On the side, I consult for Liam’s company. For weeks, I tried to convince Liam to test changes on the site that could potentially increase sales to no avail. I couldn’t understand, why didn’t he want to make more money? Or at least try? Wasn’t that why he was paying me?

Exasperated, I exclaimed, “You’re essentially telling customers to cancel during every step of the process! And then they do. How can we ever expect to grow revenue?”

Liam paused. “You know what, Rebecca,” he said. “When we came close to $1 million in revenue, I thought, is this bad? Are subscriptions evil? Am I taking advantage? Is my business model inherently wrong?” His answer was to place detailed instructions on how-to cancel everywhere on his site.

More than 150,000 people have downloaded Liam’s products. He’s a smart guy. He’s also part of the Google generation where “Do No Evil” is the motto for life and business. Increasingly, that means making stuff, but not making money.

Freelancer Amber Adrian (disclosure: she works for me through Alice) recently launched a series of essays on perfectionism. Her pricing strategy was “pay-what-you-can,” with a suggested price of $5.

“I wanted to get this into as many people’s hands as possible,” she said, “to pave the way for a bigger package that will be a set price. I’m hoping that people find it super valuable and share it around and that brings in more people.”

She told me readers paid more than what she would have charged, but I still cringed. I had heard about the amount of work she put into those essays. Not to mention, she already wrote (for free) about these topics on her blog. If she believed the essays to be super valuable, why not come out swinging with a price that indicated that value?

The truth is, unless you have an extremely wide reach, discount or zero pricing does not work. And hardly anyone has that kind of reach. The majority of us (start-ups, freelancers, small business-makers, entrepreneurs) are in markets with smaller audiences and niche targets. And that means premium pricing.

Charging for your work or products, however, just doesn’t seem to jive with the so-called basic rules of the Internet. Somewhere along the line, Free! became an acceptable business model, and revenue and sales became a sign that you didn’t get how the new economy worked. Suddenly, we’re afraid to make money.

“It feels weird to be selling to my blog readers,” Amber says. “The lines are a little blurred and I’m working to draw them more firmly. I’m very emotionally attached to my blog and it feels weird to try to turn it into a business space.”

But the lines don’t get less personal when you aren’t marketing to friends. Liam spoke to me about how his customers are from modest means, and he is often more concerned that his customers save money, rather than he make it himself. Even with a healthy level of success most would be envious of – and a growth rate a fully-backed and funded start-up would salivate over – Liam is often worried. And he seems to feel bad and apologetic at his success.

A good many of us want to start and grow businesses (or nonprofits or blogs or something). But the majority of us cannot. Our minds won’t let us. We put up all sorts of barriers and paradigms that tell us no, this isn’t right. Even if you manage to get an idea off the ground, your negative nellies will tell you that the product isn’t great/has bugs/isn’t ready/is stupid and the big one: you’re not good enough.

We all tell ourselves these invisible scripts every day, and they go into overdrive when we try anything new. We literally have a physical and biological reaction that tells us to stop, back away and let it go. Financial expert Ramit Sethi has an exercise in one of his courses where he asks people to identify these scripts. Here is a sampling of what people say:

What will I do if I succeed? Do I deserve to succeed?

Not good enough – Just writing those words makes me irritated as hell. But that’s what I battle with.

What skills, expertise do I have that someone will be willing to pay top dollar for? I’m afraid I’m just not good enough, special enough, have great enough ideas to warrant the financial life I so desire.

And the fear of not being good enough, or un-deserving, does all sorts of weird things to us when we try to implement our ideas. We decide it’s more important to be right, than effective (we don’t want to fall flat on our faces, after all), and we move forward with assumptions that are clearly incorrect.

Despite the current obsession with tracking, testing, metrics and analytics in the start-up world, we still primarily make business decisions based on emotions, not data. Business risk doesn’t depend on your conversion rate, but what you say to yourself in your head.

“It did feel more comfortable for me to do pay-what-you-can,” Amber said, “because I’m still a little uncomfortable with this whole Pricing My Work thing. There’s definitely some fear involved.”

For Amber, having people pay-what-they-could helped her plow through that fear. “Most people ended up paying the suggested $5, but a large number paid in the $10 range,” she reports. “One person even paid $50. Only one person paid less than $5, at 99 cents.” Amber plans to charge upwards of $50 for her next product.

As for Liam, I asked him to reframe his worldview. Instead of worrying if he was ripping people off, he should focus on providing as much value as possible to his users. If you are providing value, there is no reason not to charge, no reason to feel bad. We don’t need to be so wrapped up into “do no evil” that we talk ourselves right out of profit.

Instead of our emotions plowing us into despair over success – or potential success – we should focus on the fact that growth, even and especially financial growth, is healthy. Of course it will take work. Things will change, and with it will come more responsibility and expectations, but only if we can accept that we’re worthy and good enough to provide mad value and make mad money in the first place.

More than twenty years ago, Jeffrey Hollender founded Seventh Generation and went on to build the fledgling company into every affluent customer’s favorite badge of sustainability. In October of last year, Hollender was forced out of the company. Today, he continues his fight to provoke business leaders to think differently about the role they and their companies play in society.

K: What’s going on with business and politics nowadays? The Federal government almost shut down last Friday. Are business and politics inseparable with the amount of lobbying, influence and corporatism?

Hollender: Business has far too much influence in politics and that is bad, on the one hand, because citizens feel disenfranchised and don’t feel that they have a vote and don’t participate in the political process. But worse, we have a situation where a relatively small group of very large companies have our political agenda and our economy effectively held hostage to their own interests.

If you just look at the recent controversy surrounding the fact that General Electric pays no taxes and in fact will get a $3-4 billion tax refund, we have also created a terribly uneven playing field. How can small and medium-sized companies that create most of the jobs and are critical for our economic recovery compete with large companies who get large subsidies from the government and don’t get to take advantage of the loopholes that a company like GE gets to take advantage of?

It’s a serious, serious problem that is, I think, crippling our economy and spoiling our environment.

I want to circle back to that, but first let me ask you this. I just moved to DC from Wisconsin, and am wondering, have you been following the fight with WI Governor Scott Walker and his attempt to eliminate collective bargaining?

Yeah.

To me, it seems like Walker was trying to destroy the Democratic party and it wasn’t really about labor unions. However, the idea of eliminating labor unions doesn’t seem all that outdated to me in a world where transparency is king. Curious to know your thoughts.

Over a 30-40 year period we’ve seen membership in unions fall roughly around thirty-five percent to under ten percent. A significant amount of that decline is a result of business’ influence on politics that have increasingly made it difficult for unions to organize and acquire new members.

There is no question that there has been a campaign by politicians as well as certain companies to marginalize, if not totally eliminate, the union movement in the United States. And I think that’s dangerous because the unions were probably the only significant political counter balance to big business in America.

Right…

As a co-founder of an organization called the American Sustainable Business Council that has 65,000 small and medium-sized companies as members, more of these businesses have taken a position to support labors like collective bargaining and we don’t see that as bad for business. We believe, as I do, that we need more good-paying jobs because an economy where people are making minimum wage is an economy where the government will endlessly have to subsidize families because they can’t afford the services that they need to survive.

Do you see any differentiation between public and private sector unions though? Where public sector unions might not be as necessary as private sector unions?

No, you know, I don’t see a large difference. I think there are a huge number of challenges with the way the teachers’ union has functioned. And I think the challenges that we have in eliminating bad teachers from the system are problematic. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a teacher’s union. I think the issue is that we need to make some changes in the way a teacher’s union functions. But I would not ever go as far as saying teachers should not be unionized.

Okay. Let’s move on. It seems like a lot of your initial drive in this area of social justice was a result of the privilege that you had growing up. Do you see, at all, that being socially conscious is a luxury of the privileged class?

No, I think that being socially conscious is in no way something that is a luxury of being privileged. There is a tremendous social consciousness within the union movement. There is tremendous social conscious in all aspects of society. I wish there was more social conscious within the privileged. I think too many people who are very comfortable and affluent don’t accept their responsibility to share that wealth with too many other people and to advocate for people are aren’t was well off as they are.

It’s sad that, statistically, lower income people give away a greater percentage of their income than affluent people do, and I think that one fact alone would cause one to not come to the conclusion that the privileged are more socially conscious than the unprivileged.

What about being environmentally-friendly? Is that a luxury of the privileged class?

Well, environmental consciousness has become too much of a luxury of the privileged class for a couple reasons. One, environmental products are often more expensive than traditional products and one would not expect people from all economic classes to choose to pay a premium. Secondly, because people who are more affluent tend to take advantage of and access higher levels of education, they better understand the reasons why sustainable products are important.

I have always said that one of the biggest failings of Seventh Generation was that it reached primarily more affluent consumers who were already healthier and living more sustainable lives, and was not effective at reaching more people broadly.

That is true generally of all types of green products and organic food, and underlying that is an economic problem. Why is it that green products or organic foods should cost more money? They shouldn’t. They cost more money because those businesses don’t externalize their costs on to society the way other businesses do. By internalizing those costs, the product costs more money. But it shouldn’t be that way; it should actually be the reverse. Sustainable products – because they don’t have as negative an impact on society and the environment – should actually cost less money.

I completely agree. What is the solution?

Well, the solution goes back to where we started the conversation. As long as large companies control the political process, we won’t make much headway in changing the tax laws or any of the issues that allow businesses to externalize their costs. We take one example alone, global warming, and we can’t even get there to be a price on carbon. We’re a long, long, long way from changing that playing field. Unfortunately, we live in a society today where we make products that are often bad for your health and bad for the environment artificially cheap. People consume those products that adversely affect their health and the environment and we move more quickly down the road in the wrong direction.

So what’s bad for you is good for the economy? Is that how it’s playing out?

What’s bad for you is good for a select group of large companies.

Right.

It’s actually not good for the economy because when people eat the wrong things and don’t get healthy, what we see is rising health care costs that ultimately make America less competitive with the rest of the world.

What we have today is a paradigm where companies are making the most money they’ve made in sixty years. Corporate profits are at an all-time high and growing faster in the fourth quarter of 2010 than they’ve ever grown in sixty years. At the same time, as we have massive unemployment and an environment that is being degraded. And unfortunately we’ve created a system that allows companies to make huge profits while people are unemployed and the environment suffers. So we have systemic problem in the way we’ve designed our economy.

In Part 2 of this interview (coming next Friday), Hollender talks about how he would launch a company today, the tensions of scale, and what motivates him the most.

Renowned architect Frank  Lloyd Wright is known for pioneering one of the most important movements in architecture. His mastery of the compression and exaltation of space has little to do with inspiring awe (although that it does), and much more to do with a space that is living. That shows you how to act, impresses upon you what to feel and has a conversation with you. The building has a conversation with you, not Wright.

Which was probably a great mystery to those who knew Wright while he was living since he was quite the arrogant bastard. But his architecture lacks ego. Wright matched a structure to its environment. The infamous Guggenheim intentionally looks nothing like the home of Taliesin.

In contrast, Santiago Calatrava or Frank Gehry, two of the celebrity architects of present-day, are very recognizable. No matter where you are. No matter what city you’re in. A Calatrava or Gehry building has a distinct stamp, an identifiable arrangement with their hand apparent. An impression, of themselves.

And however distinct those buildings are from each other, they are also, ultimately, more of the same.   The type of sameness that dominates strip mall suburbia where big-box retailers have stamped their own identifiable arrangement with the ease of reflecting the last box onto the next, so it is the same from town to town to town.

It isn’t quite fair to compare a Walmart to a Calatrava, of course. A Calatrava is beautiful and a Walmart is most certainly not. But it is fair to compare this obsession we have to create and stamp our brand – in all of our novel and impertinent glory – across our careers, and projects and relationships.

Maybe if we all tried a little less to leave our imprint on the world, something might rise that’s a bit more meaningful than ourselves alone. We need to concentrate less on being special, and more on matching ourselves to our environment. Success isn’t about you.

Wright did this through architectural structures. You’ll do it through a lesson plan. Or diving. Or an iPhone app. Or parenthood. Whatever.

But if you say, “That’s not part of my brand,” you are missing the point. Match your skills and talents to the environment around you – those jobs, projects, affairs, and challenges that form our lives. That is change; listening to the milieu and giving it a voice.

Dilute your brand. It’s less than you think anyway. Pay attention to what’s bigger than you. Match your rhythm to what needs to be done. Respond.

Like in social media, all you have to do is start a blog and write a lot of content– it doesn’t even have to be original or even good. Next, find partners and create alliances where you tweet, digg and stumble each other’s content. Abuse whuffie to make crowd-sourcing work for you. Mass follow everyone on Twitter, import them into FriendFeed to inflate your subscriber numbers, and then unfollow everyone but twenty on your list. Spam people. Promote under the guise of community. Push. Pull. Publish.

Give your efforts a few months in the oven, and then… voila! You’re an influencer.

Congrats! And don’t worry. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually putting out interesting, new or relevant ideas into the world. Pure hustle, as Gary Vaynerchuk so aptly explains, will do the trick.

These are the mostly unspoken rules of social media. And in a medium that is supposed to be revolutionary, it’s disappointing that not much has changed from the status quo, despite claims that PR and traditional marketing is dead.

“The old way was to create safe, ordinary products and combine them with mass marketing,” Alex Bogusky and John Winsor explain in the little spark of a book, Baked In. We’re repeating the same inefficiencies in social media, however, where the focus on accumulating mass numbers is doing a great disservice to the possibilities.

Indeed, in my own outreach efforts with Alice, I’ve found that individuals with smaller numbers – whether it be traffic or subscribers – often have just as much influence, if not more than those with large badges on display. Bogusky and Winsor agree, reporting on a study that found “news travels as readily through ordinary people as influential ones. Interpersonal networks are democratic.”

We’ve supposedly learned from the likes of traditional advertising that worshiped a spray and pray approach, and yet we still pay credence to only the large influencers. Such an approach could be even more flawed than mass marketing, because social media numbers mean nothing. They’re often so inflated and distorted, that in trying to boost our influencer status, we’ve leapt back into the untargeted and interruptive advertising pool where relevancy and effectiveness drops drastically.

While the smaller scale of social media hides such issues right now – for most Fortune 500 companies, the medium is still emerging – it will soon come out that while the tool is different, the habits are the same.

What we need then, is not an improvement upon or even a replacement of the traditional PR and advertising model, but a complete market shift. “The new way,” Bogusky and Winsor explain, is to “create truly innovative products and build the marketing right into them.”

That, in a nutshell, is why my job at Alice is so enjoyable. We better connect manufacturers and consumers in the giant consumer packaged goods (CPG) market. And in disrupting the traditional retail market, Alice has made it possible to buy all your household essentials online with competitive prices and get it delivered to your door with free shipping. Toilet paper is all of a sudden revolutionary.

And in the few short months since our launch, the service has spread. While that doesn’t surprise me, the ease with which it has done so and continues to (knock on wood) does. Good spreads. Something I didn’t fully believe in until this job.

When good spreads you don’t need all the superfluous advertising and marketing campaigns. You don’t need traditional posturing, marketing gloss, fluff and trickery. Good has the promotion baked in. Creating products that market themselves means tearing down the walls between the company and consumer. No longer do you have to spray over the ledge, but you’re able to join them on the other side.

“In the same amount of time it takes to create an advertising campaign – it’s possible to take all that consumer insight and actually bake it right into a new product. A product designed with a mission. A product with a story to tell. A product with the ability to sell itself,” argue Bogusky and Winsor.

A product with integrity. That is the future of marketing.

What do you think? Does good spread or do you need to give it a promotional push?

Such a small thing years ago, but I think about it constantly because it’s one of the few times I haven’t spoken up.

More recently, Maria Antonia and I had planned to go to a local political fundraiser, and she cancelled at the last minute. Her boss thought it was a bad idea since we are both semi-public figures and should remain neutral.

And then at my family reunion just this past weekend, we weren’t allowed to discuss politics or religion. Out on the patio, I secretly tried to goad one of my uncles into telling me who he was voting for, but silent he remained. Instead, we talked about the weather.

Business Week’s Bruce Weinsten argues in his ethics column that mum should be the word on politics, especially at work. Apparently, speaking up can bring you down career-wise.

“Along with sex, money, and religion, politics is one of the most controversial topics of conversation that exists,” he states. “We talk about sex with our closest friends (with whom we probably would not even discuss our income), but this kind of conversation is wisely held after business hours. Neither your salary nor your sex life is anyone’s business at the office.”

Except that Generation Y’s rituals fly in the face of Weinsten’s fearsome foursome.

As products of the Sex and the City generation, Belle and I openly discuss sex, but we also openly discuss income. I know what both she and her fiancé make, and they both know what I make. We know how much each of us paid for our condos, and how much debt or lack thereof, we both have.

This isn’t a trend relegated to personal relationships either. Nonprofits have routinely disclosed executive salaries as part of a law for increased accountability, and now transparent salaries are being implemented in forward-thinking companies like Brazen Careerist.

Taboo topics are quickly becoming acceptable as part of Generation Y’s demand for authenticity and transparency. Except, maybe, for politics.

Despite projections that we will define one of the most influential elections in history, in part due to online discussions facilitated by people like Tim Weaver and Milena Thomas in the Gen Y blogosphere, we still seem to be weary of expressing our opinions openly in the workplace.

 “Ultimately I’m at work to work, and I wasn’t hired to discuss my personal political opinions,” one commenter argues. Which is like saying you weren’t hired to talk about the Red Sox, the back problem you have, or the Kooks concert you went to on Thursday night. Because I’m sure people are dying to hear how you made tacos with hot sauce AND sour cream more than your informed opinion on the most important issues of today.

What we believe in and have faith in informs our work and personal lives intimately, and to say that we shouldn’t discuss them anywhere is dangerous.

“The idea that practicing any profession somehow obliges or even encourages a vow of silence on any subject, politics or otherwise, that might offend someone somewhere, is odious,” argues author John Scalzi. “Everyone should be encouraged to say what they wish to say about the important matters of the day. Everyone should feel that participation in the life of their community and their state and nation is a critical act. To do less invites ignorance and ultimately tyranny.”

And to argue otherwise is to say that the whole idea of America – a democracy where people aren’t persecuted for speaking their minds – is based on a fallacy. But it isn’t. Generation Y is just entirely too quiet and conservative.

And while voicing your opinion may invite all sorts of opinions and criticism and the chance that you might – gasp! – have to defend your beliefs, we cannot have as our legacy a production that mindlessly follows the corporate establishment.

As one of the largest generations born into idealism, we are now facing the first true test of whether we will rise or recoil in the face of adversity. It doesn’t matter if you’re a librarian or are in the most public of professions, you have enormous political power.

Years from now, when I look back and reflect, I will know that I never, ever regretted opening my mouth, only keeping it shut.

Open wide.

Madison defines who I am. My career, friendships, and relationships are delivered to me from the city stork, like they were birthed directly from this intoxicating energy.

My affair with the city is an epic romance. But the city doesn’t know it.

Madison isn’t alone. Despite consistently placing in the top of every list imaginable – from Playboy to Forbes – Madison, like many other cities, is ignoring one of its most competitive advantages. That is, young people.

See, as cash cows go, Gen Y is a big one, and cities are ignoring us – the young leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals and creatives – in their plans for economic development.

Partnering with Gen Y should be of the utmost priority for cities since we are uniquely positioned to stimulate economic development. For example:

1. Good jobs come from good people. Economic development starts with human capital. The war for talent is one of the most interesting and challenging issues that cities face today. Young people actively promote and contribute to the high quality of life in cities, and need to be able to connect to both people and ideas. We are the quality workforce that is indispensable to basic sector job growth. Without a strong cadre of young talent, employers will be unable to expand.

2. Competitive advantage starts with entrepreneurship. More than any other generation, young people today are entrepreneurs. To meet the small business owners, the tenants of research parks, and other key entrepreneurs in cities is to meet an under forty demographic. There is ample opportunity to provide dynamic support for young entrepreneurs and the talent coming out of universities. Young entrepreneurs are a powerful determinant of a city’s future economy. They cannot be an afterthought.

3. To new customers, cities have no legacy. Gen Y knows little about the negative perceptions that have been prevalent within the business community. We don’t know the history or the mistakes. This is an opportunity for cities to build positive goodwill through superior customer service for this new generation. Young people can help cities to think innovatively. Cities can then borrow that energy and willingness to change to jump-start a perception shift in the existing business community.

4. Spiky should be funded. Place is extremely important to Gen Y and largely determines our destiny in today’s spiky world, to borrow a term from Richard Florida. To become a taller spike in the world’s economy – to compete – cities needs to attract young talent. In turn, young people will develop businesses and new markets. Cities should allocate money to young talent groups that promote and build upon the city’s strengths and spikiness to create the competitive advantage that allows us to expand business.

Cities must proactively reach out to Gen Y. Young people represent growth, and must be engaged in a city’s future development. We are a natural partner and ally in stimulating economic development.

Talent city.

“I make you nervous, don’t I?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. My weight shifted from one heel to the other. “I feel like you don’t trust me yet.”

“No. I trust you. I have no reason not to trust you,” he said.

I nodded and he nodded and we looked at each other, smiling. When Big Brother smiles, you smile too, like a game of telephone, passing the message on. It’s charisma and it’s indefinable.

Big Brother and I are still figuring each other out. We’re figuring out the trust thing, and the loyalty thing. We’re building it. Because you can’t just say “trust me,” and believe everything will work out. That’s a movie ending, not a business decision. Trust has to be earned. Loyalty has to be created.

Big Brother knows this. He doesn’t use his success to shepherd me into trusting him. He expects that I’ll earn his trust and he’ll earn mine.

Trust and loyalty are big deals when you’re in a position of leadership, because everyone wants to be your friend for specific reasons. And everyone else doesn’t like you, for much of the same reasons.

“Don’t take it personally,” Big Brother told me as we sat across from each other after work. A glass of water sat in rings of sweat in front of me.

“Okay,” I said, running my fingertips along the table and through the water. I was thinking about the meeting I had in an hour, because after work is never really after work anymore.

“No. Look at me in the eyes,” he said. I looked up, amused. He was not amused. “Do you understand, truly? Don’t take it personally.”

“Okay,” I said. I nodded, looking directly at him, holding his gaze until he was nodding back, satisfied that I understood.

Big Brother and I are still figuring each other out. Because real trust and real loyalty takes time. These exchanges put another stone in place. Information is the foundation. Honesty is the mortar holding it together. There is no other way if you want to build a business relationship that can stand the cycle of the game.

There is no happy ending. The game cycle is a constant push and pull of what you build, and what you tear down.

Measured excitement.

Share your success. It is incumbent on the person being promoted, according to Mark Meloy, President and CEO of First Business Bank, to pull others along with them. Make sure that as you become more successful, your leaders feel that their careers are moving forward as well.

Network to problem-solve. Finding groups that help you problem-solve will save many a headache, according to Brett Armstrong, CFO of the IT company Trident Contact Management. Like if you’re being audited, the group will have your back. But choose your involvement wisely, Armstrong advocates, since you only have a certain amount of time and need to spend it wisely. If you’re only half-involved then that is how people will know you.

Balance… well, it’ll all even out in the end. First, you have to decide if you want a job or a career, according to Mark Meloy. If it’s a career you decide upon, make sure you’re engaging in a two-way street. Work and life won’t always balance out that day, week, or month, but equilibrium will be found. Eventually. Meloy walks the talk at First Business Bank. When his employees go on vacation, they are not allowed access to email and have only limited access to voicemail. The company gives vacation, he says, for a reason.

A vision can’t just be a pie in the sky. A vision must be a concrete vision, according to Donna Sollenberger, President and CEO of UW Hospital and Clinics. To create the right vision, you must find the right direction for your organization to take. To do this, look at the industry trends and listen to your market. Then build a case, a good solid argument, and back it up with data to demonstrate where you need to go.

Entrepreneurs – socialites, control-freaks, risk-takers, and self-promoters. So says Curt Brink, a successful real estate developer. You must not only deal with a wide range of people in entrepreneurship, he argues, but you must also follow through on getting things done. Don’t be afraid to try something new, because once you’ve done it, you then understand how to do it better. A successful entrepreneur likes being in control, but can delegate fully. If you don’t, no one will grow. By the way, Brink was unconsciously promoting his current and past projects the entire time he was talking. That’s called passion. Get some.

Do a lot, and make sure everyone knows. Don’t let anyone pigeon hole your talents, says Annette Knapstein, Vice President of Office Administration at American Family Insurance. Stretch yourself, develop new talents and volunteer for different committees. And then, make sure everyone knows it. If they don’t know, it doesn’t exist.

Leadership is lonely sometimes. A good leader and manager makes effective decisions and communicates clearly, while putting the right people in the right spots. Not always easy, according to Gary Wolter, President and CEO of MGE. To illustrate his point, Wolter told a story about a receptionist he saw year after year. Each morning, the receptionist would say, “Hello, Gary.” Yet, when Wolter was promoted to CEO, the next morning was different. “Hello, Mr. Wolter,” the receptionist said. Leadership fundamentally changes relationships and people expect different things of you. People who were your peers, you now supervise, and while you can still be friendly, you can’t talk about the boss anymore because you are the boss. The support group that you had developed, who had remained loyal to you, and helped you along your journey has changed. Be prepared.

Throw an open door party daily. Reaching out to younger people for fresh air is essential, according to Richard Lynch, President of J.H. Findorff & Son, who had a great sense of the upcoming workforce. He recognizes that young workers are entrepreneurial, and need a flexible and honest environment to work in. He has an open door policy for this purpose and subsequently attracts the brightest young workers.

Speaking of honesty… Surround yourself with people who will tell you that you’re an idiot, says Gary Wolter. Look both inside your organization, and outside, for individuals you can bounce ideas off of, and who can communicate with you effectively and honestly.

Follow the Leader.

Mr. Poli Sci became quite defensive at this point claiming he had objectivity (!) since he wasn’t personally involved. I tried to think of one successful person in politics that attempted to stand on both sides of the fence. Politics is about having an opinion. It’s the very definition of passion.

In talking to Mr. Poli Sci, I realized he had committed two common Generation Y sins. One, he had a vague interest in a topic, but no passion, fostering an apathetic approach towards life. Two, he went to grad school to fix it. Life is better with experience. Here’s why:

1) Grad school is good on paper, but barely. An education doesn’t allow your competencies to be realistically measured, or allow you to be differentiated among other candidates. An education simply signifies that you have completed a degree. It doesn’t provide the full picture of your marketable skills.

Moreover, an advanced degree may bring you more money, but it’s not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is the extra stress your additional student loans will create and the regret you’ll feel for wasting your efforts when you don’t end up using your degree. Seems barely worth it considering “grad school is a confidence-killing daily assault of petty degradations.”

2) Employers look for experience, so should you. Real-world experience reigns supreme over schooling. Every time. Your experience in the real-world interacting with real people and real situations allows you to be uniquely suited towards a particular position. Of course, you need education and knowledge to put places on a map. But then you have to go live life to arrive at a destination.

Sure, Mr. Poli Sci would be a good professor, but never great. Great professors have fervent opinions, they know intimately the subject matter upon which they speak, and they have formed a deep respect for the other side. Most importantly, they’ve formed these opinions as the result of real-world experience.

3) Objectivity gets you nowhere. It’s easy to be objective when you haven’t risked anything. But success in business is not objective. Decisions are based on the relationships you have with others, and the emotions of how you’ve lived life up until this point. The facts can be laid out in front of you, but it is ultimately the experiences you’ve had that determine an outcome.

4) It’s better to do something, instead of just learn about it. Why, exactly, are so many of us in such a hurry to re-institutionalize ourselves? I spent years in college yearning to be done with school. Especially the flash card part.

Going to grad school is not having the guts to get on with life. You’re not telling corporate America anything by indulging in a larger map. You’re just making it harder to figure out which road to take. Want to give the finger to the establishment? Go blog. Go start your own business. Go to work every single day and rock every single day.

Preparation is hesitation. Action is change.

I know a lot of awesome Gen X and Gen Y women. In fact, the city of Madison, WI ranks in the top ten of both female creative class, and female super-creative class percentages in the nation (Charlottesville, VA and Bakersville, CA, rank first).Generation Y women, Hannah Seligson argues, are “making one of the fastest and unprecedented career ladder ascents in history.” Here are some observations about one of the most powerful groups of women in history:

Women are more business-minded than men… Springboard Enterprises reports that “women in the United States have an ownership stake of 50 percent or more in nearly half of all privately held businesses.” In fact, women are starting businesses at a rate of twice that of men, attracted to the flexible lifestyle of being your own boss.

And we’re successful at it. The gross sales of women-led companies grew 39 percent compared to 34 percent for all firms. Barron’s predicts that by 2010 a woman has a one in seven chance of having a powerful job post. In Australia, studies show that “women-led companies on average outperform those where there is no female leadership at the top,” while “law firms with more female partners have a higher per partner income than those with fewer.”

… but women don’t always want a man, or children. While men in leadership positions often have a family to support them, Gen X and Gen Y women put careers ahead of settling down. While this can be a lonely proposition, many Gen X and Gen Y women are not in a huge rush to find a man, get married and start popping out children.

In relationships, the men increasingly stay at home or hold a less stressful position. If we’re even in a relationship. Many of us are doing just fine without a man as a result of our highly independent lifestyle.

A lot of us aren’t even sure we want to have kids. And if we do, we want to adopt (anything to avoid having a foreign object pop out of our fitness-club bodies). The vast majority of women that do plan on having kids also plan on staying in the workforce.

Women are natural leaders. The millennial woman brand of leadership is more about changing the world than our own egos. Moreover, we’re change makers willing to defy the traditional structures of “command and control” leadership for a more collaborative and inclusive model.

Anna Quindlen writes, “by its very nature women’s leadership is about redefinition, while men’s leadership has been about maintaining the status quo… You’re less wedded to the shape of the table if you haven’t been permitted to sit at it.”

I’m not surprised to learn that women and men are switching roles. I see examples all around me of women embracing the power of now to lead the next generation. The more young women that get others to not only look past their age, but also any perceived inequities, the better off our world will be.

One last note. Over in the UK, academics have dubbed young women leaders as “’the Monstrous Army on the March’, women who cannot, will not be stopped.”

Well then. March on ladies.

These boots are made for leading.