In a piece for Forbes, contributor Liz Ryan extolled the Millennial Way, or at least some of the logic behind it. In her column, Ryan sought to assuage concerns of baby boomer parents and frustrated executives, telling them that Gen-Y’s approach to life and their attitude about employment is healthier and more balanced than we think and something that all of us should have done years ago. “Anyone who argues for a more human-centric approach to work,” she wrote, “is a hero in our book, and that quality is what millennials are most well-known for. They aren’t willing to fall in line and take a lousy job just to get an apartment that’s the envy of their friends. What good would the apartment do them, if they hate their job and therefore hate their life?”
In her well-articulated defense, Ryan highlighted two millennial propensities: an aversion to drinking the corporate Kool-Aid and a capacity to reinvent themselves as circumstances and interests warrant.
Our youngest workers, she writes, were just getting started (or thinking about doing so) when corporate scandal and widespread layoffs punctured their parents’ golden balloons. The promise of peace and prosperity in exchange for decades of hard work and sacrifice to the corporate cause went up in recessionary smoke. Now, their children, fresh off of an economic near-collapse that almost shattered their own dreams and still put many of them on hold, remain uncommitted to the corporate credo, an irreverent quality that sends tremors of fear down the spines of upper management.
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