Generation (I)nnovation: Why Today's Teens Instinctively Understand Disruption

I am honored to host Whitney Johnson's post as part of the launch of her new book, Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work. 
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My teenage daughter is going to Korea for two weeks this summer. Which meant she needed to earn nearly $3,000. So she decided to become an entrepreneur, and started a baking business that is financing her trip to Korea — one $5 loaf of hot, homemade bread, and $12 fresh-out-of-the-oven pan of cinnamon rolls at a time.

This is different from the work my husband and I did as teens; I worked as a cashier at a Burger Pit in San Jose, Calif., and my husband worked on a pick-your-own berry farm in southern Maryland. But among my daughter’s peers, becoming an entrepreneur appears to be the rule, not the exception.

The abysmal job market for teens is forcing many of them to think differently about work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the teen employment rate from 1950-2000 hovered around 45%, but since then has steadily declined. As of 2011, only 26% of teens were employed. Certainly the reasons for this decline are multifaceted, from a struggling economy, to competition with older workers, to time conflicts, to the fact that many teens just don’t want traditional “teen jobs.”

A quick poll of my peers revealed that about 60% of them had traditional “teen” jobs; flipping burgers, waiting tables, and the catchall “office work” — typing, filing, and reception. But when I asked what their children do to earn money, only 12% of them had jobs that I would describe as traditional teen jobs. A whopping 70% had jobs that are best described as self-employed; ranging from owner/operator of Diva Day Care to selling on eBay to teaching piano lessons. Today’s teens are getting a completely different work experience than I did – and it’s better preparing them to be innovators.

The media is playing an important role in this shift. Shows like “Shark Tank,” featuring young entrepreneurs, and local and national media covering feel good stories about successful teens have changed the way our youth view work. In fact, according to a Gallup poll, 8 out of 10 kids want to be their own boss, and 4 out of 10 want to start their own business.

There’s also a groundswell of support from parents and adults, generally. I saw this with my daughter’s business. Our friends and neighbors could just as easily have bought their bread and cinnamon rolls at the grocery store, but when they saw that my daughter was willing to get up at 5AM on Saturday to make fresh baked bread they were inclined to support her.

In addition to the ho-hum job market, and changing cultural zeitgeist, technology is changing where, when and how early we begin to work. Take, for example, Calum Brannan, a British teen who started PPLParty.com, a social networking site for clubbers, 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio, an Australian app developer who sold his company Summly, that summarizes the news, to Yahoo for $30 million. Or Adora Svitak, an American writer, speaker and advocate who was introduced to the world at the age of six and whose 2010 TED talk “What Adults Can Learn From Kids” has over 3 million views. For these teens, the expanse of their network is not limited to their physical location. Because of technology, their “lemonade stand” can be on any street corner of any city in the world.  

And don't forget the competitive college admissions market.  In order to get into the best colleges, teens must differentiate themselves.  This means excelling academically as well as participating in evening and weekend extracurriculars.  Not only does this leave little time for the kind of work their parents did after school, those part-time jobs to most admissions committees simply aren't impressive enough. It's no longer sufficient to be civic-minded by showing up for a town cleanup, you need to organize the cleanup and run it for several years.  You can't tell the college that you love journalism and then only write 2-3 articles for the school paper. You need to write dozens of articles and then publish them in multiple sources.  Or better yet, start your own newspaper - online. The need to be different is forcing them to innovate and diversify in ways that previous generations never did. 

This unique confluence of circumstances - a touch economy, increasingly competitive college market, expanding networks and shifts in technology - is creating a culture of innovators.  Needing to, and having the opportunity to, shape themselves into something quite different than their parents, the rising generation instinctively understand personal disruption. Some people call post-millennials Generation Z, but I think a more appropriate moniker would be Generation (I)nnovation. 

The article was co-authored with Roger Johnson, who holds a PhD in microbiology from Columbia University, and is former Assistant Professor at UMass Medical School. He is the lead parent of our bread-baking, headed-to-Korea, daughter.

Originally published on 5/25/2015 at https://hbr.org/2015/05/why-todays-teens-are-more-entrepreneurial-than-their-parents

Whitney Johnson is the author of Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work, and Dare, Dream, Do. Additionally, she is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.  Learn more about her at http://www.whitneyjohnson.com/ or connect with her on Twitter

The High Art of Designing Scaffolding

Copyright of Alex Proimos https://www.flickr.com/photos/34120957@N04/5967688938

By Ian Gonsher (republished with permission)

Vasari tells us, that in preparing to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a debate arose between Bramante and Michelangelo about how to design the scaffolding necessary to proceed with the project:

The pope ordered Bramante to build the scaffolding in order to paint it [the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel]; Bramante did so by piercing the ceiling and hanging everything from ropes; upon seeing this, Michelangelo asked Bramante how, once the painting had been completed, he would be able to fill the holes; and Bramante replied, ‘We’ll worry about that later’, and added that there was no other way to do it. Michelangelo then realized that either Bramante knew little about it or he was not much of a friend, and he went to the pope and told him that this scaffolding was unsatisfactory and that Bramante had not understood how to build it; in Bramante’s presence, the pope replied that he should build one in his own way. And so Michelangelo ordered scaffolding built on poles which did not touch the wall, the method for fitting out vaults he later taught to Bramante and others, and with which many fine works were executed.[1]

Often, the most difficult part of any creative process is just getting started; preparing for the tasks at hand by putting the necessary structures in place that will bring the project to fruition. But scaffolding of this kind not only gives structure to the process; it demands a consideration of the tools, knowledge, and resources that are necessary for crafting novel and uncommon things.

Scaffolding can take many different forms, but in the narrowest sense, it is a tool. Woodworkers, for example and by comparison, will often design jigs to position a part in relation to a tool in order to augment the function of that tool. Like the scaffolding that Vasari describes, which was designed to bring the body of the artist into close physical proximity with the work, a jig allows the craftsperson to adapt his/her tools to act on a given material in a precise, repeatable fashion. When designing an effective jig, consideration must be given to the path through which the bit or blade will pass, and how the piece is fixed, but it must also do so in a safe manner. The design of a jig can sometimes be as interesting as the design of the piece itself.

We can further extend our definition of scaffolding to include the skills and knowledge necessary for operating the tools that advance the project, as well as to the critical engagement that is fundamental to the creative process in general. In this way, scaffolding is a form of learning. It gives structure to what we know and how we know it. Every new project comes with a new set of questions, a new set of constraints, that require new skills, and new approaches for creative problem solving.

The words we use inform the ideas in play, and those ideas give form to what is produced. Developing new language is sometimes necessary for scaffolding our understanding and communicating those insights to others. Neologisms and provisional project titles, for example, create space where new ideas can emerge.

We live in an age of abundant knowledge, where so many resources are a mouse click away. This too is a kind of scaffolding; an augmented intelligence. What are the books, tutorials, and courses necessary for mastering the appropriate skills (or at least becoming familiar enough with them to satisfy the task at hand)? Who are the mentors, experts, and partners that can help us navigate challenges as they arise? What do we need to know to make what we want to make? These are all ways we scaffold our understanding of projects.

This kind of scaffolding is nested within another, even more extensive kind of scaffolding; that of the institutions in which we operate and with which we participate. The structures of institutions dictate how we relate to one another, how we collaborate, how resources are allocated, and the kinds of spaces available for projects. Every institution structures these relationships differently, each with its own affordances and constraints, each with its own culture and values. We tend to gravitate towards institutions with which we have an affinity, and whose culture and values we are sympathetic to. But sometimes we should question these assumptions and eschew the formulas they produce. We should attempt to expand the territory of possibility and the creative dialectic in play. Like Michelangelo in Vasari’s telling, sometimes we recognize that it is necessary to dismantle inadequate scaffolding in order to design a better one, one that is more appropriate to the project at hand.

There are many ways to solve a problem or ask a question. There are many ways to structure a project. It is for these reasons, and others, that in addition to thinking of scaffolding as something that occurs prior to the task at hand, we should also consider scaffolding as something that occurs throughout the creative process, and which might require edits and adaptations as that process moves forward. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in the awkward situation of filling holes in the ceiling.

[1] Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Artists. Trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.  The unpainted portion where the scaffolding met the wall is still visible just above the lunettes, although it is not easily seen from the floor below. It is also noteworthy that the recent restoration employed a system not dissimilar to the one employed by Michelangelo.

[2] Boswell, Victor. “Sistine Chapel”. Boswell, Victor. National Geographic. December 1989.

The Hope & Serendipity of #RCUS

The highlight of the year - BIF.  It's the embodiment of my definition of innovation ~ the Network + Serendipity - through Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects (#RCUS). It's the place to renew your mind and soul - to see what can and is being done to positively change our world by people of all ages, ethnicities, experiences, industries, sectors, geographies.  This will be my 6th BIF and every year I think it can't get any better... and every year it does.  Why? Because the human desire, passion and spirit to do good is everlasting.  Despite the misery and pain we see in the world around us, there is always hope - hope being realized by action.  That's why I can't miss a BIF - it renews your hope in mankind.