Tamara Erickson

Award-winning Author; Expert on Organizations, the Changing Workforce, and Generations at Work

BIG IDEAS

• Ten Assumptions that Are No Longer True . . . But Still Shape Our Organizations Today
  Today’s organizations are ripe for change. Over the next several decades, we’ll see very different business entities evolve. Why? Because today’s organizations were designed in response to conditions that no longer exist. Do you still think loyal behavior at work will lead to a lifetime of protection and care from the corporation? Of course not. But many of our cherished talent management practices, from pension plans to perquisites, like vacation, that are based on tenure, are holdovers from the days when this old assumption rang true.
  
  There are many new business realities that we haven’t yet translated into our management practices and organizational designs. It’s time to question which practices still make sense and whether there are new options, better suited to today. In this provocative and interactive session based on a forthcoming book, Tammy will list ten assumptions that underpin organizations today. All have major implications for the way we manage talent and run organizations and yet none are true today. She’ll leave participants looking at their organizations–and themselves–through a whole new lens.
• Leading a Multi-Generational Workforce
  Four generations are working together in today’s workplace—and a fifth is on the way. Each brings unique assumptions to the job. As a result, events in the workplace are often interpreted differently by individuals in different generations. What may seem like good news to a Boomer might well be an unsettling and unwelcome development to a member of Generation X. Things that members of Gen Y love often seem unappealing or frivolous to those in older generations.
  
  Today it’s increasingly important to create a culture that is welcoming and engaging for talented individuals of all ages. Based on years of in-depth research and three books on generations in the workforce, Tammy Erickson helps audiences understand the underlying evolution of the assumptions each generation brings to work, with humor, empathy and enormous insight. Contributing rich data and unparalleled research with her optimistic point of view, Tammy offers practical strategies and actionable insights so that audiences of all ages will better understand each other.
• Innovation in the Intelligent Economy: Bringing People and Ideas Together
  The heart of innovation is the combination of two previously unrelated ideas. Creating the capacity for innovation in your organization means encouraging collaboration: namely, sharing knowledge and working together to create new ideas. The paradox: many of the best ways to encourage collaboration work against innovation! How can you balance both?
  
  Based on ground-breaking research—one of the largest and most rigorous studies of collaborative behavior within organizations—as well as years of experience with innovative organizations, three keys emerge: building the capacity to collaborate, asking great questions, and introducing sufficient diversity of thought and capability. Tammy identifies the highest-priority investments and practices needed to build an organization skilled at successful innovation.
  
  This is a fresh look at one of the most challenging aspects of leadership today—creating an organization filled with the on-going spark of new ideas. Others address innovation from a process perspective—how to manage the development of innovations once an idea has surfaced, or provide a strategic overview. Tammy brings her unique organizational understanding to outline the embedded practices that create a culture of sustained innovation.
• Building Collaborative Organizations
  We are on the brink of an important transformation. New technologies are making their way into the workplace, offering significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, finding helpful colleagues and information, tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise, and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.” Over time, these collaborative technologies will change the way work is done and the way organizations function. They will shift the way we interact with people on our teams, find external expertise when it’s needed, and share ideas and observations more broadly.
  
  Identifying relevant business connections isn’t as clear cut as finding old high school friends. The range of activities that collaborative technologies can take on to enhance performance and drive increased productivity in the workplace is far broader than the activities most of us have explored during our personal use. Perhaps most importantly, many of our existing work practices actually hinder the successful use of extended collaboration.
  
  How do you transform an organization that doesn’t have a collaborative culture? Which practices are essential to move in that direction? Which companies are taking new and interesting approaches to the ways they work, leveraging today’s capabilities? What do they tell us about the characteristics of organizations that excel at extended collaboration? Based on several years of deep research into the barriers and motivations for organization-wide collaboration, Tammy provides sound guidance on re-shaping your organization for future success.
• What Does It Mean to Work Here? A Signature Experience for Extraordinary Engagement
  A highly engaged workforce has never been more important. Much of the work today requires an individual’s discretionary effort—people have to choose to innovate, share knowledge, and provide extraordinary service. Many employees, particularly those in younger generations, are less motivated by money than the connection they feel to the work.
  
  Tammy’s unique, ground-breaking work on employee engagement provides some powerful perspectives for today’s leaders. As she’ll explain, meaning is the new money. Companies with extraordinary employee-employer relationships understand what it means to work in their organizations and excel at embedding that meaning in the day-to-day employee experience.
  
  Engaging employees is never about copying another corporation’s best practices. It’s about digging deep to identify what’s uniquely important to your organization. As Tammy’s research shows, individuals find meaning in different aspects of work; work plays different roles in our lives. She helps audiences understand six psycho-demographic segments that describe our relationship to work and provides ways to understand the values that are most important to your employee population.
  
  To bring them alive, leading companies need to first understand who they are and then design their organizational practices around their values. One of the most powerful approaches to strengthen meaning in the workplace is the creation of Signature Experiences—distinctive, value-driven elements of the employees’ experience that encourage self-selection and reinforce values, leading to retention.
  
  Learn how to re-energize and re-engage your organization. Reconnect with and reinvigorate what it means to work here.
• Global Generations
  Geography significantly influences the formation of generational beliefs and behavior. Each country’s unique social, political, and economic events shape specific views and attitudes among today’s adults. Understanding these country-to-country differences is critical to creating employment opportunities that attract and retain the best employees in each geographic area.
  
  Tammy’s research has extended to the generations in a number of specific countries around the world, including the four BRIC nations, as well as countries in Europe and the Middle East. She will work with you to develop a customized session, focusing on the areas of the world that are most important to your business–or provide an overview of the similarities and differences within one generation around the globe.
  
  Understanding individuals’ backgrounds and resultant perspectives or mental models both within generations and across geographies helps leaders grapple with the diversity, challenges, and potential of a global workforce.
• Get Ready for the Next Wave: The Re-Generation
  The next demographic wave is almost ready to hit the shore. Children who are 15-and-under today are almost certainly not members of Generation Y. They’ve been influenced by a very different set of global events than those that shaped the ideas and preferences of people in their late teens and 20s today.
  
  Today’s children have been forming their mental maps of the future at a time when our national and global optimism has been doused with the cold water realization that we are facing significant, seemingly intractable problems on multiple fronts. The inconvenient truths of the past half century–precarious global finances, resource constraints, shifting economic power, and environmental degradation–are settling around our shoulders, and these early teens are not unaware of these issues or their complexity. This generation’s perspective is based on a world with finite limits and no easy answers.
  
  What is this new generation, soon to be the fifth generation in many workplaces, all about? What do they value and how might they shape both the future of work and of the marketplace? Tammy’s newest research, the subject of a forthcoming book, brings the “Re-Generation” into sharp focus, with insights for employers, marketers, educators . . . and parents.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and widely respected expert on collaboration and innovation–on building talent and enhancing productivity–and on the nature of work in the intelligent economy. Her work is based on extensive research on the changing workforce and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations innovate through collaboration. Tammy has authored or co-authored numerous Harvard Business Review articles, including “It’s Time to Retire Retirement,” winner of the McKinsey Award, an MIT Sloan Management Review article, and the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. She recently completed a trilogy of books on how individuals in specific generations can excel in today’s workplace: Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation, What’s Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead and Getting the Career You Want and Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work.

An interactive, engaging keynote presenter, reactions from participants in Tammy’s sessions consistently rate hers as some of the most powerful insights into the generations they’ve ever heard, affecting not only their future work relationships, but lending new understanding into family dynamics.  Tammy offers a fundamentally optimistic point of view, along with fascinating trends and actionable counsel. Perhaps more importantly, she will build-to-suit, depending on your learning objectives. Her blog, Across the Ages, appears on the Harvard Business Review site where it is the highest-rated blog. Her entries address how the talent shortage and shifting employee values will create opportunities for individuals—and challenges for corporations that aren't prepared! Tammy's article "Leading Across the Ages" was one of Harvard Business Review's Breakthrough Ideas of 2008. HarvardBusiness.org created a Best of 2007, a collection of the editors' favorite content from the entire year. Three of the 19 selections are based on Tammy's work.

A Closer Look at Tammy

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Tammy's current research agenda?

In her own words:

There is a lot happening in our world, particularly in our work world. Some people view that with a sense of doom and dread, but I don’t. I see tremendous opportunities ahead for both individuals and corporations, provided they are ready to take advantage of the shifts under way and adapt approaches and practices.

My current research agenda includes continuing exploration of the trends that shape tomorrow’s corporations and the values of the individuals who work within them. My view of the future is grounded in extensive research on changing demographics, employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations collaborate and innovate. I have always been very interested in technology, how it is changing the way people work and live, and how organizations function as a result.

Although my most recent work has focused primarily on the changing workforce, my career more broadly has involved issues associated with building and managing successful organizations. I started with work in classic business strategy, but quickly focused on developing strategy for firms in which the success of their investments in technology/R&D was a key determinant of their strategic options (pharmaceuticals and others). This led me to work on how to make those investments more successful and strategically aligned and eventually to my first co-authored book Third Generation R&D: Managing the Link to Corporate Strategy. Today my work continues full circle with continuing themes of understanding the implications of technology, the forces changing organizations, capturing people’s passions, and becoming more innovative.

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Tammy's expertise, and what's ahead on her schedule?

In over 30 years as a researcher and advisor to senior executives, Tammy has worked with global organizations throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, helping them become more innovative and effective.

Her work today includes a great deal of "light bulb" work–helping senior executives understand the key issues that will affect their businesses by looking at events in new ways and identifying insightful and thought-provoking patterns. Although not (primarily) a futurist, Tammy’s work does include discerning and describing interesting trends.

Based on solid research, Tammy’s work is well-grounded and academically rigorous. It is also fundamentally optimistic, driven by the perspective that there are tremendous opportunities for both individuals and corporations who take advantage of the great changes that are occurring around us and adapt their approaches and practices. Working primarily with senior executive teams, she provides actionable counsel for business results and offers smart advice on how to capitalize on the changes around us.

Tammy is also a gifted and passionate teacher. Her work includes designing innovative curricula and teaching in a number of executive development programs.

Her colleagues at BSG Concours work with client companies to develop effective talent strategies and design engaging employee experiences.

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Who shapes Tammy's thinking and inspires her work?

• Those with insight into patterns, trends, technologies and organizations of the future–Peter Drucker, Thomas Malone, Jim Collins, John Seely Brown, John Hagel
• Those who understanding effective organizations and individuals within–Lynda Gratton, John Boudreau, David Garvin, Dave Ulrich, Peter Senge
• Those with a unique perspective on engagement–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Jim Loehr
• Those who understand the demographic and workforce trends–Ken Dychtwald and her colleague Bob Morison

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Tammy's must-read list?

Books that provide a unique perspective on or describe a pattern of historical events, such as Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and books that offer provocative views of the future, such as The Future of Work by Thomas Malone.

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Tammy tap into to feed her mind and fuel her creativity?

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel (http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/)

Edge (http://www.edge.org/)

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (http://www.thelongtail.com/)

Applied Abstractions by Espen Andersen (http://www.espen.com/weblog/)

The Becker-Posner Blog by Gary Becker and Richard Posner (http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/)

The Gig by Nadira A. Hira (http://thegig.blogs.fortune.com./)

OUTREACH
What are Tammy's pressing questions, and on which topics does she seek your feedback?

How will organizations change over the next decade? How do they need to change to take advantage of the technologies that will be available and respond to the way the today's workforce prefers to work? How can leaders create organizations that are innovative, collaborative and engaging—as well as highly productive and successful?