The Millennials and PricewaterhouseCoopers

Playing a bit of catch up here, but there was an interesting article in the July 11 Wall Street Journal about one of my favorite topics…the millennials! PwC’s CEO Switches Tactics to Keep Millennials is worth reading on a number of fronts, but especially in his comments about the millennials and their interests relative to working. Dennis Nally is the CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the author of the article is Javier Espinoza.

From the article:

Mr. Nally: This millennial generation is not just looking for a job, they're not just looking for salary and financial benefits, they're looking for skill development, they're looking for mobility, they're looking for opportunities to acquire different skills and to move quickly from one part of an organization to another. How you manage that sort of talent and how you deal with their expectations is very different from what's been done in the past.

Mr. Nally: The millennium generation is probably the most technological group of people ever joining the workforce. How they want to work, use social media and team within a company is very different than the prior generation. If your human policies aren't responsive to what they are looking for, they are going to go to a company that is. They want less-hierarchical structures, they want more flexibility, they want to work as hard but they want to define how they do their work. If you can't figure out a way to accommodate that kind of flexibility, you're not going to be able to retain that talent.

WSJ: What [is PwC] doing to attract and retain talent?

Mr. Nally: We have adapted both how we recruit and how we work with people once they join us to suit the millennial generation. For example, in the U.S. we have set up a LinkedIn application that allows students to track the career paths of existing graduate trainees already in the firm so a student can see how a career with PwC develops. In the U.K., we use a Facebook application to connect recruits together before they join so they can begin to build their own PwC community.

We also provide mentors for our people from day one both formally and informally and encourage people to actively use their mentors to build skills and experience. We understand that flexibility and the ability to gather useful experience are key, as a result we actively encourage our people to move both between different business areas and around the world to gain experience. We also provide career breaks, flexible working, cycles of experience outside PwC and we actively encourage volunteering.

Non Profits and the Mission Statement

Terry Teachout’s column in today’s WSJ, Why Does NY Need Two Opera Companies, should be required reading for non-profit executives. While the focus is on opera, anyone in the nonprofit space can read this and see their own particular organization and consider their own mission statement.. While I think he overstates the case of the very short mission statement, a clear notion of “what do you do” and “why do you do it” needs to be at the core of everything the nonprofit does. Good luck to the Opera company in coming to grips with those questions.

From the article:

Good mission statements grow naturally out of sound strategic thinking. Peter Drucker, the great management consultant, said that a mission statement should be "short and sharply focused. It should fit on a T-shirt. The mission says why you do what you do, not the means by which you do it…. A mission cannot be impersonal; it has to have deep meaning, be something you believe in—something you know is right." That's what made "The People's Opera" so effective: It summed up in three crystal-clear words a mission that made sense.