Who Gives a Hoot about Gen Y?

Do Millennials really matter?

To hear some people talk, the generation that came of age as the century turned is so transformed and transformational that human history is off on a new trajectory. In America they are "the most politically progressive age group in modern history," one study crowed, a year before the most conservative Republicans in memory took back the House. Unlike Baby Boomers, whose mantra was (or was supposed to be) "never trust anyone over 30," these young adults have kept the lines of communication open-37% of them talk to their parents every day. Of course, this may be because so many are unemployed and still living at home.

As you can tell, I'm skeptical about the idea that generations are materially different from one another. On this topic, there's more facile punditry than serious research. Sure, differences exist-my kids remind me-but the biggest have to do with age rather than epoch. People in their twenties are a lot like twentysomethings twenty years ago. Or 100 years ago, for that matter: Check out (before the Tea Party cuts funds for PBS) the young servants on "Downton Abbey": impatient with hierarchy, networking like crazy, and eagerly exploring how the latest technology, the type-writing machine, can give millions of people a chance to participate freely in economic life. More of the apparent differences among the Facebook generation, X-ers, and Boomers can be explained by where they fall in Shakespeare's "seven ages of man" than by Don Tapscott's (quite good) Growing up Digital.
Yet in at least three ways this generation represents the biggest opportunity/challenge we've seen in business since--well, since Boomers crawled out of their playpens and took up their positions in front of the TV. You can ignore most Millennial hype, but forget about these at your peril:

Millennials will be the biggest middle class ever. In absolute numbers, this is the biggest generation in U.S. history-according to the Pew Research Center, there are some 46 million Americans in their twenties, vs. 42 million Boomers when they were the same age. (The latter were a larger percentage of a smaller population.) But as with everything else these days, the real story is global. In aging societies like Japan and Germany, Millennials will be more than half labor force by 2025-but in India and Brazil, the figure is closer to 75%. And these countries-plus China-are for the first time ever becoming predominantly middle-class nations.

By 2030, my Booz & Company colleagues figure, 85% of the global middle class will live in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. That's a lot of households to furnish, tourists to fleece, and eyelashes to lengthen. More than their elders', the Millennials' world view was shaped by falling barriers to travel, trade, and socializing. In 1989, when the first of them were about ten, the Berlin wall came down. The next year, Wilhelm de Klerk freed Nelson Mandela from prison and begin dismantling Apartheid. In 1991 India opened its economy. In 1992, the Maascricht Treaty changed the Common Market into broader, deeper European Union.
This global middle class is the biggest market ever-most of it is in emerging markets-and if it doesn't reshape your investment, product-development, and marketing strategy, you're missing one of the two most lucrative opportunities of our time. (Urbanization, the other, is a close kin.)

The Milliennials are the pioneer generation of the great media remix. Just as Boomers were the first TV generation, Millennials are the daughters and sons of the digital age. Leave aside the debateable question of whether this has rewired their brains. (The same hypothesis was adduced vis a vis the boob tube.) Think simply, narrow-mindedly, about how you're going to discover their unmet needs, shape their purchasing decisions, and earn their loyalty. In the 1930s, at another time of revolution in media, Pepsi's leader Walter Mack reinvented advertising and built his company into a real competitor to Coke with the famous "Pepsi-Cola hits the spot" radio jingle. (One of America's truly great businessmen, he later integrated marketing with a controversial nationwide campaign to reach black customers.)

Today "Cyber Monday" competes with "Black Friday" for holiday shopping, multitasking Millennials jam 12 hours of media consumption into nine clock hours, the first Millennial billionaire (Mark Zuckerberg) has wrongfooted Gen X poster-boys Page and Brin, and there will soon be as many broadband web-enabled smart phones as there are people on the planet. Understanding customer experience is blank, uncharted space on the map of this new world. The first pioneers on that land will find gold.

For Millennials, work-life balance has become work-life blend. Partly because technology is ubiquitous and mobile, to many Millennials the separation of work and life makes no sense. They are on Facebook at the office several times a day and can't understand why any boss would think that's a problem. They are inside the VPN at home several times a night, and expect their significant other to do the same. That may be new to us, but it's old hat in human history.

Karl Marx, among others, documented the social change that came about when factories and railroads started splitting private from work life. With industrialization, economies of scale became the killer app of competitive advantage, and the way to achieve scale was to amass vast capital, build great factories, and fill them with masses of workers. Marx documented the separation-alienation was his term-of the worker from the tools of his trade, which had become the property of the capitalist.

Now your most important piece of capital equipment is carried in your pocket, purse, or backpack. For the first time in more than 150 years, there's an opportunity to reinvent the organization of work in a way that produces an economic advantage as great as the industrialists' economies of scale. We see adumbrations of what's possible in cloud-based enterprise, open source, and the like. Today these are mostly fringe enterprises-often involving volunteer labor (hola, HuffPo)-- interesting but not important in the global scale of things. But some genius capitalist (or collective) will make a bundle by figuring out how to do this in a way that makes a difference.

Me, I'm someone who likes offices, where I burrow under piles of paper like a hamster. I like to go home, open a bottle of wine, and do a little desultory keeping-up-with-email while I watch "Law and Order" reruns. But what do I know? I'm a Boomer.

Illustration courtesy flickr user ryantron.