Dinosaur Inc.:: How to Survive Digitization and Advance your Career

Bibliography:

Preface

Let me start with a confession: I usually skip prefaces and I never read more than the first page. By and large they are a waste of our most valuable resource, time. So, I will not thank my extended family (sorry, sweetheart, sorry, boys) nor try to impress you with the hundreds and thousands of interviews and books required to write this work.

There is one thing, you should know, though: this book could save your professional life. You are not aware of it yet, but it is endangered. One of the Homo millennials (don’t worry, we’ll explain that later) might grab or abolish your position. Your company could become extinct, because it is a dinosaur; run by dinosaurs, hence the title. Once you have read the book, you will know how to deal with this.

Scientists utilize two research methods: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative means a large team sends out hundreds and thousands of questionnaires and they crush lots of data. This research is extremely useful to conclude that shareholder returns are below average, if there is an aquarium in the hallway of the CEO (true). It fails abysmally in forecasting disruptive trend changes, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union. For that you need to apply the qualitative method: long and brutally honest interviews with experts. In my case, most of them took place after midnight and led to outrageous hotel bar bills.

Part One: The Dinosaur in You

What is the Issue?

As kids we all heard and read about dinosaurs, those clumsy, violent, pre-historic creatures that used to rule the earth. And we all know they became extinct from one day to the other because of a comet that collided with our planet. The dinosaurs had missed out on a window of opportunity that determined their destiny: the interval between the flash created by the impact of the celestial body and the arrival of the destructive wind blow caused by it, which eliminated all vertebrates larger than a mouse in a radius of several thousand miles. If the dinosaurs’ brains had allowed them to analyze what the flash had meant, they would possibly have been able to find strategies to minimize the impact, such as looking for shelter. Their tiny brains fell far short of this challenge and that was the end of 160 million years of evolution. There is a positive side to this, though. Instead of the dinosaurs eating our ancestors, these days, humans devour the successors of the dinosaurs such as chickens and turkeys.

As I will show on the next pages, all managers born pre-1990 are subject to the attack of a new, dangerous human species, the Homo millennial, which will likely eradicate us old-timers. Just because you think you are a Millennial and have not reached the age of 30 yet, does not mean you are protected from being outdated. Just ask a 29-year-old mathematician or sprinter, they stand no chance against younger competitors. Although your IQ exceeds that of the intellectually challenged ancestor of the birds, your survival is equally improbable, unless you change fundamentally.

The reason for that can be found in your brain stem, which you have in common with crocodiles, dinosaurs and other deep thinkers. Facing a challenge, we have three possible reactions: we attack, we run away, or we play dead seemingly ignoring the danger. Most of us prefer a certain behavior pattern and for a lot of us this means ignoring the danger. That can be a terrific strategy, if you cannot change the situation and do not want to be bothered by it. Your partner’s complaints about your less than perfect income are a great example. If you could have changed it, you probably would have done so already. So why react to such a challenge, which likely will only extend an existing fruitless discussion? The applicability of this strategy has obvious limitations. When you stand on a train crossing and hear the train approaching, ignoring it is probably not the best solution.

Some of us prefer running away, which would resolve the train crossing problem. In general, that was an excellent proposal for our mouse-like ancestors, when dinosaurs were still roaming the earth. Also, frankly speaking, they did not have much of a choice. Not many mice have successfully attacked a T. rex, even if one allows for the patchy record keeping of those days. Likewise, if the Big Boss has a bad day, fighting him might not always be the most career enhancing choice. But if a five-year-old comes along and demands 100 million quadrillion dollars, you might want to consider not giving in immediately.

The remainder of us tends to fall into the fighting category. When attacked, our first impulse is to strike back. Our ancestors could be grouped into those, who knew when they could afford to fight back and those, who got it wrong and landed in the stomach of some unpronounceable creature. The latter group had a smaller chance of reproducing and therefore the offspring of members of the first group should be in the majority today.

One of the great gifts, nature has handed to us is our capability to consciously overcome our primary behavior patterns, given enough time to react. In case of danger, the best move is often to take a deep breath and to think it over before you react. It takes about 90 seconds until the effects of Adrenalin, which makes us fight, wear off. Now, what is the danger that is currently threatening you? Okay, if necessary, you should take a 90 second break and get yourself a non-alcoholic beverage and a low-carb snack. The word ‘danger’ is a primary Adrenalin booster.

Back? Let us get started. Don’t play dead and ignore the danger, don’t run away, but rather let us fight the danger together after careful consideration. So, what is it all about? If you are like me, hard work made you successful. While you enjoy the fruits of your labor without any hesitation, whenever work calls, you are there and will do whatever it takes to maintain your professional success. You might think that social networks are a fashion fad and will disappear as quickly as they came. Grudgingly you published your CV on LinkedIn, in order to stay in touch with the headhunters. You do not have an actively managed Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on account and even if, it is most likely managed by a paid PR-expert. In short, you are like every other successful person born before 1990.

You focus on getting things done and do not want to waste your time on unnecessary distractions. And this is exactly where the problem commences. When your employees start talking about their work-life balance, you smile politely and cross them off the list of potential promotion prospects. Maintaining personal relationships is a natural thing for you. You will meet your contacts for dinner, over a coffee or on the golf court, send them presents and call them for the occasional chat. If you are like me, you are unfortunately hopelessly outdated, a Ford T on the high-speed race track that modern management has turned into.

Take Joe Oliver, yes, his name was changed, I did not want to offend Michael … oops! Anyway, none of the names in this book are correct, and I sometimes changed references to certain companies to reduce billed attorney hours and adjusted actual events for didactic reasons, but I guess you know the spiel from other management guides. Joe was Head of Sales in the North East region for an electronic devices’ manufacturer. One of his customers, let’s call him Sam, was the head of a local power plant. Joe had inherited the account from his predecessor and met Sam regularly. He would wine, dine and schmooze with him. Every year he would send Sam and his wife Christmas presents. The maintenance contract was up for renewal and given their strong relationship, Joe was confident to also win a tender for a capacity expansion that had just come up. On the day of the announcement of the winner, Sam was held up in another meeting and so Joe was waiting in a conference room together with a young, sloppily dressed woman, who introduced herself as Jill, representing a competitor. Seeing her dreadful outfit, Joe was even more certain of landing a big win. When he was called in to meet Sam, however, Joe was shocked to hear that not only had he not won the extension tender, but he had even lost the maintenance contract that his company had operated for decades. Joe had to sit down and think about ways, how he could explain the loss of this rock-solid account to his boss. Ultimately, he simply asked Sam, whom he thought to know well enough. This is what Sam answered:

You lost touch with your customers. My wife has died of kidney cancer six months ago and you keep sending me theater tickets, chocolates and other gifts for her. Every time I read her name on an envelope, I see her face in front of me and it tears my heart apart. If you don’t even know the most basic things about me, what else do you not know about our company? That would never have happened to Jill. She even sent flowers to my wife’s burial. She is close to her customers, you are not. She got the contract, you lost it.

Of course, you could say that Sam is a sissy and should simply have told Joe about his loss. But that is the typical answer of a dinosaur, the customer is always right. Jill got the contract and won; Joe lost. Period. You might be relieved to hear that Joe was not fired due to this mishap, but that is only because his whole division was liquidated a few days later anyway.

Look at Claire, a successful finance executive in charge of accounts receivables for the Californian operations of a manufacturer of specialized carbon products, let’s call them CCL. Claire had been running her department in L.A. for decades. Her customer base primarily consisted of SMEs, small and medium sized enterprises. She was good at her job and knew the order-to-cash cycle inside out. She negotiated the best rates with the local rep of their data provider, regularly had the scoring model maintained and consistently kept her bad debt-ratio below 0.7%, which was excellent in her customer segment. Her kids had just left home to attend college and together with her husband she had bought a nice duplex, whose mortgage rates together with the college tuition fees were perfectly matching their joint income. By the time she retired, she would have repaid the whole mortgage. Claire was a very well-organized person, as you can see.

The first clouds appeared on the horizon, when the long-term head of the US accounts receivables department was replaced with a young kid almost straight from university. Claire had not really wanted that job anyway, as she had not planned to move away from L.A.; however, she was somewhat disappointed that they had not even asked her. Rumor had it that her new boss had done an internship at headquarters and had landed the job right thereafter. Claire planned to explain to him, why her experience was crucial for CCL, whenever she would finally get the opportunity to meet him.

It never came to that. Instead, she received a three minutes call from the boss of her boss, the head of the US order-to-cash operations, apologizing that he would have to fire her together with the rest of her team. It was nothing personal; the whiz kid had just found a way to automate whatever she had been doing. Luckily, Claire got herself a similar job quickly, albeit at a somewhat lower salary and her 401(k)-retirement fund will grow slower than planned.

So, what is going on that turns harmless looking youngsters into dangerous opponents that will strike out of the blue? You do not know Randy, but you certainly met someone who made the same mistakes. Randy was not old, in his best years, 40 something. Randy prided himself to stay in touch with all new technologies. He used to say that the only acceptable reason for him not to understand a new technology would be lying three feet below the ground.

Of course, he had a Facebook account, you need to have it these days, he said. Randy thought he knew how to handle these things. He made sure that he would not befriend any blushing flowers, only guys who understood some fun. He loved to share off-color jokes and received plenty of Likes. Nobody ever complained about it. He also shared his fishing successes with impressive photos of his largest catches. He was a born entertainer and his customers loved his visits as a sales rep covering South Florida for a copying machine manufacturer. His employer struck hard times, however, and it was clear that the sales department would have to be downsized.

Randy was not too worried, although one never knew, of course. But it was not his first restructuring wave and he had survived them all. His salary was sensible, without being outrageous, plus he had a nice pension package that went hand in hand with, well a golden parachute would be an exaggeration, let us say a silver parachute that he had managed to negotiate during the boom days.

His two colleagues were far more likely victims. Joanne had her best years behind her and found it more and more difficult to resist a drink well before sunset. Jimmy was a boring, pale kid, who was unpopular with his customers. If anybody should survive the next round of corporate restructuring, it was Randy.

Randy could never prove it, but to this day he is convinced that it was Jimmy who shot him down. One day, HR approached Randy and spoke about the tasteless jokes he had shared on Facebook which together with some remarks they deemed sexist had in their view damaged the company’s reputation and exposed them to sexual harassment. His friends had not complained, that was true, but friends of friends had or at least could have had, HR was not very specific about that point. They offered him a deal that involved no severance, a hair cut on his company pension and two months of gardening leave. The alternative according to them was a loss of all pension benefits and immediate dismissal. Randy’s lawyer was not very optimistic and grudgingly Randy accepted. The Facebook disaster left a stronger imprint than expected and even made him sue Facebook for deletion of some entries. Ultimately Randy was forced to open a shop for fishing gear, which is still struggling to make some real money. Jimmy was the only survivor and even got himself promoted.

What is happening? Why do poorly dressed, boring people get promoted, while formerly strong performers lose their job? There is a simple answer: the losers turned to dinosaurs without noticing it and that cost them their careers. What is a dinosaur? Apart from the obvious answer, I could tell you that dinosaurs are not familiar with disruptive technologies and ignore the change of paradigms. That is a mouthful and there is a much simpler way of describing it: dinosaurs just don’t get it.

Let’s look at Joe, the guy who sent greetings to the recently deceased wife of his customer. How should he have known that? You cannot go around and ask your acquaintances: Is your wife still alive? What about your kids, parents, etc.?

How did our ancestors deal with this issue? Very long time ago, you saw it with your own eyes, if something happened to your fellow caveman. Then we moved to villages and everybody knew everybody. After Sunday Mass you had caught up with all local scandals, births, etc. The problem started, when we populated towns. You could not possibly know everything about your fellow citizens, unless they told you. The internet brought us search engines and news agents. You could get all the news about ‘John Oliver’ with a mouse click. That was great if you wanted to know about ‘Ebenezer Scrooge’, but there are plenty of John Olivers around. Also, how do you know that his spouse and patchwork kids are even called ‘Oliver’? Still, there was no sensible way to get the appropriate information and nobody would expect you to.

This changed completely with the arrival of social networks like Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. Either you post it yourself or somebody else will comment about it. Like the efforts required to join an exclusive club, it takes a significant investment and a lot of time to build up and maintain such a digital network. Unlike his competitor, Joe had not prioritized properly and decided not to undertake this effort but had rather focused on typical dinosaur activities.

You might say that Randy, our politically incorrect sales rep, had appropriately invested in his social network. Well, let us look at this again. It is true that Randy had opened a Facebook account. But what did he do with it? He posted fishing photos (nice human touch, but it will offend a sizable part of the population, who do not like the idea of killing animals for fun) and racist as well as sexist jokes. Hello? Since when is it advisable to make jokes about Hispanics, even more so in a region with a high percentage of Hispanics? This is comparable to standing on the marketplace of a 17th century Irish village and shouting out jokes about the Catholic Church. Sure, some of your audience might admire your courage, but most of the population will not want to be seen with you again and if this adventure of yours ends with a severe beating, you can call yourself lucky. And never even think about sexist comments, professional suicide is the unavoidable consequence (female readers watch out, this increasingly cuts both ways). Randy used the network to pursue his private interests and did not treat it as a professional tool. He was toying around with it, like a teenager who takes his Dad’s car out for a ride for the first time. There is no split between your private and your professional persona anymore. Just ask your HR experts, whether they check the Facebook pages of job applicants (and employees!).

In the next chapter, we will be focusing on the new kids on the block and you will understand better, why their strengths are particularly dangerous for you.

Summary:

So, what is the issue? If you are born pre-1990, you run the risk of turning into a dinosaur. A dinosaur is somebody who simply does not get it. Dinosaurs stand no chance of survival in the professional world of today, they lack basic tools and knowledge and they are modern analphabets. Unless you are prepared to learn from the new players, which we call Homo millennial, you too will be extinct. And what is worse: you will not even be aware of the danger, until it is too late. But do not despair yet: by the end of this book, you will not only have caught up with the Homo millennial, you will have taken the lead again.

The Homo Millennial: a new Species

You do not need to be a paleontologist to have heard about extinct human species like the Homo erectus, the Neanderthal and others. Unfortunately, you too might become the object of a future article about ancient human species no longer around. We make jokes about the destiny of the horse-smith after the arrival of the automobile, but you better be cautious, if you consider your profession not to be subject to this threat. By the time you retire – voluntarily or not – it will have changed beyond recognition.

That is a chance, as much as a threat. When I landed my first job after university as an investment banker, this was a profession that had not even existed in my hometown by the time I was born. My next job was in an industry that had not even been created at the time of my birth, Venture Capital. You get the gist of it: one person’s threat is the other one’s – very well paid - opportunity.

So, let us look at the new kids on the block, who want to profit from new trends and technologies. The journey starts right where you sit. Put your reading device down for a moment. If you hold a book, that is a strong indicator that your Dinosaur Quotient (DQ™) is off the charts, by the way (explanation to come). Stand up and go to the room in the first floor, where one of your children aged 12+ is chilling out. Knock politely, open the door, ignore any fumes (these days it is mostly about things to swallow, anyway) and ask your child, what he or she is doing now. Should you be able to get their attention (throwing their smartphone out of the window helps, but sometimes reduces their willingness to co-operate), promise them immunity for their sins confessed and listen carefully to their answers. The only reason that they might not have been in the process of communicating with their friends through one or more social networks when you entered, is a technical