Chapter 2: Differentiating Through Competition
Competitive Zers want to signal that what they are doing is differentiated so they can rank themselves. The military should better display niche MOS communities, credentials, and clear billeting pipelines to attract competitive candidates.
Solution: The military must display niche MOS communities, credentials, and clear billeting pipelines to attract competitive candidates in small formalized group-chats (GTG = Good To Go Group).
The ~70 million kids who have grown up hunting for likes, retweets, and shares are now becoming young adults who want to compete in the working world. Z has nurtured a mindset that allows them to do activities and make proclamations that rank them in society. David and Jonah Stillman,[1] the authors of "Gen Z at work," explain that Gen Z believes there are winners and losers in the world. In high school, the likes one receives on a Facebook picture or the following-follower ratio one has on Instagram signifies social status. Z now realizes that these metaphysical bits and bytes, which confer "points" in youth, can also be obtained in adulthood. This social competition leads to a strong desire for signaling amongst Zoomers. Tons of research literature[2] is focused on analyzing social hierarchies. For all their lamentable aspects, they fulfill innate human needs for resource allocation and understanding in a way that motivates.
History has long recognized social capital and status. However, today's modern digital teenager has a more transparent, more instant, and more public accounting system to do so. Three converging trends are heavily influencing today's hierarchies. Firstly, niche communities are making social rankings more focused. Second, this ranking system is often tabulated by the visual progress one can project and display. Third, Zers want to know the clearly defined paths to climbing in these hierarchies; the so-called rules for winning.
[1] Stillman, Jonah. Gen Z @ Work - How The Next Generation Is Transforming the Workplace. HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2017.
[2] Halevy, Nir, Eileen Y. Chou, and Adam D. Galinsky. “A Functional Model of Hierarchy.” Organizational Psychology Review 1, no. 1 (2011): 32–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041386610380991.
