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"They want to be treated like colleagues rather than subordinates" "They would renege on a job-acceptance commitment if a better offer came along." "Millennia
by time_management 18y ago
"They want to be treated like colleagues rather than subordinates"
"They would renege on a job-acceptance commitment if a better offer came along."
"Millennials also expect ... time for their family and personal interests."
Through my mind as I read those quotes:
"[Baby Boomers] want to be treated as superiors rather than colleagues."
"They would rescind an offer if they found something embarrassing on Facebook." (This has happened to people I know.)
"Baby boomers also expect ... others' lifestyles to be arranged for their purposes."
In any case, I'm surprised but not amazed that people are willing to say things like this. The problem is as follows: consider that a money economy is essentially a computer, designed to allocate resources to the most productive individuals and institutions; e.g. those who make the best decisions with them in the past. Of course, this process is filtered through large corporations...
Most people would agree that, unless there was a specific, well-defined goal of high potential value, working at immense sacrifice is unwise. Most higher-level corporate work is not toward a well-defined goal of value; in fact, most of it's so generic and abstract as to be pointless. But large corporations often value sacrifice over productivity, shifting the money and (much more importantly) power over to those who were most willing to sacrifice themselves. What does this mean? Well, becoming a "company man" in a large company, with all the personal sacrifices that entails, is actually often a bad decision. Thus, decision-making power is allocated to those who made bad decisions (about the relative value of their personal existence vs. corporate goals) in the past. In large big-box companies, power shifts to the defective rather than the productive. Hmm. That definitely wasn't supposed to happen.
This article is the voice of Baby Boomers who made bad decisions with their lives and, out of regret and reflective bitterness, have chosen to chide those who wish to explore other options, falling back on a "because I said so" attitude. People veer toward authoritarianism when under psychological stress, and that's exactly what we see in this article.
- dla2000 18y agoYour argument above seems to miss at least one thing. A corporation wants to reward people who value the company. At the upper eschelons, they may reward people for independent thinking, but in most cases, people are hired to perform a job to meet a corporate goal. I recently had to reprimand a person because she missed a client meeting to attend Junior Achievement. I praise her for her efforts with that organization, but it doesn't pay her $100K salary, and my organization does. It's not that any of these ideals being mentioned are terrible, it's the juxtapostion of "I want salary X" and "I'm going to wear offensive t-shirts to work because I'm expressing myself" and "I want to take off time whenever I want". Having compared many fortune 500 companies, I can tell you that at a company with flex-time in place, it's hard to schedule meetings for a 20 person team. Effectively 2 days out of a 5 day work week were "unavailable" and therefore lost. I love flex time. Love it. But I can also point out the very real reasons why a company would not be able to support it. So there's a lot of trade off and I think it's killing our ability to be competitive. Power shifting to the defective is more a matter of the Peter Principle than any person's ability to separate personal time from corporate time.