Millennials: Rightly Up-ending the Apple Cart

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” 
― Haruki MurakamiKafka on the Shore

While the Boomer's bemoan (wrongly) Millennial's lack of work ethic, narcissism and lack of respect for seniority, there is a sea of change coming that corporations and start-ups alike need to fully appreciate. Millennial's aren't buying into the status quo, whether it be traditional corporate structures, incentive systems or goals. They have been honed since youth to achieve yet at the same time, have watched the ways of the boomers sink the economy into a hole. They have been asked to do more sooner (on the achievement track by 6th or 7th grade) yet now find traditional jobs harder to find and not consistent with their upbringing. So, yes guys, they are going to play by a different set of rules and, given they'll be a majority of the workforce within 10 years, you better get on the wagon.

Recently, Deloitte ran a Millennial survey to better understand their fastest growing employee segment. The findings are very interesting. Here is a link to it Deloitte Touche's CEO post on Their Millennial Survey.  It reinforces many of the themes we've heard in the past.

What I find striking about this post is that it is the first time I've seen a Fortune 100 CEO lay out why it is important to change, even turn on its head, how we (and they) manage people. Just as we moved from Organizational man through several iterations to the Knowledge Worker, we are now morphing into Millennial Man (or Woman).

At our annual Pritzker Group CEO summit, we held a panel on Managing Millennials with the wise sage, Kevin O'Connor (founder/ex-CEO Doubleclick) whose employees are all Millennials and the Millennial wunderkind, Rishi Shah (Context Media) & Emerson Spartz (Spartz Media). and the takeaways were consistent: mission/purpose in their firms, their jobs and their tasks are critical; they demand a meritocracy over seniority; they are very interested in professional development and ongoing self-improvement; they want more frequent feedback & affirmation; they are open to measured & action oriented criticism but not good with harsh/blunt commentary.  Intelligence is not what you know but where to find it (Internet generation)
 
The Deloitte study & others have a lot more details. However, the key thing to take away here is that all of our corporate & entrepreneurial cultures, incentive systems, goals, focus on mission, etc are going to need to be revisited and improved on. While more difficult to manage, I applaud their demand that jobs should be more than hierachical contracts where you are told to do some mindless task, put in your hours and suck it up for two decades. More to come…

In the interim, let the storm begin.