TELL ME WHY I DON'T LIKE MONDAYS

Bob Geldorf sang this in 1979 with Britain at its lowest ebb after a winter of strikes and 20% + inflation.

No - we didn’t much like going to work then.

Today a piece of research compiled for the National Citizen Service shows teenagers are the most driven to succeed that they’ve been for a century. Nearly 4 in 5 of them say their career is important and they are, as a cohort, showing more enterprise and energy than many who preceded them. They start working when still at school and the urge to succeed is much the same for girls and boys.

All the young people I talk to have a resentment-free attitude to zero hours contracts and short career horizons - if your contract runs out after six months you’ll find something else won’t you? So get over it. Their enthusiasm is not dimmed by the flux of today’s world.

But there’s one thing they strive for and, no, it isn’t money. It’s real job satisfaction. They yearn for a job which has a tribal intensity and zest for growth, things  that matter when over 40% of your awake week is spent working. You’d better like your peers, better be inspired by the project you do and better feel valued.

Most of all you expect to learn.

There’s never been a worse time to run a command and control business. Down the road in Brighton the Co-op staggers on and what angers young staff there the most? The bizarre fact that they’ve had 18 managers in the last three years.  In London some people in advertising tell me there’s is a dull sweat-shop (how can advertising be dull? It’s like saying sex is dull. It just isn’t).

Companies at their peak like Nike, Snapple, Ben and Jerry, Pixar, Patagonia and hundreds of others have been conceived in passion and driven with a committed and excited team. I should have added Apple to that list but their world is changing. The brilliant Lucy Kellaway tells us the company that used to even write legal documents with snappy prose and who had an “impressive way with words (almost certainly part of its success)” has reverted in its job advertising to stuff like this “the successful candidate must identify integration points with other teams and drive high-resolution of cross-functional issues”. Sell your Apple shares now.
The appetite to work with and help create the sort of liberated and creative business that would be the envy of your friends be it a law firm, accountancy business, advertising agency or a manufacturer of ready meals, has bitten deep.

And if the current crop of big companies go the way of Apple and start speaking droid as opposed to human the brightest young talent will leave and start something themselves. In fact my prediction is we are on the verge of an era of brilliant start-ups to rival those of the 1930s or 1960s.

Let’s create a generation of Monday-lovers….it’s time.