Our resident corporate Agony Uncle, CEO Ken Cheng, tackles business challenges – so you don’t have to.
Dear Ken Cheng,
I’m 55 but want to seem “cool” in front of my Gen Z employees. How do I achieve this?
Lowell, Southend
“Cool” changes generation by generation, so it can be impossible to predict sometimes. However, there is one thing that is always universally cool, no matter what age bracket.
That is “dressing up like The Fonz”.
Leather jackets, motorcycles and slick back hair never go out of fashion, so I threw a few thousand pounds into getting the full kit and arrived at the office with the new look. People were so stunned by my coolness they didn’t say anything for the whole day.
After a few days, something was off, and I realised that wearing the outfit isn’t enough. It’s not enough to look like The Fonz, but you also have to sound like him.
I hired one of the UK’s best speech therapists to teach me how to perfect the famous “ayyy” that he does, and after 10 sessions, I almost nailed it.
This still wasn’t enough. I knew I needed to do more. So I bought a jukebox for the office.
Not just any jukebox. It was a custom-made jukebox that would appear broken, but activate as soon as you hit it. This way, I could emulate the Fonz’s signature move, by activating a jukebox when I hit it.
When the jukebox finally arrived, it was my time to shine. I slammed it as hard as I could for maximum impact, but ended up breaking my own hand in the process.
My employees all laughed, and they actually thought that was cool. I wore a cast around my hand for weeks and it gave me loads of streetcred. I dropped the Fonz look and became known as “the Handyman”.
I spent upwards of £15,000 on trying to be cool. Turns out you don’t need to do any of that. All you need to do is shatter 4 of your metacarpal bones.
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