Author: drnicko

Awarded an MBE for services to arts-based businesses, I am passionate about generating inspiring, socially engaging, creative practice within educational contexts both nationally and internationally.

Tips for Business Start Ups: 7 ways to engage Generation Y-ers in business

Time Magazine printed an article in 1967 to worried parents across the USA that Baby Boomers “seem more like dangerously deluded dropouts, candidates for a very sound spanking and a cram course in civics.” Time was following in a well worn tradition of media frenzy. The Dallas Morning News in the 1920s described its young people “as not caring about people and not having any sense of shame , honor or duty.”

So, we need to be careful about any predictive process when it comes to basing economic or social policy on the stereotypes of young people (or indeed anyone else). Bearing that in mind, what might the stereotypes of the Millenial – the Generation Y-er – suggest about how they may or may not get involved in the messy business of business start ups?

Well, the stereotypes fly thick and fast when it comes to trying to assess what constitutes the typical Generation Y-er. According to Psychology Today, they include:

being the toughest generation to manage;
growing up in a culturally diverse school and play environment;
being tech-savvy, enthusiastic, self-centred, confident, well networked and achievement-oriented;
one of the best educated generations in history;
confident with a constant need for variety, challenge and instant gratification;
Represented by the “Prizes for All ” generation.

At work, Generation Y-ers are said to:

expect their opinions to be heard and considered and are not usually shy;
want to know that what they are doing is valuable to the company and/or environment, as well as valuable to them and their career;
have a strong desire for rewarding opportunities – for them and their company.
are driven less by money and more by accomplishment;
Want to express their creativity and be able to complete tasks on their own – using their own methods;
want to know they have access to an open door to ask questions;
want to engage in work relevant to them and important to them and the company.

So if we expect Generation Y-ers to blindly follow career or vocational paths that have been laid for them, and which have been paved with rewards that may have been acceptable to Gen X-ers or Baby Boomers, we’re going to have a few surprises.

We may need to think less of how do Generation Y-ers fit into business, and more about how the business world can be shaped by a Generation Y culture.  Perhaps we might even see some of the Baby Boomer and Generation  X orthodoxies of business being challenged.

So, here’s a guide on how to engage sterotypical Generation Y-ers in business: by changing business practice around them, rather than trying to fit them into your business.

1. Be aware of the boot camp and other military metaphors

Enthusiastic entrepreneurs all over the UK are currently being inundated with all types of business support programmes from every conceivable source: their local council, their friendly bank and the taxi driver who’s trying to take them to their next networking opportunity but who has of course lost his way to name but three.

These support programmes are being promoted through a variety of metaphors which express the spirit of growth and enthusiasm which drives the people behind the programmes: everything from growing an allotment through to levitation systems (getting your idea ‘off the ground’) hothouses, hatcheries, nests and even the occasional business meeting womb.

The most insidious of these however is the military metaphor which describes the process of starting up in the starkest of terms: entrepreneurs are encouraged to attend boot camps: they are persuaded to ‘put their bodies on the line’; they have to ‘go over the top’, ‘batten down the hatches’ and ‘take one for the team’. Whilst this may be of use to some entrepreneurs who are thinking about setting up a private army which will compete of course with the publicly funded armed forces when larging it around the world’s hotspots, the military metaphor is a pretty hopeless way of describing activity whose moral compass is guided more by the desire to create jobs, improve the economy and do good in the world.

2. Engage more sorcerers than apprentices.

A new business start up is not a mature business and not necessarily a reasonable place to work. It is fragile, uncertain of its place in the world and whether it is likely to survive out in the wilds of the market place beyond the first year is open to a lot of doubt. There’s a forest load of wild animals, poison ivy and bear traps to face if you’re setting up a new business and the last thing you want is a co-pioneer complaining about their employment contract.

A new start doesn’t need solutions imported to it from mature businesses with notions such as ‘employing staff’ driving its thinking. It needs new solutions which confront the needs of its newness. The new start up doesn’t need staff at all – people who will honour contracts and deliver a job to the best of their ability in return for a negotiated remuneration – but generators: people who can not only deliver the business core activity but who can also generate more activity, more income and emulate the entrepreneur who has brought them to the party.

New businesses need people who have the ability to generate something from nothing, to make value from where there was none before, to act as alchemists rather than as commi-chefs who can follow recipes to the letter but who don’t have the inspirational touch which invents, creates and conjures further opportunities from thin air. They need to engage a lot more sorcerers – not more apprentices- in the kitchen that is the new business.

3. Work in, on and under the business

Perhaps what’s more important than working in and on a business, is an understanding of what was going on under the business: the stuff which tells you why a business is important to other people and why it matters. Working in the business is important; working on the business is essential; but working under the business will provide Generation Y-ers with the energy and motivation to sustain their businesses through the long dark nights of recession and economic challenge.

4. Cash may be king but even royalty needs a moral compass

Business is frequently portrayed as a moral free zone with no rights or wrongs other than can it sell? Can it make a profit? What are the loop holes? and is exemplified in Milo Minderbinder’s moral code of ‘there will always be trade‘ as he cleaned up after organising the bombing of his own squadron at Pianosa by the Luftwaffe in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.

5. If in doubt, use the C word

Dropping the ‘c’ word into any business venture is bound to galvanise the Generation Y-er and the wider workforce, impress investors and stoke up the heat of admiration upon you. It doesn’t matter what the ‘something something something’ is (you could have equally said blahdy blahdy blah): the fact that you’ve introduced the ‘c’ word to your proposal is what’s fired up the meeting.

In the olden days we would have used the words ‘magic’ and the effect would have been the same. These days, ‘creativity’ has replaced the word for ‘magic’ (and ‘alchemy’ and ‘smoke and mirrors’ and ‘snake oil’ for that matter) and the world and it’s business offices have become far happier places as a result.

So, if in future you’re stuck in a turgid negotiation, CRM update or monitoring moment, just drop the word ‘creative’ into proceedings and see your Generation Y-er grow wings and fly to the heavens. He or she may not last long up there as they get too close to the sun, but your colleagues and customers will thank you for liberating them from their non-magical daily grinds.

6. Join a movement – Slow, Guerilla or Digital

If your Generation Y-er has got bored with your business then you could do a lot worse to align it to one of the many movements out there which in their own way are crying out for new forms of activist engagement. Just add ‘slow’, ‘guerrilla’ or ‘digital’ and your business will discover new legs and give you added oomph when you wake up in the morning. Failing that, you can always make your own movement: try ‘Independent’ ‘messy’ or ‘chaotic’ when it comes to rejuvenating your business and watch those customers come flocking.

7. Write your own business language

Like many people who want to set up a business, the following language fills the Generation Y-er with dread, suspicion and horror:

* Connect with your customers confidentially
* Identify your USP intelligently
* Optimise your Search Engines efficiently
* Motivate your employees easily
* Maximise your value added effortlessly
* Shake your booty heartlessly
* Strut your stuff engagingly
* Wedge your bling tellingly
* Fluff your tail provocatively

Don’t worry: lots of potential entrepreneurs and business start ups look aghast at the terminology they are expected to use as they hunker on down in the depths of business speak land. Many of them throw away perfectly respectable business ideas just because of the language they are expected to subscribe to.

But fear not: if your idea stands a chance of surviving the challenges of that language, it will survive anything: and it may turn you into a guru in your own right which will allow you to coin your own aphorisms, cliches and incontestable business jargon.

A great way to start is to generate four columns: in the first, write a list of verbs which might be used in any military, medical or porn movie context. In the second, write a list of personal connectives: my, your, our – that sort of thing. In the third, write a list of any part of your body and in the fourth, write any adjective that might describe a boxing match.

Before you know it, your business lexicon will blow away your competitors and you’ll be calling the shots, imperiously.

One thing that is guaranteed is that the Generation Y-er will engage with your business with all their usual, stereotypical intelligence, panache and style – and may well help you innovate and radically reshape your tired business propositions and orthodoxies.

An amazing taxi offer! Yes, you heard it right…

I know have a habit of banging on a lot about the wonders of contemporary taxi drivers and minicab firms and how little they know about anything at all: but at last, I have found a firm who know a whole lot more about the world: ie where they are in it, where you are in it, how to get you from A to B in the shortest possible time at the lowest possible cost in a manner which is civilising and civilised.

I know it sounds too good to be true: a taxi firm which knows what it’s doing!  But its Christmas after all, and now is the season to expect miracles. So, thank you, UGO Cabfinder!

You can find out about it here.

UGO’s message of pre booking cabs is in line with TFL’s ‘cabwise’ advice which you can find here.

Here’s a lovely graphic to accompany all of the above too!

Tripping off the tongue: truth, reconciliation and disruptive playground politics.

My second visit to Cape Town in 2002 was the time I understood how teachers can hunt in packs and why we can never do everything on our own and have to rely, as much as we might not like it, on the ineffable.

Mandela’s colleagues had led us to schools in some of the Western Cape townships for a week and as the week wore on, my colleagues and I became increasingly inebriated with the achievements and challenges that Mandela’s colleagues were demonstrating.

One inebriation led to another and before we knew it we were walking around a Stellenbosch vineyard, knocking back the free tasters, plying ourselves with goats cheese, biscuits and fruit and one slip of a post-it note led to another and before you knew it, bang! The atmosphere was shattered, distrust washed over the group and we UK colleagues looked at each other: embarrassments were waved away, giggles were hidden, smirks stifled and post-it notes and pens hurriedly hidden in handbags. The pack was out in force and it’s ability to join forces and stand shoulder to shoulder against outsiders summonsed up. The old empire is never far away when Brits are abroad.

Mandela’s colleagues managed to patch the group back together again, well versed as they were in truth and reconciliation but the schism in our group never healed, albeit that disruption happening over 10 years ago.

If it’s hard to heal a small group of teachers out on a weekly field trip, how on earth do you go about healing a nation?

Some time later that week we visited a disability centre where disabled people were being trained in new employment related skills and tentatively being prepared for the workplace. We asked them how this was possible in the country at this time.

Jimi, one of Mandela’s colleagues pointed to a large map of South Africa hanging on the wall. There were three pieces of thin plastic tubing coloured red, blue and white, fixed into the map. The red tubing spanned the length of the country and, explained Jimi, represented the blood of the people required to make the changes necessary; the blue tubing started mid- country and ended in the Pacific Ocean and represented the water and resources required to make the changes necessary; the white tubing started mid-country and went northward up to the limits of the map, disrupting the frame in the process. This, explained Jimi, represented God as there was no way human beings were capable of making the changes necessary on their own. There was a need for something else in this process, something which couldn’t be described and passed by all of our understanding.

We all looked at each other surreptitiously not quite knowing where else to look or what else to say, the earlier events of the week still fresh in our minds. We may have shared a common blood between us, we certainly had no shortage of resources to draw on but we were distinctly impoverished when it came to being able to draw on an ineffable source of power that we could all confidently identify and draw on. We were in fact, distinctly alone in our school trip.

Perhaps the first step in our truth and reconciliation process would have been to recognise that it was loneliness we shared, not the false gang mentality of the pack that the earlier inebriation had succeeded in unmasking.

Free Nelson Mandela? A confession.

I never did like The Specials’ song, “Free Nelson Mandela” back in 1984. There, I’ve said it and a small white man’s burden has lifted.

You couldn’t dispute the lyrical intention – unless you’re of the Tebbit clan – but the jaunty ska trumpets always left me rooted to the dance floor back in Leeds University Students Union. Not that I was a natural in the student discotheque, surprising though that may seem.

I was more of a svelte glam rock poseur and could do a mean languid impression of Phil Oakey or Marc Almond. I once provided a memorable routine to Soft Cells ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’ at an overcrowded student party in Hyde Park, but Jerry Dammer’s anthem invariably led to me half heartedly jumping up and down out of time with my compadres until one evening I realised I just didn’t like the song at all so slinked off to the kitchen to hang out with members of the SWP (the Socialist Workers Party in those days before it had a Blairite conversion to the Socialising Workers Privileged Tendency in the late 1990s).

But now that Mandela has left our shores, I’m fully expecting the track to be re-released any day now only this time around on multiple formats of CD, I-Tunes, YouTube, DVD, and who knows, perhaps even 7″ rainbow vinyl: which lets face it, was the height of choice back in the mid ’80s.

Those days, the choice of vinyl symbolised an act of political solidarity so you had to be careful as you stepped around Jumbo Records in Leeds Merrion Centre to make sure you made the right choice for those student parties later on that day when us student geeks would earnestly look each other up and down, compare shoe size and argue whether it was plausible that the purchase of the record could play a small but important part in contributing to Mandela’s release and ultimately over throwing the apartheid regime. I hope it did, even though I couldn’t bring myself to buying a copy. Times were tough then and Human Leagues Hard Times seemed more in tune with both my personal and the wider public mood.

This time, though, I shall try harder to like the song although the chances that I shall be able to dance to it any more effectively are extremely remote.

First disruptive steps in South Africa.

I first visited South Africa in 1999 when I was working at LIPA and Lee Higgins, our community music tutor at the time, had been involved with various ISME activities and had come back enthused about what he had seen and heard and made a very persuasive case about why LIPA should be out there and how it might be a great source of potential undergraduates for our course in our august institution.

Whilst LIPA released some funding to pay for a market research trip for the two of us, we realised very quickly that asking potential students to pay what in some peoples case would have been the equivalent of a life times earnings to study for a three year degree programme was a form of optimism which bordered on the deluded. Of course, there would have been some students whose parents could have paid – but they almost certainly weren’t going to be from the black families who lived in the townships of Cape Town that we visited. And sure – we could dream about sponsorship of talented black musicians by benign white multinationals all we liked – but the fact is that going on a student recruitment drive to South Africa in the late 1990s was a potentially ridiculous mix of idealism, naïveté and market forces.

What wasn’t ridiculous though was what we did find. We went looking for students and sources of institutional income and instead found people and places and sights and sounds and colours and textures and atmospheres and politics and religions and a place on earth which was simultaneously heaven and hell and which blew apart our preconceptions of notions of community, of music, of Black and White and of good and evil.

Mandela of course infused the air we breathed, the ground we walked on, the talks we talked and the music we listened to. We saw, heard and felt Isicathamiya; we heard Xhosa and Zulu, we wondered why there had never been a civil war in South Africa and we were astounded. In fact, there wasn’t one single day when we weren’t astounded by something or another.

That first visit led to several future visits which became less about attracting the South African Rand to the coffers of LIPA, and more about wider educational and cultural exchange between artists and teachers but the astonishment we felt during that first visit continued to dance around our footsteps as we met many inspirational people whose lives were also infused by Mandela’s presence – or absence, given the amount of time he had been incarcerated on Robben Island.

I don’t really want to say RIP Nelson Mandela as there are millions more saying that right now much more authentically from places that can still astound. His death not only opens up other ways of being astounded by the stories of South Africa: but also how we live our own lives in places which may be thousands of miles from Cape Town but which may as well be on Mandela’s doorstep given the racism, bigotry, fear and ignorance which are still evident everywhere you look and tread.

So I hope his family and people find some peace once he has been laid to rest; but for the rest of us, Insha’Allah, we could do a lot worse than to allow ourselves to be constantly astounded at the world we continue to live in and infuse some of his spirit into disrupting those worlds.

Maybe, just maybe: the role of the artist entrepreneur.

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur could answer the question of how the fuck are we going to manage when public sector funding has dried up? When audiences are becoming more conservative? When the corporates are opting for the safe and secure? When the cliches are running rings around new thinking opportunities?

Maybe, just maybe the artistic entrepreneur can see opportunities for new productions and new services…

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur can carve out new marketplaces rather than be beholden to preconceived ideas of what constitutes the marketplace…

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur could ignore boundaries of professional, amateur and community and facilitate engagement processes which work with the power of the artistic vision rather than the pragmatism of the cultural realpolitik.

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur could reimagine a future which is based on vision, critical engagement and personal and social transformation.

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur could galvanise the artist to wake up to what their power and possibilities are, and to quell their worries and anxieties.

Things not to talk about: lessons in keeping your mouth shut.

Well, there’s lots of them at the moment. Always have been, always will be: and there’s lots of people who always want you to keep schtum; keep your mouth shut; keep mum; go shhhhhhhh.

And the current topic not to say anything about is: well, clearly I can’t say. Otherwise it would be in the public domain and that would be the end of it. So there. On the other hand… No, there’s no other hand when it comes to keeping your mouth shut. You do it. End of. There is no alternative.

So, for those who need some advice and guidance on keeping your mouth shut, here are some tips and tricks. In the best of social media protocols, this post is open to suggestions and refinements so please feel free to add them liberally. As long as no-one else objects of course.

Lesson 1. Don’t turn UP. If you turn UP to something, it makes it difficult not to spread the word afterwards about what you have turned UP to. If you don’t turn UP, there is no risk that you’ll be tempted to spread those words which form in your head through that something or indeed afterwards. If 50% of life is about turning up (on time, to the right place, with the right people) then the other 50% is about not turning up and being saved the awkward moments of being asked your opinion.

Lesson 2. You don’t exist if the media aren’t interested. Lots of things we do these days rely on the power of the media to spread our words for us. This means we have to talk, behave and exist in a certain way if we are to gain their interest. If we don’t do any of those things, then we don’t exist as far as the media is concerned and you have effectively been shut up. It’s like having your photo taken or waving at the camera if you’re inadvertently on TV – you only exist when someone has snapped your face or waving arms. Until that happens, you are nothing. Zilch. Nada. A media-free zone.

Lesson 3. When someone in authority says ‘advice’ they mean ‘instruct’. Many people in charge feel awkward about their role and try to adopt all sorts of friendly mannerisms to hide their discomfort. They might say to you that they advise you to do something (like keeping your mouth shut) when in fact they mean they’re instructing you to do it (ie shut your mouth). So, when it comes to helping you knowing what to do in difficult political situations, just pay attention to the person who says ‘I advise you to….” They really mean shut the fuck up. And you would best to adhere to their instructional advice.

More lessons in keeping your mouth shut to follow over the next 2 months!

HS2: does it matter that it’s an unknowable phenomenon?

“Who’s right and who’s wrong?” asked the orange tanned young woman of her six and a half foot track suited skin head boy friend as they were waiting for the bus.

Were they talking about the vague ties of family kith and kin? Or recent events in the HS2 saga? Or the vagueries of post modern knowledge? Were they wrestling with contemporary epistemological challenges about how we know what we know and who knows what they’re talking about? Who indeed is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’?

I tried broaching the subject with them both as we muscled our way past the mums with prams, lads with bikes and senior citizens sporting shiny new roller blades.

Travelling by bus has changed beyond all recognition I mused, they’ve turned into freight transportation for lesser forms of transport, hijacked by the mass transport equivalent of the cuckoo.

No longer is it possible just to get on a bus and meet other people. They now have their own internal highway control processes: bikes go there, prams go there, wheelchairs have to put up with whatever the driver determines and the mere passenger scrabbles around for whatever’s left. The bus driver does at least know he is no longer driving a bus but a Scalectrix track on wheels.

Doris and Gyorgi I later learnt were indeed struggling with the state of knowledge, not least the reliability or otherwise of bus time tables. Like Doris pointed out, “they’re shite those timetables”.

It’s the challenge of the modern day traveller – how do you know what you can rely on when it comes to going from A to B? George Stephenson didn’t have that problem back in 1830 when he invented the first intercity railway: he knew nothing, and he knew it. He had a plan of sorts but even then the first train was three months late leaving the platform -a phenomenon which has clearly taken root in the DNA of the British rail network ever since.

And what about HS2? What can anyone truly know about what that is or will be? The budget falls apart daily; the unintended consequences multiply like rabbits in a field looking at a stationery Virgin Pendolino and the route hops from one village to another depending on which village feudal baron shouts the loudest and is able to cajole their villagers into brandishing enough pitchforks in the general direction of Richard Branson.

The sad fact about HS2 is that for all our speculation, we know nothing whatsoever about it: its budget, its route, it’s timetable or the colour of its livery. It would be better for all concerned if they acknowledged their complete ignorance, threw up their hands and admitted it’s a terrifically ludicrous project and damn the expense and the disruption and the egos and the politics and the legacy.

At least if they employed Doris and Gyorgi to run the project, they would have someone who knew what they don’t know and have the orange sun tan, track suit and torn up bus timetables to prove it.

An Open Letter to Russell Brand: Voting. So what?

So, yes, Russell, democracy ain’t perfect. Voting is a corrupted and corruptible process. History will show us what we want to look for and voting will either be the peak of human endeavour or a sleazy, compromised dance of settlement with partners you’d not want to get too close to in case you catch something nasty like realpolitik.

But Mr. Brand, marvellous entertaining and uplifting man that you are, voting is the best it’s gonna get for the time being. And I don’t mean the macro choices of Cameron Heavy, Cameron Light or Cameron Rosé. I mean the voting in the little places of the classroom, the workplace or the pub on a Friday night when we might rashly vote to go for a kebab or stay for another Subrowka shot.

We need constantly to practice our voting skills in all sorts of places and at all sorts of times – and often in the knowledge that whilst the ‘majority’ voice should be heard, the ‘minority’ voices also need listening to – otherwise we face a future of loud mouth boorish fat bastards in blazers calling all the shots about which pub to drink in, which school lunchtime option to gobble down and which Labour Party leader gets elected by what kind of vote.

The issue about the act of voting is not about whether you ignore it – but it’s about how you can do it more often, more sophisticatedly and with more joy in the complexities it offers us when it comes to understanding the social lives we are woven into.