The Generation of Change: The Millenial Need for Financial and Moral Satisfaction in the Workplace
Ξ June 26th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Op-Ed |
Lately I’ve seen a slew of blog postings about a recent article in the NYTimes entitled “Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test”. As you can probably tell from the title, the article focuses on the choice between money and service that is facing today’s graduates. It touches a social nerve that’s received a lot of attention as the infamous Gen Y, or Millenials, are beginning to enter the real world. Will they serve themselves or will they serve the world?
Having been born in 1983, I’ve paid particular attention to the fact that we are alternately praised for our work ethic and proficiency with technology and disparaged for our selfishness and lack of loyalty. I can understand how confusing it must be to our elders because I’m perplexed myself by the incredible range of behavior displayed by my generation. We obsess over our Facebook profiles, some of us even bring our parents to job interviews and then droves of us line up to go through rounds of rigorous application for the opportunity to teach in America’s most distressed schools with Teach for America. Some of us develop software that changes the world before we’ve finished college and yet binge drinking is at an all time high on those same campuses. It doesn’t seem like any label sticks for very long and with good reason. Any attempt to fit such a large and diverse group of people under a single umbrella is missing the point. We don’t share a single set of values. If American culture is as fragmented as it has ever been, why should it make sense for an entire generation to fit neatly into a single classification? I don’t think it does.
Labels are beside the point, though, because whatever you wish to call us the important fact remains that this is an era in which the decision to serve oneself or to serve humanity is as important as it’s ever been. There are more millionaires in the world than ever before and yet there are more global calamities sitting on our doorsteps as well, about which none of us can feign ignorance. There is incredible potential for lining our pockets and even more unprecedented potential to change the world. Which path will we choose? Will we prove to be selfish or selfless?
We can be both. Our career choice doesn’t need to be framed as a decision between salary and service. As awareness of climate change, poverty and other global problems grows so do the questions about whether these issues could be addressed more efficiently with an entrepreneurial approach rather than depending on non-profits. As I referenced in my last post, four Harvard Business School professors have recently published a casebook making just this point. Author Jane Wei-Skillern says that, “Societal problems are increasingly large and complex, taxing the ability of nonprofit organizations to solve them” and that “a new model for the social sector based on entrepreneurship would allow organizations to create more value with their limited resources and tap additional resources not directly under their control.”
It used to be that businessmen made billions of dollars and then donated the money a la Bill Gates; business and philanthropy were two separate and often conflicting realms. The networks of purpose driven businesses popping up all over the internet and the panoply of blogs devoted solely to social enterprise are evidence that this paradigm is changing. Microfinance is turning poverty into an investment opportunity and groundbreaking alternative energy companies are producing solutions to both peak oil and climate change.
Phrases like corporate social responsibility, environmentally sustainable business, and serving consumers at the “base of the pyramid” would have been met with quizzical faces when our parents came of age, but are now the latest thing in the corporate world. Many of these changes have come about because of the wrongdoings of the past, but the important thing is that they are happening. MBA students around the world are more aware than ever before of the responsibility they have to address these issues and they’re doing so at conferences like Net Impact.
During my childhood the images I associated with big business were never good, mostly the tar covered seals of the Exxon Valdez spill and employees streaming out of the Enron headquarters. My generation grew up with the notion that big business created the problems and then the non-profits did their best to clean it up. That was life. Perhaps this resignation was what led us to think that our career could give us money or the chance to make a difference, but not both. But times have changed and even though we can be self-centered at times we’re an adaptive bunch it seems. We’re starting to realize that perhaps it’s not that business is bad, but that business has been done the wrong way. Maybe it could be truly groundbreaking if we did business the right way. Maybe we can have our cake and eat it too. How millennial of us.
