I’m a Boomer who has a lot of fondness and respect for the much-maligned Millennials. I’ll admit, I’ve had fun at their expense and indulged in a little snowflake-calling and participation trophy mocking.
But my heart’s not really in it. Because in my experience as a father and an employer, I’ve come to see, once again, that it’s much easier to disparage a group of people than it is to knock the individuals who make up the group.
In both my home life and work life I’ve gotten to know plenty of Gen Y-ers who are motivated, hard-working, responsible and wonderfully grounded people. Oh, and they’re also fun to be around. True, I’ve also run into people who won’t make my desert-island picks list, and they probably felt the same about me. But I don’t think that’s generational…it’s just human.
As someone who started and built a small business I take a lot of pride in the company’s accomplishments of the past 14 years. And as someone who’s begun moving into the next phase of my life I have an owner’s natural concerns about what happens at the company now. The business cycle swings, the economy gyrates and new things always come along to push out the old.
The one concern I don’t have is about the quality of the people who’ll move the company forward. There’s no one there besides me who’s yet reached even the ripe old age of 35. Yep, all Millennials. And given their intelligence, their level of commitment and their unsurpassed creativity I have no doubt they’ll take Boileau Communications very successfully into the future.
So maybe that’s a humble brag (Millennial term) about my company. More broadly it’s an expression of my confidence in Generation Y. We Boomers take a lot of knocks for a lot of things, but the evidence I’ve seen indicates that we got a lot of things right with Gen Y. I think it’s a generation that’s going to step up very nicely to what will be demanded of it.