Will Corporations Tap Millennials’ Unique Strengths?
Unless business schools start diversifying their approaches to education, they may fail to tap Generation Y’s strengths–which would mean huge losses for the corporations they’re being trained to lead. So argues Matt Symonds “Business Schools Beware: Gen Y is at the Door.” in the January 21, 2010 issue of BusinessWeek. How is this age group different? According to Symonds,
“They differ in one crucial respect. They don’t just use the new technology that has revolutionized business over the past decade—they eat, sleep and breathe it. That means the lessons they will want to learn and the way they will expect those lessons to be delivered could be radically different.”
Technology, he goes on to argue, has bred a generation whose style of thinking and working is intensively interactive. This difference could be put to great advantage in corporations dealing with the realities of globalization:
“Managing and directing international teams means the traditional “face-to-face” model of leadership is no longer possible and, for younger employees in particular, not even relevant. In this context, leaders need to be collaborative, consensual, and inclusive.”
The stakes of whether business schools will rise to the challenge of responding to new differences in the workforce could be high. Symonds believes that the new emphasis on real-time interactivity could “eradicate much of the herd mentality and stifled thinking that have led us into so many economic crises, from the South Sea Bubble to subprime mortgages. The question is: Who is going to have the vision and the courage to implement it?” The article goes on to offer fascinating glimpses of what some of the most forward-thinking business schools in the United States and Europe are doing.
Finally, corporations must confront the exact same question. As I wrote in The Inclusion Paradox, the Millennial Generation is going to challenge the workplace like no other. Businesses are no more ready for them than business schools are.
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