Page 38 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE CASE FOR MEANING

percent of Internet users online daily and 70 percent
of businesses having a website. Customers have more
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information and choice than ever about what and how
to buy, and distant markets have replaced local markets
in many industries. Global companies have 24-hour
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operations among their locations around the world.
Workforce demographics are becoming increasingly
diversified around race, ethnicity, social class, gen-
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der, sexual orientation, age, religion, and nationality.
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Corporations face the major challenge of how to respect
and make good use of these differences in increas-
ingly diverse workforces. For example, as GenMe or
Generation Y employees (born between 1981 and 1999)
move into the workforce, their values (like self-esteem,
self-interest, and leisure time ) often clash with those
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of the baby-boom generation, creating the need for
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policies and practices that appeal to and motivate vari-
ous subgroups. All of these technological, global, and
demographic trends make work more complex, neces-
sitating both more specialization and more teamwork
to respond. Teamwork requires unprecedented skill in
cooperation, prioritization, and communication—skills
often underdeveloped in an age of text messaging rather
than in-person relating.
4. Increased isolation. Proliferating electronics, high
mobility, and urban sprawl have all been blamed for
increased social isolation. Those who spend hours in
front of a computer screen spend less time with real
people, Wiki and chat groups notwithstanding. U.S.
households own an average of 2.24 televisions, with
each television running for an average of 6 hours and
47 minutes per day and the average child watching TV

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