Management – Alexandru Diduc

How do you motivate a Gen-Z?

Did you ever hear a barely audible moan at your work place and wonder where it comes from? This is the sound of Gen-Z’ managers. This is a hyperbolic take for humor – Gen-Z brings fresh energy, innovation, and much-needed change to workplaces! But yeah, it’s an adjustment.

Managing Gen-Z can feel like herding cats – if the cats had TikTok/Twitter attention spans, zero patience for corporate BS, and an allergy to outdated processes. They demand flexibility but expect promotions yesterday, thrive on collaboration but ghost meetings for DMs, and want “purpose” in every task while rolling their eyes at anything resembling hierarchy. They’ll fact-check your words with a Google search mid-conversation, call out inefficiencies loudly (often on Slack for everyone to see), and prioritize “mental health days” over last-minute crunch time – forcing you to actually, you know, plan ahead. Their digital-native confidence is impressive until you realize they’ve never addressed a client without an emoji.

Adapt or perish, boomer!

The idea that Gen-Z are “unmotivated” and “lazy” is rooted in a stereotype supported mostly by the companies with a rigid organizational culture. They are not poorly motivated, but rather they are motivated differently. The problem with Gen-Z is not the lack of motivation, but rather weak mythology and unappealing meanings shared, for instance, within an organization. This short article aims not at solving the problem once and for all, but rather at exploring the alternatives, rather at taking a look over the generational fence. In doing so, it makes sense to briefly consider what Gen-Z is, what motivates them at work, what meanings they get exposed to, and honestly looking back in the mirror to what companies offer.

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50 Business Diagrams for Strategic Planning

Sometimes, the task of strategic planning is overwhelming. The breadth of the issues often stunts with the question ‘WHERE DO I START‘. Here is a list of 50 business diagrams for 50 business diagrams for strategic planning (by Cinergix Pty) in one PDF file with brief explanation of each.

For brainstorming:

Affinity Diagram
Decision Tree
Mind Map
SCAMPER template

For documentation:

BPMN
Employee Journey Map
Organizational Chart
Service Blueprint
SIPOC Diagram
Value Stream Map

For meetings:

Retrospective Meeting Template

For project management:

Action Plan
Communication Plan
Lessons Learned Template

For research and analysis:

Cause and Effect Diagram
Competitor Analysis
Customer Journey Map
Empathy Map
Force Field Analysis
User Persona Diagram

For strategy and planning:

ADL Matrix
AIDA Model
Ansoff Matrix
BCG Matrix
Business Capability Map
Business Model Canvas
Impact Effort Matrix
Lean Canvas
OKR Goal Setting Template
Operating Model Canvas
Perceptual Map
PEST Analysis
Porter’s Five Forces
Product Roadmap
Project Charter
Risk Assessment Matrix
SMART Goal Framework
SOAR Analysis
Stakeholder Map
STEEPLE Analysis
Strategy Map
Strategy Diamond
SWOT Analysis
Value Chain Analysis
Value Proposition Canvas
VRIO Analysis
5 Why’s Analysis

For task management:

Eisenhower Matrix
Gantt Chart
Workflow Diagram

Internationalization strategy: how to go from local to global

Internationalization is a complex process with many scientific articles dedicated to that. Comprehensively presenting it in a format of a short blog post is a task that requires major simplifications. Nevertheless, here is what it takes from a company to consider this major step in terms of market, operation modes and product – internationalization strategy canvas.

Understanding the big picture is critical for strategic decision-makers. Implementation of a decision too early or too late can turn very costly. Especially in the context of internationalization, a right decision in a right time makes an ordinary company extraordinary. The challenge is though how to understand the timing and correctly interpret the operational context of a firm, when external environment is always in a change?

International trade is an “infinite game” (see Carse 1986). Good news is that rules are the same for all players; the pace of the game is different, but stages are the same; the sequence of steps is different, but steps are the same. Each player sets own goals and selects a strategy. As it is common for the games, choices come with a price tag. Once the setup of the game is clear, the action is just a matter of imagination.

Figure 1. Internationalization process canvas

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Business Process Re-engineering and Organizational Change

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is the process of restructuring the organizational design from the ground-up. It stresses the importance of full-scale recreation of the processes instead of numerous and often continuous optimization of sub-processes. To avoid repetition, one may have a brief introduction in the idea of BPR from the Wikipedia.

Despite of usefulness of the BPR, there were some concerns. In his revision of the Socio-Technical System theory, Clegg (2000) has proposed the 8^th principle – core processes should be integrated. The idea of the principle is that “organizations can be viewed as comprising a number of core processes that typically cut laterally across different functions. This contrasts with the more traditional view that organizations comprise sets of expertise-based specialisms that are organized vertically.” Here, Clegg also regretfully mentions the devaluation of application of the principle by the BPR approach in the context of the organizational system design.

This brings to a thought that there is more to what organizations can be than what BPR has to offer. Despite of being a useful tool, it should find its application with consideration of its limitations.

References
Clegg, C. W. (2000). Sociotechnical principles for system design. Applied Ergonomics, 31(5), 463–477.