Organization of Managerial Work for innovation: Millennials and the shifting paradigm

The world is ruminating to change every moment, but most part of our living remains the same. This partially explains why productivity growth is so feeble. If one looks around, of the many objects we touch throughout the day, only the smart phone or the smart card are the pieces that have been added in the last decade, rest have been there since long. Innovation gets missed in the trivia of competing objective functions, where we settle for the encumbrances attached to the inertia of habits.

The incoming and outgoing activity to the workplace shows no signs of change; we remain slaves to external environment which we have stopped to control. But the fallacy is that even in areas where we control things we have found little solutions to make work more innovative or productive.

The enormous activity associated with commuting to office, in trains, buses and cars is the single biggest waste, aggregating to 15% of our lives’ active hours. We have done little to reduce this. More importantly we have done precious little to see how the remaining active hours can be made such that innovative work could be done, instead of doing regular, mundane, repetitive and mostly menial jobs creating no value.

The organization of managerial work itself, the structure and channels through which innovation happen still remains to be developed, while there are millennials (people who became adults at the turn of the new millennium) with solutions we can hardly agree to. How could productivity growth happen when the initiators are lagging to initiate?

Ask yourself, how much value did I add today? And the answer will be not very difficult to give as hardly we could add any, given the nature of tasks we perform. Ninety percent of what we do throughout the day has nothing to do with innovation. If that be the case how could we be living in a world bubbling with change that we are supposed to initiate?

While the organization of managerial work remains the same, there is so much happening around us, whether be it healthcare, telecommunication and the internet, or the virgin fields of AI, nanotechnology or the human genome project, bringing in technologies that weren’t there a decade ago. In the buying and selling area there is so much change happening in the field of e-commerce. A farmer today is connected to the market directly, a buyer has plethora of options to choose from and the seller has the world to find customers from.

While the options have widened exponentially, managerial attention to the trivia have limited us to the selection of a few things that our mind can only handle. Too much is sometimes leading to too little. As our mind, which has the same attention span of a Goldfish, would make the sullen adjustment to limiting the options at entry point; this way they would make a far better judgment of the choices at hand. By constantly making these selective choices we are optimizing the mix of inputs that would lead to some meaningful outputs.

The millennials understand this far better, they almost do it intuitively. They are the people who would make the smartest of choices around products, people and connections. The recent survey made on them about their investment decisions found that their best investment option is cash, which gives them the flexibility not to be encumbered with an asset whose replacement value could be volatile. Whereas in a world where inflation has been largely tamed, the replacement value of cash remains largely fixed and secure. This also gives them the time to ruminate or take a view that is not governed by what the crowds dictate. 

Looking at the investment choices that the millennials make, one would be bent to think that they are more risk averse to making losses than we were. This only gives them the inclination not to waste their time and energy when it comes to working in organizations.

Millennials understand the value of work better, if they see wasteful hours aggregating during their working lives they opt for a change where such wasteful hours can be minimized.

Some of them find it odd that the value of work they put in any organization does not add up to the benefits they derive from working there. They seek value in joining start-ups where they could find empathy with what they passionately want to pursue. They want to be part of the ownership, which makes these start-ups even more productive.

Organization of work is the fore-runner to innovation; the more that is ordained on pursuits that cannot be hardwired in codes and disciplined on explanatory rather than exploratory work, the more they create value in terms of innovation.

The millennials are not bent on long association with tasks that would not change or assignments that are monitored. They do a job better if the output of the job is not well defined. They have numerous ways of doing the task and the system must find a way to choose the best that would suit the specific purpose.

Organization of work in corporations would have to adapt to this new paradigm. It is not a “one size fits all” paradigm. It conflicts with the goals of organizational discipline as well. But it is at the root of innovation being part of the organizational DNA.

And more importantly, it must be aligned to the working minds of the millennials.