An Entertaining Keynote to Help You Avoid Generational Warfare" and "You’re Not an Acronym – A Practical Approach To Leadership” have quickly become a must-have for any event where audiences want to learn something new while laughing at the same time. Good! They seem allergic to using the phone, or even waiting on customers. I get to poke fun of my generation, laugh at the number of face injuries we’ve caused walking into things because we were distracted by our phones, and laugh at the fact we basically created a billion dollar coffee industry when just twenty years ago coffee was free everywhere you went. Can Millennials be loyal, hard-working employees? Avoid shortcuts. I don’t remember the time myself, but I’m told coffee flowed from faucets freely instead of costing $8 without free refills.We also shouldn’t be quick to judge their missteps in the process as failures. “When baby boomers were working, they had no idea who was working at a better or cooler office, who had better work-life balance,” Lauren says. All good? Allow Telecommuting or Working Remotely Millennials can be incredibly valuable employees. Not all Boomers are old, stodgy authoritarians. This means human development is failing, too. And I think one big difference between millennials and [boomers] is we're seeing a bunch of options like a buffet and being asked to pick one thing to eat. Now that Boomers are in middle-to-upper management levels or serve as a mentor to younger colleagues, they expect the same approach to take hold with Millennials.Let’s get this out of the way. ‘Millennials hate their elders with a ferocity never before seen in our culture’ Plenty of ambitious, future-focused millennials work their hearts out at taxing, low-paying jobs. Millennials have been taught you sometimes rush to deliver an idea instead of spending weeks tying up every loose end. Thanks for contacting us. Tiny boxes! But if they spent more time studying actual history, which can’t easily be found on iPhones, they’d know that boomers were, and remain, the most socially and environmentally conscious generation America ever has ever known. Boomers also won the Cold War against Communist tyranny and along the way brought us unprecedented prosperity and technological innovation. Once-a-year performance reviews just won’t cut it. I get to politely make fun of Millennials. The latter includes the made-in-USA digital revolution that brought forth the gadgets without which millennials couldn’t get out of bed.But is it really that much more? And they are from a different planet than, say, baby boomers. A lot of millennials are hard workers who get results, but to connect with them and retain them, you might have to be willing to live with a more flexible schedule and a less restrictive dress code. You put in your time. The audiences generally skew older towards Gen X and Baby Boomers. We've received your submission.How did I pay it off? Gallup defines millennials as people born between 1980 and 1996. It’s in these moments where I relish in the challenge of convincing others we’re much more similar than we are different. A stoned Starbucks clerk, after asking me to endlessly repeat my order for a grande coffee, then repeating it to himself, asked me, “What were you having?” The zoned-out guy at Duane Reade took a $5 bill from me and inexplicably asked me what my phone number was — to the amused tittering of decidedly older customers in line behind me.Student loans, which many recipients think should be forgiven, may indeed cost more than they did when I was in college.Baby boomers who cried “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” during the Vietnam War should be scared to death of millennials. Boxes made of corrugated cardboard so your hand bleeds whenever you try to break the box down and recycle it!And while I love laughing at some of the silly things we do on a daily basis, I also love getting the opportunity to bring us closer to each other by recognizing our differences aren’t that far apart. These endeavors all take hard work to pull off but diversifying your life can open you up to the possibility of getting lucky that something sticks. Rather than expect instant transport into the corridors of corporate power, I, like most of my friends, worked my butt off in backbreaking, sometimes dangerous jobs that offered no more guarantees or benefits than many companies confer today.While some millennials are truly committed to constructive change, many more seem to be upset mainly because they have to “work too hard.” Their lust to become CEOs at 25 without first paying their dues or even learning the business is hilariously satirized on “The Millennials,” a “Saturday Night Live” segment where a vapid young woman demands a promotion after three days on the job.Would you like to receive desktop browser notifications about breaking news and other major stories?For all our deep divisions, the United States is an immeasureably more open, diverse and tolerant society than it was in the 1950s.
In order to get things done, you must go through the proper channels and the defined process. Now act like that first paragraph didn’t exist and let’s throw tons of people into boxes! In my experience, it’s how we perceive our situation (or others) which might get us out of whack from time to time and thinking there’s no common ground.I get to speak across the country to thousands of people about leadership and generational issues. They are not like I was, and they shouldn’t be. Not all Millennials are tech-savvy Twitter mongrels.