they like their parents, they also seem to like and get along with their managers. They are highly concerned with work life balance, and will take less money in the trade off for more fun. In a world where global competition is the name of the game, we would be advised to keep this in perspective as their Asian Millennial friends report that they are in fact less concerned with work/life balance and are ready to work. Time will tell, but this dynamic may change with work choice scarcity in the current recession for our job hopping, fun seeking employees.

A typical Millennial will state that they look at the work place as a social organization, not just a job, and they need to have fun. They report to be very credentials driven which is not surprising given their high self esteem. This group does not seem to have patience “paying their dues” and are not likely to desire the true entry level job. (It is this writers opinion that this is a great opportunity for the displaced Boomer who just love to work.) This seems to have been born in the environment where the driver is to get into a “good” college and all of the competition that goes along with this. Alsop reported that one parent interviewed had kept a spreadsheet of all their child’s accomplishments since kindergarten for inclusion in the interview process for college. Thus this group views the world as a “meritocracy” where you merit the advancement, and as such they are constantly asking for feedback. The challenge for employers is going to be a big one to retain the talent once you invest in the training of this group. Millennials want to be casual and enjoy work, and they make it clear that their lives come first, and jobs come second. Where did they get this idea? Probably from us workaholic Baby Boomers that give everything to work because “it matters”, only to find out in this current economy, you can in fact not just be replaced, but displaced and the company can do more with less.

There is a saying, “God gave you kids, because he isn’t finished with YOU yet.” This may be worth thinking about as we spend time raising and managing our Millennials.