Parking on Driveways
Did you know that there are international rankings for geniuses? I learned about this from my wife and kids, who have informed me, “You’re not the smartest person in the world.”
With the advent of Big Data, it does seem possible (if not likely) that everything a person says, does and thinks can be captured and quantified by some algorithm into a massively comprehensive IQ score. China is already partway there with their social credit system that tracks behaviors that the government considers subversive, such as not paying taxes, visiting unauthorized websites, criticizing the government, or even interacting with other citizens with low social scores. The consequences of having a low score can impact one’s immediate life (such as restricting air travel) or limit their future (such as blocking admission into a university). To many observers this is an Orwellian example of how Big Data can be employed for nefarious purposes.
On a less frightening note, it is both intriguing and ironic that the main use of Big Data today is to be able to analyze things at a more granular level. For example, we have seen how the continuous evolution of the credit score is to gather more and more data about a person’s earning and spending history, so that fewer and fewer people can be deemed creditworthy. Baseball cybermetricians are now measuring the batting averages of players with runners in scoring position after the 7th inning against left-handed pitchers. Your mobile phone can now track your steps, your screen time, how soundly you sleep, and keep all your medical records. It’s a matter of time before it figures out how to give you a prostate exam.
Another example of Big-Produces-Small is in electron microscopy. To see particles at the atomic and subatomic level, these microscopes have become incredibly large. My friend Bill is a field manager for Thermo Fisher Scientific and installs electron microscopes that weigh 20,000 pounds and stand 13 feet high. Since Bill is an engineer this makes sense to him, but when I think about it I get a brain freeze. Are we in Seinfeld’s Bizarro World, where the worst economic recession in 40 years can lead to record highs in the Dow?
One of the huge challenges for people in business today is to comprehend the granular and paradoxical information that Big Data generates, and to normalize it into a framework that can enable informed decisions. Perhaps Millennials and Gen Z professionals will be more adept at making sense of Big Data findings because they’ve grown up with it. Though let’s not count out Baby Boomers who have been wrestling with syllogistic puzzles ever since George Carlin mused about why people park on driveways and drive on parkways?
I have gotten a lot of feedback from my recent article about the work habits of different generations. Testimony from readers of all ages has sharpened my view about the essence of why Baby Boomers and Millennials are different, which I can express in a Carlin-inspired way: Boomers like working but don’t like work, while Millennials like work but don’t like working.
Say again?
Baby Boomers like working because they are the original workaholics. There are lots of causal factors behind this including the honoring of their parents’ work ethic, the obligatory pursuit of the next chapter in the American Dream, the need to finance exorbitant college attendance costs for their kids, the importance of job title and profession to one’s self-identity, pick one or more. But they have sacrificed a significant personal cost in work-life balance, and have grown to dislike incompetent management, poor leadership, corporate politics and the soulless nature of the workplace. Hence Boomers like working but hate work.
Both Millennials and Generation Z are far from the laid-back, unmotivated workers that the older generation perceives. Those who have survived the gauntlet of hypercompetitive youth sports and hypercompetitive high schools in order to get into hypercompetitive colleges and universities are no stranger to hard work and high achievement. Yet it seems clear that they carry different values: your job is what you do but not who you are. Millennials have infinite energy to plan a weekend getaway trip at an Air BnB with their eight closest friends, or to spend four hours preparing an exotic meal they found on the New York Times cooking app. For many the purpose of their jobs is to provide the income to support their many personal interests. Hence my posit that Millennials don’t mind hard work, they just don’t like working so much.
For those of you who have an interest in empirical proof behind the above hypotheses, CareerMap is gathering Big Data about workplace attitudes and career goals, through a study of graduates of a major university; look for some interesting findings from me in the upcoming months. In the meantime, we can dwell on Carl Sagan’s words for his book Cosmos: “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence”. Now if I can figure out what this means, maybe I can break into the top ten rankings for International Geniuses.
Tim Guen is President of CareerMap and blogs frequently about the challenges of building careers in today’s environment.