| Sam Young Newsletter |
Issue 159, December 2008
Hi guys,
To understand why your younger and older workers sometimes appear to be from different planets, read Boomers & the XY Generation below.
Watch out for a dilly of a trojan called Mebroot. Get your defences in place now.
Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.
| Boomers & the XY Generation |
Australian company Expr3ss! recently published the following article on CEO Online (http://www.ceoonline.com/). They have kindly given permission for me to reproduce it for you.
Working with the über-cool X and Y generations is often an insurmountable challenge for the older manager. Boomer bosses complaints about X / Y workers are legendary, the stuff of many indignant long-lunch conversations.
Now a new study sheds light on the reason and offers hope of a solution. The study shows that the stereotypical outgoing, open and socially-networked younger worker is not necessarily all that they seem. The results of the study showed that, with X / Y's levels of friendship and help-seeking behaviours more than 20% higher than average, and Boomers 15% lower than average, younger workers outscore their Boomer equivalents by 300%.
The study also showed that this hides a level of distrust in younger workers that is nearly three times that of those they typically work under, along with significant levels of oppositional behaviour that peak in 24 - 29 year olds.
The generational trend identified by the study highlights why older supervisors and managers struggle to work productively with younger employees, and explains why the typical Boomer struggles to manage effectively and to understand why. Boomers on average are 55% more trusting than they are friendship and help-seeking, whereas their younger colleagues are much more friendship and help-seeking than they are trusting, to the extent of a massive 400%.
"A fatal dislocation in relationships and communication exists between the younger and older worker", says Dr Glyn Brokensha, Joint Managing Director of Expr3ss!. "This dislocation means that each will respond in their own preferred style, which is exactly the opposite of what the other expects and needs. Boomer managers mistakenly assume that the strong friendship and help-seeking behaviours of younger employees are evidence of high trust, whereas exactly the reverse is true."
Brokensha says from the younger worker's perspective, the relative lack of friendship-seeking and help-seeking behaviours in their seniors is taken as evidence of lack of trust and, worse, lack of trustworthiness. Boomer managers fail to work at building trust in their relationships with younger workers because they mistakenly believe it already exists. Younger employees fail to communicate their intrinsic levels of distrust because their natural friendship-seeking and help-seeking behaviours obscure the true picture.
"Boomer managers and X / Y employees enter a deadly interlock where each assumes that what they see in the other is evidence of that which does not actually exist", states Brokensha. "Boomers assume that X / Ys have levels of trust even higher than their own, because of their friendship-seeking and help-seeking natures. And X / Ys assume that Boomers are untrusting and, worse, untrustworthy because they lack those very same friendship and help-seeking characteristics. Unlocking that struggle is the key."
Expr3ss!® is a web-based applicant management solution enabling employers to prioritise candidate job applications and communicate with applicants easily and quickly, improving time-efficiency and reducing costs through "better people intelligence®". Expr3ss! For more information visit Expr3ss! at www.expr3ss.com
| Mebroot |
Those of you have the sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong with your PC, yet your AV programme is showing nothing amiss, you may well be right.
There is a Trojan called Mebroot (formerly Sinowal) that drops and loads a password stealing component on your system and steals account information. It also tries to steal information that is required to access certain online banks' and online payment systems' websites. It flies under the radar of most firewalls, AV software and Malware checkers. It is a very stealthy little application that does all sorts of trickery to fool your operating system and normal defences (read more at http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/trojan-psw_w32_sinowal_cp.shtml).
How you can prevent getting it is by going to http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/ and downloading the free, personal use scanning application and running that each month.
How you can get rid of it once you have it is to isolate the PC from your network as soon as the problem is detected, reformat your PC's hard drive and any external hard drives (eg memory sticks or back ups) and reinstall all your software and clean data. General consensus is to be very, very careful about copying any files off an infected PC; you are probably better to dump them.
Prevention is better than cure with this little beauty.
| Registry Patch for Old Office Files |
If any of you have downloaded Service Pack 3 for XP recently, you may suddenly have found that your old versions of MS Office documents no longer open.
There is a very easy work-around for this (although it took me a long time to find it!):
- Click on "Method 1"
- Then click on the executable file hyperlink for the appropriate Office software patch you wish to download
- When you have finished downloading, double click on the downloaded executable file to load the fix into your registry.
Easy, isn't it!
| TLAs for SMEs |
Here are this newsletter's TLAs for you:
- eCRM, electronic Customer Relationship Management. Web-based applications added to customer relationship management systems. Moving management of customers up to the enterprise level and away from individual departments.
Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.
| Tips, Short+Hot Keys |
Over the next few newsletters, we are going to look at all you can do with Alt and letters. This time it's one lonely V:
- Word "Auto Text" Alt & Ctrl & V
| Hot Linx |
A quick reminder about when to use 'who' and when to use 'which' at http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/writing-for-business/quiz-writing-for-business-who-or-that/
To discover the best of New Zealand television and film, check out NZ On Air's new foray into an online, publicly accessible film archive at http://www.nzonscreen.com/
The World Bank has a page charting youth action, to encourage young people to make a difference in their community; viewable at http://www.youthink.worldbank.org/
Tech Republic has distributed a pdf showing how to create your own training presentation using PowerPoint's Photo Album feature. I have downloaded the pdf and it is available at http://www.samyoung.co.nz/TechRepublic_ppt_training_presentation.pdf
Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here
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