Millenials, or rather any generation, are a product of their era – especially the one they witnessed/endured during their teens. And this then manifests itself back on the world when they enter the work world.
Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com joked earlier this week that Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. 🙂
In a similar vein, 21 year old CEO of scvngr.com, a social/location based gaming & gaming platform start-up, who bets the future on game mechanics, stated he has never known a world without social media.
But the Millennials the world over are not the same, though much more similar than the earlier generations, thanks to digital communications that they were born into.
Sharing, at least the water cooler variety, has been a cultural edifice in the west. Not so in India. The age old Hitopadesha’s claim that the wealth of knowledge is the only one that grows when spent notwithstanding the equivalent of boomer generation in India abhorred sharing. Especially the bad news. Ditto with the elder Gen X too. The Millennials are much more prone to sharing, may be way too much. Much to the chagrin of the CIOs.
So IT managers used to not hearing upfront about the bad news from their offshore vendors and acclimatized to it might have a pleasant surprise when they start hearing more news of all kinds from the millennials getting into the team lead roles at offshore. Also, brace yourselves for some ‘no’s and challenges sent back your way. And it is not a bad thing. 🙂
Add to these the fact that as knowledge workers we are all now arriving at the gates of a post scarcity economy. Information is just a click away. Experience curve (as defined by Boston Consulting Group) tapers off pretty fast too. Collaboration, which can help beat the tapering experience curve, is second nature to the Millennials. Company boundaries can’t stop them from reaching out to their networks & communities that extend well beyond those corporate figments of imagination called firewalls.
Sorry to jot down some random thoughts and add to the confusion. But I recommend The Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison if you want to discombobulate and look at what the future might hold and how we can be prepared for it.
