Thoughts on Millennials and Corporate
Memory
I must be
getting really old and cranky. I can
remember way back in the 60’s, my mind has not failed yet. I was in college and we were told as a caring
society we should stop cutting down trees and we should become a paperless
society. In fact, once, during an
interview with a catalog company I told them we would have to start looking for
an alternative to paper catalogs. As
stupid as that was, I still got the job, they obviously saw something I did not
know was there. But here it is 2016, the
world for me is a strange and different place and I still like to pick up a
letter, the newspaper, or a book and read it. Part of the time I do use a Nook. There is
something so comfortable about paper with words that you hold in your hands. Humans have been writing on things for a long
time. Cave men wrote on stone walls and
we can try to understand them today.
Tom Curry
was the best mentor I ever had. He and I
used to go to lunch almost every day and he would talk casually about his
experiences in business and tell me how he had done things to solve
problems. I learned a lot of things
without ever knowing I was learning them. I learned about how people and things
worked, how customers reacted to various stimuli and what made them upset and
most importantly what not to do. Of
course I asked a lot of questions and discussed a lot of my plans. Tom almost never said no, but he would dig a
story up from his past and talk about it until I understood that my plans were
not the best new thing on the block. Not
all my plans were bad, some were dropped, some even worked, but they were all
made better because they were touched by Corporate Memory.
I have made
mistakes in the past. The worst ones
were the ones I refused to admit. You
cannot hide from a mistake. Almost
always things can be made better by admitting an error in judgment, correcting
course and moving on. You can actually
gain a certain degree of respect from the admission.
I guess what
I am trying to say is I am not a Millennial; I did not grow up with a phone,
tablet and computer appendages. I think
book stores and libraries are wonderful places.
I would rather play cards with my
friends than my computer. There are more people like me in the quilting industry
than there are Millennials. I contact my
customers with catalogs and emails so I am changing. Most of the time an email lasts for a few
seconds and a catalog lasts until it is destroyed. There may be a time when our society becomes
paperless. It is not today or tomorrow,
and I doubt seriously it will be in my lifetime. I was wrong back in the 60’s.
If you are
new in our industry you should find your Corporate Memory and learn from it.
I never
consider it a mistake or moving backward to give my customers what they want,
because they always reward me for the consideration.
Very well stated. I took like to hold the book in my hands. Think of all the history that we would not have or know about had things not been written down on paper.
ReplyDeleteInterestinng thoughts
ReplyDelete