"You're a dreamer, Nick."
Those were the words from my first and only boss in corporate. Ever since I was little, I've loved to dream. It gave me a drive that was unstoppable. The creativity to invent. The deep need to really love what I do.
It's the reason that three years later, at 24, I'm not still crunching numbers on Excel spreadsheets. I'm sitting in my own office, five blocks away from my first job, with seven full-time employees and a growing company.
But being a dreamer makes you less desirable in the baby boomer corporate culture. And by making dreamers the outcast, corporate America isn't just losing millennials, it's losing the talent it needs most — the creatives.
The fact is that over the last decade the world has changed, a lot. And when the world changes, the skills that bring value change as well. The "do more, think less" mentality may have been the key to success for baby boomers in the corporate world, but it's far less relevant in a world where a single Twitter post can gain you a major new client, or a clever YouTube video can get a billion views.
Creativity has incredible benefits, so why can't corporate seem to find it?
Catch 22: Don't hire yourself
For the management teams hiring the new generation, working hard and doing what you were told was enough. It's only natural that they would hire based on the same skill sets. This leads us to the truth about creativity in corporate.
Corporate doesn't want creative people. In fact, the gold standard of success in corporate is the person who is content with the status quo. He or she takes perfect notes, is never late to a meeting and never forgets to use the company logo in a presentation. Someone who can fall in line, because if people have always done it this way, it must be the best way to do it. This person has complete confidence in the bureaucratic system. Someone who isn't going to come in and question how you're doing things.
Those aren't the people I want. People afraid to try something that will fail.
I want the kids who get bored in meetings, who can't stand the fact that their decisions are so minuscule that they don't really matter, who speak up when something is wrong.
Please don't think that I'm here to complain about the situation.
As the CEO of a tech start-up, I reap the benefits of corporate's outdated hiring practices — it allows me to scoop up great talent.
So go ahead. Take your "always-on-time," hyper-focused employees. I don't want them.
Instead, give me your misfits, your dreamers, your interns yearning to do something that matters.
And if you're a talented "robot," yearning to be free, please keep me in mind.