Every year Crain’s releases a profile of 40 successful or rising business folks under the age of 40. Innovators in their fields, folks who will be rising stars and change the business paradigm as we know it.
Well, now here is your chance to nominate someone for the 2008 40 Under 40. If you think you are cut out for it, you can even nominate yourself.
According to the FAQ, if you want to be picked for the 40 Under 40, don’t waste times with things like hiring a PR firm to push for you. Be successful, the best you can be in your field and make your mark that way. Impress people with your qualifications rather then the word of mouth of someone hired to make you look good.
The deadline for submissions is Oct. 31st. And remember, the person nominated has to be under 40 until Feb. ‘08, so start thinking now and get submitting.
I live in Washington, DC so pretty much every third person I know is a spy. Intelligence runs like a leitmotif through every policy discussion in this town on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China and terrorism. The talking heads on the all news channels and think tank policy wonks who focus on this issue are almost exclusively former intelligence officials now outside the tent pissing back in.
Their bottom line assessment usually goes something like this: “The CIA [or insert three-letter agency of your choice] is so broken it can’t possibly be fixed. The biggest problem is personnel, everyone who ever knew anything has left and now the kids are running the candy store! You have supervisors with less than five years of experience!” There they stop their tirade. The fact that most analysts are under thirty is all that is needed before declaring victory and going home. QED. Read more »

In the beginning there was Archie. The there was Veronica and Jughead. No, we aren’t talking about the Senior Class at Riverdale High, those are the names of what are considered to be the first 3 search engines. Since those days, Search Engines have come a long way.
Most people when searching on the web today go for the biggies- Google.com, MSN.com, Yahoo.com, these are your typicalsearch engines, pulling up a long list of entries to search form.
But now there is a new group of search engines hitting the block. Visual search engines are becoming all the rage these days, engines like KartOO and Quintura present us with a whole new way to search for information. Instead of listing out entries and possible suggestions, it visually lumps thing together, showing you related search terms you might want to consider or further research. While old folks like myself might not be totally about these new fangled searches, we all might want to just take a moment to familiarize ourselves with them, you know so we don’t look totally lost when chatting with those Millenials.
(Archie picture courtesy of Robby Reed’s www.dialbforblog.com.)
Well, that was one generation name that never quite stuck did it, too bad for that failed campaign, otherwise we might have a definitive name for the current generation. Another meeting attended, another tidbit of information to throw up here (take that how you will).
There were the Baby-Boomers, Gen-X and now we have the Me-llennials.
Me-llennials (or Millennials) are the Baby-Boomer’s kids, born around 1982 (give or take. While I don’t particularly like the implications of the Millennials, some of the traits described about them fit a lot of the people I know who are currently read and writing for this blog, so there is some cross-over and overlap). They have been called Generation Next, the Generation born with a mouse in their hands, and a number of other things. Anyway, these Millennials tend to be coddled, tech-savvy, over achievers who work well in team settings and when ever they have any problems their parents come to the rescue (these parents are called Helicopter Parents due to all of their hovering or Blackhawk Parents because they feel the need to swoop in and save the day when a problem arises… I heard a tale of a Millennial not getting the raise he desired which prompted his mother to call his boss to find out why he was denied the raise and explain why he so dearly deserved it). Oh, Millenials are also apparently conservative, though about what I am not sure from the television, clothes and marketing directed at them (and all the tales of sexual horrors going on at Bar-Mitzvahs) they are clearly not socially conservatism.
Millennials drive social networking services, prefer email and texting to calling (and emailing is primarily used for contacting “old peopleâ€), probably have their own blog (which may come back to bite them in the ass when they apply for Harvard and the admissions committee reads about the drunken orgy they had at their bar-mitzvah when they were 13), think advertising is dishonest and were raised on the inclusionism of Barney telling them that we are all the same (as opposed to Gen-Xers who were raised on Sesame Street and learned that we are all different, but that is good).
Now, technically I am not a Millennial, and for this I am actually kind of grateful, though I am not really a Gen-Xer either though, those of you I know who are reading this tend to fall into the category with me, we are a little of both: tech-savvy Sesame Street lovers who text, but also know how to dial a phone. Our parents have probably never spoken with our bosses but may have read about them in our blogs.
There was a whole lot more I got from this meeting, but 1- my battery is dying on my computer, 2- I didn’t grab a paper copy of the PowerPoint presentation (I plan on downloading the PDF from the presenters website instead). I’ll post some more ME-llennial information up here as I remember/re-read it, maybe even the presentation, though, unless you work in admissions, it doesn’t contain that much interesting information. And if you are reading this and thinking “Whatever, I am SO not part of the millennial generation†consider how many of your friends have home phones in addition to their cells.
Oh and this is the video they started this meeting with: My Generation
P.S. It is much harder to tag an entry written a few days ago… I am blanking on which tags to use now