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Put me in the game, coach

As the football season starts, we again hear head coaches talking almost as much about motivation as about the games themselves. How to encourage players to perform better, how the staff can exhort their squads and teach them the finer points of the game, even how to energize couch potatoes to attend games.

Motivating football players has many parallel applications in business: the need to boost employee performance, get customers to focus on your company, transform suppliers into better partners and induce other firms to cooperate on mutual projects. All require motivation with a capital M.

Most football players are in their 20s or early 30s, Generation X, just the age group sports and business desperately need, yet find most difficult to manage and motivate. Business, though, has the tougher assignment as some of these young people really don't want to be at work. Their attitude has been described as directionless, with no grasp ofthe big picture, no goals, only payday and the pleasures of the weekend. The knock is also on their general attitude and lack of a work ethic.

Yet some reject this whole argument, pointing out that grownups have thought the younger generation was lazy and shiftless since time began.

What's not in doubt is the need for business to include and motivate our latest generation. A diminishing labor supply in the Nineties means business needs everyone it can lay its hands on. Whether it takes better pay, incentives, recognition, empowerment, training, sharing, a feeling of entrepreneurship or something else, the challenge to motivate isn't optional, it must be done.

We don't buy the Generation X-is-hopeless opinion. Mostly these young people are ready, willing and able to work. We suspect the number of flakes in their generation is in about the same proportion as in preceding generations. They just respond to different motivational tactics.

The businesses that figure out how to make young new hires enthusiastic, canny tean players will likely score big.