Embrace the differences that will drive innovation
If you want to know what’s driving business, you have to drill down deep. Of course, demand drives customer orders and, as it follows, your customer’s customer orders and so on. But when you finally get to the bottom of it, you’ll see a new face of change—a nonconforming consumer that’s younger, and more powerful than any previous generation. He could also be just the employee you need to make the best of it. Enter Generation Y and get ready to embrace more sweeping change on a number of dimensions. It’s a new eminence front—and it’s no put on.
Strength in numbers
The familiar and dominating Baby Boomer influence is diminishing as it moves out of its prime earning and spending years. Now, according to a 2009 Harris Interactive study, Gen Y (those born between 1980-2000*) is now the largest group of consumers in U.S. history. Their current annual spending power exceeds $200 billion of their own (and their parents’ money), and they influence another $50 billion in purchase demand. It is predicted that in just 6 years, they will surpass Boomers in spending sway. And, as these “millennials” begin to build households, their spending will soar. Happy days are coming, but there’s more to the story. Listen up.
Count on differences
To sustain your business success I am suggesting that you make room on your payroll for more young people—the sooner the better. There are two compelling reasons:
1) The mass of this generational change will inevitably define a whole new marketplace, and
2) Gen Ys think and act in ways that will seem disrespectful at times, but the fresh perspective that comes with it will help industry evolve.
For starters, a full 83 percent of 13- to 25-year-olds will trust a company more if it is socially/environmentally responsible. And here’s plausible explanation for their “attitudinal” differences: (They can seem like know-it-alls)
“[Gen Ys have] grown up with this Web 2.0 mentality that there’s complete equality in the world.” They think, “If everyone has access to the same information then we’re all equal, so I know as much as you do even though I’m 20 and you’re 55.” —Patricia L. Bower, clinical associate professor of management communication at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
Just know, they are very different animals; your business will adapt or it will die a slow death if it doesn’t embrace the differences. Suck it up and learn to love the tension between the contrasting attitudes. “… it’s in the combination of two different points of view that innovation occurs.” Says Tammy Erickson, in a post from Harvard Business Online. Because Gen Ys grew up with the Internet they learned to learn in very different ways and not so much always by doing. Now it becomes our challenge to understand their perspectives on the world. Ms Erickson continues,
“[Their] gift is not that they know how to use the technology, it’s that the way they use the technology causes them to think and act in different ways. Not only do they “own” the technology, redrawing the line between institutional and personal … they understand a world that is asynchronous, based on coordination, machine-enhanced, collaborative and alone. They bring these and other new perspectives to work.”
Embrace this generation. I know they have something to teach us.
HIT Solutions believes the more your business keeps up with important trends, the more you will improve your product, and improve your bottom line.
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