Want to Engage Gen-Y? Stop Planning and Start Doing

The biggest lesson that I've learned since launching Employee Evolution and starting a company is to stop planning and start doing. For the past five months, we've been planning the launch of Brazen Careerist. We've gone through a pre-launch redesign and a hundred new ideas that were sure to be great for our audience.

Now, we're finally at the point where we are very close to launch, and guess what? We eliminated 99 of those great ideas to focus on the best one. The funny thing is, the best idea is the same one we started with, a blog network.

I thought we were wasting a lot of time planning when we could have been executing, and truthfully, I was really frustrated, I wanted to take action. But now I can see we were executing the whole time. We weren't just talking about it, we actually acted on many of those ideas. All things considered, we've moved pretty quickly for a small start up with limited resources.

The point here is that you can plan all you want. You can question whether or not you should start that blog or if you should send your resume to that company. You can go back and forth redesigning your website to make it perfect before launch, and you can sit through hours of pointless meetings to determine the best course of action. Or, you can just do it and see what happens.

These days, the people who act and then react are the ones who get ahead. Successful entrepreneurs have quickly learned this, and Millennials seem to intuitively understand it. This is why executive summaries have replaced detailed business plans. This is why most new companies start with little idea of what they are actually going to do. And this is why Corporate America is out of sync with Generation-Y.

We're ready to act, we get frustrated when we can't. We're ready to get so much done and be so productive that we move up the ladder faster than anyone in the history of the organization.

Established companies seem pretty content to waste time arguing pros and cons in meetings, passing ideas up the chain of command, creating strategic plans, and perfecting their big picture vision. It's one thing to realize you're moving too slow and learn from your mistakes, but to keep running in circles is just counterproductive.

No wonder we're changing jobs every 18 months, starting side projects, or ditching the corporate world all together. It's just our way of saying, "I'm not waiting around anymore. I'm going to do something."

When companies finally get with the times, stop all the planning, decentralize, and actually change rather than talk about change, maybe they will begin to keep their employees around for a few years. But if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath.