7. Deciding How (or Whether) to Implement a Change

You now know why some of your colleagues are constantly agitating for change while others are constantly resisting it. You understand why this difference tends to break along generational lines, and you know how to explain the value of your existing systems and also how to remind people that change and innovation have always been a natural part of their careers. In theory, there really shouldn’t be any more problems.

But theory often breaks down when we’re talking about specific real-world situations. Even if you’re successful at convincing everyone that change is a natural process we’re all experiencing every day of our lives, you’ll still run into resistance when you try to implement a new policy, procedure, or product. So why doesn’t philosophy align with action? Why would someone—Young Person or Old Person—acknowledge the need for change in theory but still fight it in practice?

As with everything else we’ve discussed in this book, there’s a very logical reason for it. And given that I wore a full-body chicken suit on a semi-regular basis in my youth,¹ I think it best to start explaining that reason by looking at the world through the lens of fashion.

¹ True story. You’ll have to ask me about it sometime.

Flash forward to the 1960s, however, and you get a different ideal. Flip-flops and tie-dye shirts, dreadlocks and shorts, sleeveless tank tops and the kind of beards that Middle Earth’s dwarves would envy. Women sometimes wrapped curtains around themselves and called them dresses, and men sometimes decided that pants were optional. Today’s Old People often decry the sloppy fashions of Young People while forgetting that theirs was the first generation in modern times to make such sloppiness fashionable. Again, this isn’t how everyone dressed in the 1960s...but whatever idea we have of 1950s fashion, 1960s fashion is the opposite of that.

And then things just got weird. The 1970s was all horsehair boots and plaid leisure suits, since women apparently all wanted to look like go-go dancers and men wanted to look like they were wearing their grandparents’ tablecloths. The 1980s brought denim jackets and leg warmers and slitted sunglasses and shiny leather pants, and women everywhere shot a gallon of hairspray into their hair every morning to create bangs a tornado couldn’t touch. The 1990s brought us the unemployed lumberjack, ripped jeans and flannel shirts as far as the eye could see.

And as for today, I will just say that in the past month I have seen people working away at their jobs while wearing the following: a woman with pink hair and one blue eyebrow; a woman with 14 or 15 facial piercings and half of her head shaved; a man in a fedora, three-piece burgundy suit, and bowling shoes; a woman in a t-shirt, slippers, and pajama pants; a man in linen yoga pants held in place by a piece of rope; an impeccably dressed woman with one arm fully tattooed; and a man named Kyle wearing a button-down shirt he bought at a consignment store specifically because it had the name “Billy” monogrammed on the left breast pocket and he thought it was funny. As best as I can tell, today’s fashion ethos is suffering from multiple personality disorder.

There are two important things to take away from the evolution of fashion over the past 60 years. The first is that the dress code issue, which you’ve probably been grappling with and which in many ways is the quintessential generational difference in the workplace, is not a new phenomenon. Today’s Millennials are not pushing the boundaries of acceptable dress any differently than Baby Boomers did in the 1960s and 1970s, or Gen Xers in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, Young People have been continuously challenging established fashions since at least the late 1950s. This is a small point, but it’s important for reinforcing the main theme of this book: The generational issues you’re facing at work are not significantly different from the generational issues people have always faced, and those issues break more commonly in two categories than four.

But there is a broader point to this walk down memory lane. Based on what I’ve just written, it might seem as though fashion is changing all the time, a constant progression from old to new. However, that’s not really true. Because if you consider what comprises the standard business outfit today, it’s not fundamentally different from the standard business outfit of the 1950s. There are differences, of course; people more commonly wear tennis shoes today, men can choose not to wear a tie and still look perfectly professional, and women are just as likely to wear pants as skirts. But a side-by-side comparison of a proper 1950s businessperson and a proper 2015 businessperson will reveal far more similarities than differences.

Therefore, over the past 60 years, most of our fashion experiments have turned out to be nothing more than passing fads. There is no real place for tie-dye shirts in the business world, or leisure suits, or ripped jeans, or many of the other styles that have been very popular at various times. In fact, the majority of these fashion “innovations” have made exactly zero impact on our conception of acceptable business attire. For 60 years we have taken fashion detours that have ultimately led to dead ends, and we have stayed more or less true to the 1950s idea of what constitutes professional dress.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Consider the following examples:

• In 1980, Pioneer introduced the laserdisc for use in the home market as a direct challenge to VCRs, which first came to market in 1977.² It featured a superior picture quality to VHS tapes (400 horizontal lines vs. 250), the ability to jump instantaneously to any point in a movie without the need to rewind, and more audio channels. Laserdiscs were also heavier and bulkier than VHS tapes, stored less data, and didn’t allow for recording or overwriting. Consumers overwhelmingly choose convenience and recordability over higher quality; annual laserdisc player sales peaked at 2 million units in the United States, compared to 11 million VCR sales in 1985, 9.8 million in 1988, and 9.5 million in 1989.

² The original VCR cost between $1,000 and $1,400, by the way—more than twice as much as the original iPad.

• The 1990s saw skyrocketing popularity of both mobile phones and mobile video game systems. These devices were separate, however, so consumers had to carry both of them. In 2003, Nokia introduced the N-Gage as a dual-platform device, capable of making phone calls and playing high-quality video games. Gamers could even play one another through Bluetooth connections. The idea was an excellent one, as shown by the fact that gaming is a key feature of every modern smartphone. However, it was an idea ahead of its time. Because touchscreen technology had not yet been developed, the N-Gage required consumers to use the phone keypad as the video game controls; the alternative would have been to put both phone buttons and video game controls side-by-side on the same device, which would have been prohibitively bulky. Unfortunately for Nokia, users found the gaming setup to be difficult and unintuitive and the device itself to be awkward for receiving phone calls. In the year of its release, the Nokia N-Gage was outsold 100-to-1 by the Nintendo GameBoy Advance.

• In February 1999, Flooz.com launched. A precursor to Bitcoin, Flooz attempted to create a completely new, online-only currency that could be purchased and then redeemed with participating Internet retailers. The only problem was that there was absolutely no reason to choose Flooz over credit cards, gift cards, and other established forms of payment—unless you wanted to launder money by transferring it to a fictitious currency and then changing it back, which by mid-2001 is how 19% of Flooz.com transactions were categorized. The company announced its closure on August 26, 2001, having spent between $35 and $50 million in venture capital.

• In January 1998, eight months before Google existed, Disney decided to make a foray into online search and launched Go.com. Intended to compete with Yahoo! and Alta Vista, Go.com was supposed to be a comprehensive search engine that would benefit from the advertising dollars that made (and still make) search engines so profitable. However, being a Disney property meant that Go.com had to filter out any content deemed too mature, inappropriate, or otherwise inconsistent with the Disney brand. As a result, Go.com was doomed from the start to be a semi-functional search engine at best. That, combined with the fact that Internet users wanted to access online content directly instead of having to stare at Disney ads before they could reach whatever they were searching for (ever wonder why Google’s homepage is so sparse?), led to the closure of Go.com in January 2001—at a loss of $790 million.

• In 2003, Myspace was founded and quickly became the most popular social media platform in existence—so successful, in fact, that barely two years later, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought Myspace for $580 million in a heated bidding war with Viacom.³ At the time, everyone thought it a great purchase—and, indeed, the next couple years justified News Corp.’s optimism: In 2006 Myspace surpassed Google as the most-visited website on the planet, and in 2007 Myspace was valued at $12 billion. And then, for numerous reasons that would require another book to fully explain, people started abandoning Myspace as quickly as they had joined. By 2011, the company’s fortunes had fallen so far that News Corp. decided to sell Myspace to Specific Media, an investment group led by Justin Timberlake, for $35 million—6% of what they had paid for it a mere five years earlier. Rupert Murdoch later called the acquisition of Myspace a “huge mistake.”

³ Viacom’s failure to acquire Myspace led to the firing of its then-CEO, Tom Freston.

• In 1993, Ty Warner, Inc., released the first nine Beanie Babies in what would eventually become an armada. The toys became wildly popular, and Ty’s policy of limiting production and systematically retiring various models convinced many people that Beanie Babies would rise in value. People begin to collect the $5 toys as part of their investment portfolio, and for a time, many sought-after Beanie Babies sold for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. As late as 1998, one influential magazine devoted to the Beanie Baby market projected that an “investment grade” Stripes the Dark Tiger was worth $250 and would be worth $1,000 in 2008. Then it all collapsed, as quickly and completely as the housing bubble in 2007. Today Stripes is selling for less than 1% of his projected 2008 value, and at least one documentary (“Bankrupt by Beanies”) testifies to the hundreds of thousands of dollars some investors lost as a result.

This list could continue infinitely, but the point is clear: New ideas sometimes fail. It’s as simple as that. We all know it, we’ve all seen it, and we’ve all dealt with the aftermath of a healthy number of bad decisions. So sometimes we resist the next new idea because we don’t wish to repeat the experience of living through yet another failure.

In fact, aversion to change is more a consequence of our outlook than it is our age or experience level. All of us start accumulating failures as soon as we’re born—burning ourselves on hot stoves, falling off of bicycles, failing exams, quitting piano lessons, and so on. By the time we enter our working lives, all of us have experienced plenty of failure at plenty of different things, and that causes many of us to approach the next new thing with some degree of trepidation. You’ve almost certainly worked with both Young People and Old People who were resistant to new ideas. You can probably think of some Old People who automatically say no to any new suggestion that comes their way, and you’ve probably worked with some Young People who were even more stuck in their ways than most of their Older or more-experienced peers. And in every case, regardless of the age of the person in question, their attitude is a direct consequence of focusing on the potential risks rather than the potential rewards. All of us do this from time to time.

However, the stereotype still exists that Old People are more reluctant to change than Young People. Why would this be true? If aversion to change is more a function of attitude than anything else, why would Old People be more resistant to it than Young People?

Easy—because they’re older. In the Chapter 6, we discussed how repeated success (or repeated non-failure) causes all of us to trend toward complacency as we age. At the same time, all of us also accumulate a larger body of failures as we age. The older we get, the more fads we’ve seen come and go, and the more ideas we’ve been exposed to that didn’t work out the way they were supposed to. And just as exposure to repeated success leads to complacency, exposure to repeated failure leads to caution and skepticism. It would have to, unless you’re somehow immune or indifferent to the negative effects of all those failures—and very few of us are. Thus, because a 60-year-old will inevitably have experienced more successes and failures than a 25-year-old, the 60-year-old is more likely to be complacent in his or her successes and more cautious as a result of his or her greater number of failures. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, of course, since people have an annoying habit of not fitting perfectly into definitional boxes, but it is a tendency that comes as we accumulate both age and experience.

In fact, one of the biggest advantages that Old People bring to the professional world is the perspective they have acquired by virtue of getting older and accumulating more experience. In many cases, they aren’t theorizing about the potential problems that will come from a new idea or initiative; often they’re making direct comparisons between today’s idea and one they experienced personally a few years ago. Indeed, without the perspective that Old People bring to the table, every new idea would be based entirely on educated guesses rather than on anything concrete.

So if you share a new idea with Older or more-experienced colleagues and run into some resistance, you’re welcome to assume that they’re intentionally trying to be spiteful. They very well could hate you and everything you’ve ever thought. It’s far more likely, though, that they’re simply trying to avoid making a bad decision. Perhaps your idea reminds them of something they tried years ago that didn’t work out very well. Maybe they aren’t convinced that the theoretical and untested advantages of your approach are better than the known and well-tested advantages of their current approach. Whatever the reasons behind their hesitation, their ultimate goal is almost always to avoid making a mistake—and it’s critical that you encourage those people to voice their concerns because their uncertainty will require you to analyze your new ideas in ways that you may not have done otherwise.

There are only two tiny problems with that approach. First, it’s completely impossible. And second, some new ideas actually end up being good ones. In fact, for every example of people embracing a new idea only to be disappointed when the idea fails to live up to its potential, there is a different example of people resisting a new idea only to be shocked and amazed when that new idea proves to be revolutionary.

But again, don’t take my word for it. Consider these examples:

• In the late 1990s, an electronics engineer named Tony Fadell had an idea. Since 1995 he had been working on handheld devices at Philips, and he thought people would like a digital music player that could fit into your hand. He presented the idea to executives at Philips, who showed no interest. So in July 1999 he founded his own company, Fuse, to develop the product. He failed to secure enough funding, however, so Fuse went under, and Fadell decided to try partnering with another company to build his product. In 2000 he approached Real Networks with his idea for a handheld digital music player, but executives there also showed no interest. Then, in 2001, Fadell spoke with Steve Jobs and learned that Apple was in the initial stages of developing a product very similar to the one Fadell had in mind. Fadell was hired and ultimately picked to lead the team that would develop the first iPod. Executives at both Philips and Real Networks had passed on an idea that would earn billions.

• In the 2000 NFL draft, Tom Brady was chosen in the seventh round, which is a polite way of saying that every NFL team rejected him six times before the New England Patriots decided he was better than whoever else was left over. In the 14 years since, he has led the Patriots to six Super Bowls, four of which the team has won. By comparison, of the six quarterbacks picked before Tom Brady in the 2000 draft (Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi, Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger, and Spurgeon Wynn), only Chris Redman has a Super Bowl ring, which he earned as a backup in his rookie season.

• In 1918, French general Ferdinand Foch was appointed commander-in-chief of the Allied Armies. He had impeccable military credentials, and many historians credit him with having devised the strategies that would ultimately win the war against Germany. However, in 1904, when presented with reports of the first airplanes, he stated unequivocally, “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” Without air support, Foch’s offensive of September 26, 1918, would very likely not have been as successful as it was.

• In 1880 Henry Morton, the president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, offered this prediction upon hearing of Thomas Edison’s electric lightbulb: “Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.”

• Lord Kelvin, one of the most highly respected scientists of his time, said in 1897, “Radio has no future.”

• In February 2005, as the popularity of his social media platform was skyrocketing, Myspace cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe met with Mark Zuckerberg to discuss Myspace’s acquisition of Facebook. At the time, Facebook was primarily used by college students and was significantly smaller than Myspace. Zuckerberg offered to sell Facebook for $75 million, and DeWolfe refused. He saw no need to pay such an absurd amount of money for a social media platform that would only ever be used by college students. Besides, he thought, Facebook was more of a novelty than a real threat.

• In 1970 Bernard Sadow, a vice president for a luggage company, was returning from a vacation when he became frustrated by his heavy and cumbersome luggage. Observing an airport worker with a wheeled skid, he hit upon the idea of attaching wheels to luggage, which he did originally by removing the casters from a wardrobe and attaching a strap to the front of his suitcase.⁴ His was at least the third attempt at putting wheels on luggage; a wheeled trunk had been patented in 1887 and a wheeled suitcase in 1945, but neither invention took off. At first, Sadow’s invention suffered the same fate; retailer after retailer refused to carry it, primarily arguing (this is completely true) that wheeling luggage around wasn’t something that a grown man would ever do. “People do not accept change well,” Sadow said of the experience. It took almost two years for Sadow’s wheeled luggage to find its first advocate in Macy’s.

⁴ Prior to this, one of the most popular solutions of the 1960s was to purchase a wheeled folding cart. Travelers could unfold the cart, place their luggage on it, wheel it wherever they wanted, and then fold the cart up and strap it to the luggage once they got to their destination. The wheels were RIGHT THERE!!!!! And yet nobody thought to put the two of them together.

But Sadow’s invention still didn’t revolutionize the luggage industry. People bought wheeled luggage when Macy’s first made it available in 1972, but it didn’t become a ubiquitous sight at airports around the world. That would have to wait until 1987, when an airline pilot named Robert Plath took his own luggage into his garage workshop and created the Rollaboard, a rolling suitcase with a retractable handle. Other luggage companies took no notice. Plath initially sold his invention to fellow pilots and other airline workers, but travelers began asking where they could get the same for themselves. Plath then quit flying and started his own luggage company, Travelpro International. Only after Rollaboards had become popular did other luggage companies take notice and begin to create their own versions.

Like the previous list, this one could continue indefinitely.⁵ Every type of business—indeed, every company—has its share of people far too comfortable with their current success who refused to see the potential of industry-changing innovations when they were first presented. This is probably most common with technological advancements, as I have personally spoken to people who swore they would quit their jobs rather than use a computer, stop using DOS, take work home on a laptop, put up with email on their phones, or engage in any form of social media. You probably know some of those people. You’ve probably been one of those people at one time or another. Yet all those changes came, and it is now impossible for us to imagine doing business the way we used to.

⁵ I’m certain that a loooong time ago, whenever the first human being put on clothing, other naked people were sitting around saying, “That’s never going to work. He looks ridiculous. Seriously (gesturing to naked self), who would want to cover all this up?”

So if one of your colleagues is insistent on getting you to agree how wonderful his or her new idea is, you’re welcome to assume that he’s tacitly calling everything you’ve ever done a complete failure. He very well could hate you and everything you’ve ever thought.⁶ It’s far more likely, though, that he’s simply excited about capitalizing on a possible opportunity. He may have been studying the market when you weren’t looking. If it’s a new colleague making the suggestion, he may have seen something you haven’t needed to see because your track record of success may have made it less important for you to look for something new. Whatever the reasons for his enthusiasm, his ultimate goal is very likely to help your company become even more successful than it already is—and it’s critical that you encourage such people to share their ideas because those new concepts will require you to analyze your business in ways that you may not have done otherwise.

⁶ It sounds more absurd the more times you read it, doesn’t it?

Every business, at every point in its existence, is engaged in a constant battle between sticking with existing practices and trying to anticipate the needs of the unknown market the future is going to bring. Some new ideas are terrible, while others are revolutionary. Some new initiatives will fail, and others will become industry standard. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict with perfect accuracy which changes will take off and which ones won’t; and for that reason, it is also impossible to get 100% agreement on adopting a new and untested idea. Some people are going to focus more on the potential risks, while others will focus more on the potential rewards, and there’s no getting around that.

No, because this isn’t a generational issue at all. When it comes to addressing the potential merits and drawbacks of a specific new idea, product, or process, the only generational factor at play is our tendency as we age to become more cautious with respect to new ideas and more comfortable with respect to established practices—and we’ve already discussed how to address that issue. Otherwise, any frustration you’ve experienced regarding the adoption or rejection of specific initiatives comes from exactly two sources:

• Some people focus on the potential positive outcomes expected to come from the adoption of the new idea, while others focus on the potential negative outcomes.

• Some people focus on the positive consequences of staying with an existing system, while others focus on the negative consequences.

This tension has nothing to do with generational characteristics and everything to do with our different personalities. There are people of all ages who are naturally adventurous and conservative. You’ll almost certainly have both Young People and Old People who are convinced that a new idea is going to be fantastic, and you’ll just as certainly have both Young People and Old People who are perfectly happy to do whatever work is necessary to adopt a new idea but who still think you should stick with whatever you’re doing now.

Let’s take the dress code issue mentioned in Matthew’s story back in Chapter 1. If you’ve experienced the same issue, then you already know that this is almost exclusively the consequence of Young People choosing to dress in ways that some Old People disapprove of. I have delivered hundreds of keynote presentations to virtually every kind of company and industry imaginable, and I’ve found that when it comes to generational tension, the issue of dress seems to cause more frustration than any other single issue.

The primary reason this seemingly small difference is such a contentious one is that Young People typically want to dress casually because they feel like it, and Old People typically want everyone to dress more formally because they prefer it—at least, that’s how the conversation usually goes, if indeed there’s any conversation at all. In both cases, the attitude is virtually identical: Everyone should do things my way because that’s how I like it. This approach is guaranteed to resolve exactly nothing.

Now I’ve already made the argument that this issue has been continuous and unbroken since at least World War II. When they were younger, today’s Baby Boomers dressed in ways their elders found scandalously unprofessional. (“You’re not going to wear a suit to work? You’re not going to wear a tie? How will anyone take you seriously?”) When Gen Xers were younger, they dressed in ways many Baby Boomers found absurd. (“You want to wear sneakers with dress pants? You think that gives a good impression?”) With respect to dress, Millennials are behaving no differently than Young People have for generations. But does that knowledge do anything to solve the actual disagreement between people who believe in adhering to different dress codes? Absolutely not.

Instead, if any reconciliation and consensus are ever going to occur, then all concerned parties will need to be able to say what benefits they believe will result from their ideas or approach. Is there any indication that professional dress leads to higher productivity or a stronger work culture? Is there any evidence that relaxing your dress code will improve employee morale? Do you work in direct contact with your customers and so have reason to believe that physical appearance is an important element in successfully conducting business? If you can’t come up with reasons for wanting to do things your way, then you’re either sticking with an existing practice out of habit or advocating for a new practice because you find it interesting somehow, and neither approach will convince anyone else that your way is a good one.

It is both impossible and unreasonable to expect that everyone you work with will enthusiastically support every new thing that comes along, and no amount of conversation is going to change that. All of us have opinions, and many of us are rather attached to our own ideas of how things should be done. But if everyone has the opportunity to explain the benefits they think will come from either adopting a new approach or keeping things the way they are, then two things will happen. First, you (and everyone else) will know the reasons some people disagree with you, which will automatically make the disagreement less intense and more civil. And second, everyone will know what the goals are for either implementing or not implementing the change in question. If a change occurs and people start to see the benefits that its advocates predicted, then those who resisted will slowly admit the value of the change; and if you continue with “business as usual” and keep finding success in the ways its advocates promised, then those who wanted to change will slowly concede the value of your existing approach. Either way, you will have invited everyone to participate, and there’s no better way to bring people closer together on the Us/Them spectrum than by making them realize that they all have something to contribute.

Recognizing that our attitude toward specific changes is not a generational issue will go a long way toward helping you view your Younger or Older colleagues in a new light. They aren’t intractable enemies, and they aren’t so locked into a particular generational mindset that there’s no hope of getting them to see things differently. They’ve simply chosen to focus on different things than you have—which means there is hope of getting them to see things your way, as long as you’re patient and willing to explain it to them.

Fundamentally, all of us think the way we do things is right. As a result, we tend to think people who do things differently than we do are misguided at best and dangerously wrong at worst. This is true not only of generational differences but of religions, systems of government, approaches to marriage, attitudes toward exercise, and pretty much everything else. Because we more commonly identify with people our own age, we tend to believe that all Young People think one way, while all Old People think another. Because Older People have more reasons to be complacent than their Younger colleagues, and given today’s Young People have only ever lived in a world defined by constant and rapid change, we tend to believe that Young People are universally impatient for change and Old People are universally opposed to it. Indeed, this “wisdom” is so prevalent that most generational books take it for granted as truth.

But as we’ve just pointed out, that isn’t really true. When it comes to addressing specific changes, you will find people of all ages who are both excited and concerned. Moreover, you will also find people of all ages who will ultimately be proven right and wrong to have embraced a new idea, just as you will find people of all ages who will ultimately be proven right and wrong to have resisted a new idea. Unfortunately, although each of us thinks that the way we do things is right, that simply is not always the case.

That concept is so important to understand, in fact, that it’s the bulk of what we discuss in the next chapter.