Managing a younger boss - how to finesse working for a someone who has never seen a functioning typewriter

While you may not be keen on having a very young supervisor, your best strategy includes:

1. If you are really unhappy with the selection process and believe that you are the victim of age or other discrimination, follow the appropriate legal steps and be prepared to accept the consequences. Talk your HR department; talk to a lawyer. Don't talk about this to every single one of your co-workers.
   
   
2. If #1 is not true, stop whining. Right now. Whining and back-biting were unattractive and inappropriate in junior high, and they can cost you your grown-up job in the next 90 days.
   
   
3. If you want to keep your job and to be valued for what you know and what you can contribute, you have to make perfectly clear from Day #1 that you are deeelighted to be on your boss's team, that you will do everything you can to assist him in the transition, and that you are invested in his success. If this is not true, start looking for a new job. If you sit at your desk and stew for the next five years (assuming you aren't fired), you will be a seething mass of inefficient hostility.
   
   
4. Scrub from your vocabulary: "In my day.." "In the old days..." "We tried that once..." "We've never done it that way..." and anything else that smacks of your knowing how everything is and always should be done. You are not the leader of the band.
   
   
5. On the other hand, you do have mission-critical information, and it is your job to very professionally broach the subject of that knowledge to your new boss. Suggest that you would like help in defining your new role -- you want to be able to provide useful information, you don't want to appear to be sniping from behind your desk, and at all costs, you don't want to appear to be undermining new leadership.
   
   
6. Remember that your new boss may not have supervised anyone of your generation. If this person is as smart is senior management believes her to be, she should welcome your assistance if you present it with generosity and without being an overbearing know-it-all.

Looking for the File in 2009

The ugly specter of miscoded, misnamed and otherwise misplaced files has been conspicuous by its absence from most of the enthusiastic discussions of paperless offices. Perfectly executed, the paperless office should render “Where is the file?” a forgotten question. However, while this idea’s time has certainly come, it has within it the very real possibility of making “Finding the File” an excruciating electronic misery, and not much improvement over searching for a paper file.

The Paper File When The File was in a folder or in bankers’ boxes, lawyers and staff knew that it was somewhere – on a desk, under a desk, in a pile on the floor, behind the door, in someone else’s office, alphabetically misfiled, tucked into another file… While no one tracked the millions of hours each year devoted to “finding the file,” there was, in the end, some assurance that it was somewhere.

In the Very Olden Days, lost files could be painstakingly resurrected from lawyers’ “Chron Files.” In this now-forgotten labor-intensive process, the last copy of every document was typed onto flimsy paper called “onion skin” and saved in chronological order. In addition to keeping Client Files in order, a secretary managed her lawyers’ individual Chron Files, as well.

Donna Neff and Natalie Sanna come closest to raising the specter of lost files in the September 2009 issue of Law Practice Today in their piece about well-crafted file naming systems. They note “…that search software can be used to assist in locating documents; however, in our experience that can be a time-consuming process as one tries to guess what words or phrases might appear in the document being searched for…”

The lost electronic file Will the paperless office solve the decades-old problem of finding lost files? Keyword searches for lost documents are a lot quicker than searching every physical file in the office, but the “Dreaded Delete Key” retains its power. The paperless office will only fulfill its promise with thoughtful training whose goal is to have every document named and saved correctly.