Net Geners vs. Old-School Management

The Net Geners (a.k.a. Generation Y) are fighting a war with old-school management and the balance of power is slowly changing. Some say that the Net Geners are highly motivated, multi-tasking, versatile workers and highly collaborative humans. For the old-school managers, they are simply lazy narcissists exposing their intimate life in Facebook, wasting their time and company resources in instant messaging, twitters, and other banalities. We are describing the war being fought between those born in the 1980s and 90s, vs. the others, more seasoned managers and employees, pre-1980s.

But this war is far from being contained between the walls of offices and cubicles. It transcends the corporate terrain, and is becoming part of the informal corporate academia as well as the consultancy swarms, always looking for a new field of flowers.

The Net Geners have grown with networked computers and are being challenged to take their new role at company headquarters, with the same enthusiasm they have killed virtual enemies on the PC screen. They have been encouraged to challenge received wisdom, to find their own solutions to problems and to treat work as a route to personal fulfillment rather than merely a way of putting food on the table. Not all of this makes them easy to manage. Bosses complain that after a childhood of being pampered and praised, Net Geners demand far more frequent feedback and an exact set of requirements for the project under development.

For the older managers, the current recession gives them a relief. Once again, the management fads that always spring up in years of plenty are transitioning to the more “brutal” command-and-control methods. Having grown up in good times, Net Geners have been under the illusion that the world owed them a living. But hopping between jobs to find one that meets your inner spiritual needs is not so easy: there are no jobs to hop to.

Net Geners will certainly have to change some of their expectations and take the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. The old-school managers should also be prepared to make concessions. The economy will eventually recover and the Net Geners will be the only resources available to tap.

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Note from Business Week: Author Don Tapscott coined the term Net Generation a decade ago in his best-selling Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1998). Even then he was inspired by his kids: In 1993, seven-year-old Alex was already e-mailing Santa Claus. At that time the Web was "a place for outsiders, geeks, radicals or visionaries," Tapscott writes. Net Geners—those born between 1977 and 1997—had little say, as baby boomers and Gen Xers ruled. But fast-forward to now, and Net Geners—81.1 million strong, or 27% of the U.S. population—are starting to put a stamp on education, work, family life, and politics.