The young are different than you and me. They have more selves. According to a recent European study, in fact, Millennials have a "multifaceted sense of their own identity."
"They change completely their attitude during the day, during the night, during the weekend," says Alessandro Bigi, one of the coauthors of the study. "It is not like my generation, where I have my professor work and then I go home and have my professor life." Millennials evidence what Larissa Faw calls "multi-careerism," holding several jobs at once. She calls them "hustlers" working "angles" in search of their "best bet."
This multiplicity comes from economic necessity. Having several selves make it easier to make a living. But multiplicity is also driven by creativity. Several selves make you more expressive, give you more opportunities to participate in contemporary culture. For pragmatic reasons or playful ones, Millennials have been adding on.
This comes as news to Boomers, who are inclined to take Millennials at their face. When they show up for work in a business suit, we assume we're looking at the whole person. But many Millennials are faking it.
Forgive a wild comparison, but Millennials are a little like Marranos, people who kept their religious identities under deep cover for fear that the anti-Semitism that had driven them out of the Iberian peninsula would find them in their new homes. Boomers who scorn this comparison may not fully appreciate just how much is being kept from them. The guise is working. The concealment is deep.
Take the case of tattoos specifically or popular culture more broadly. For Boomers, tattoos come from a world that is confusing, embarrassing, and disheartening. They look at hip hop poet Lil' Wayne and think, What the hell? Favorite TV shows are often regarded as low culture and therefore a "guilty secret." Then there's Lindsay Lohan, the Kardashian sisters, and kitten memes, clear evidence that popular culture debases our world, corrupts our children, and heralds the end of Western civilization. (Lil' Wayne once more figures as a favorite case in point.)
Research says 1 in 3 Millennials have tattoos. With 4 Millennials in a room — even a boardroom — someone is bound to be inked. And "popular culture" isn't popular at all: now it's just culture, their culture. (The "popular" fell away sometime in the 1990s.) There's no guilty pleasure here, no apology, no pretension, just a passion for music, movies, and memes. If this were an indiscriminate wallowing in pop culture, boomers would be vindicated. But in fact Millennials have cultivated an extraordinary media literacy and cultural intelligence.
So it's tough for Millennials to sit in boardrooms and listen to boomers talk about music and movies that are neither interesting nor current. But they give no sign. Glances may pass between them, but these people suppress the inclination to raise eyebrows in disbelief. Boomers will just have to take my word for it, but on average they say stuff worthy of reproach twice a day. In a more sensible world, they would get the standard rebuke from the sports world, "Come on, man!" Millennials remain mum.
The Boomer retort to tattoos and contemporary culture is well known. They say they discourage this stuff because "This is a place of business. Tattoos are distracting. When we ban the sight of them, the workplace runs more smoothly. There's no generational conspiracy here. Just business."
But this is wrong. In fact it's spectacularly mistaken. Culture is the sea in which business swims. We can't do good innovation without it. We can't do good marketing without it. And we can't build a good corporate culture without it. One case in point: Best Buy bought Musicland for $700 million and was obliged to give it away three years later. The problem? Peer to peer file sharing (Kazaa, etc.) As someone later put it, everyone at Best Buy seemed to know about file sharing except the people in the C-Suite.
Culture is where the Black Swans breed. It's where the Blue Oceans thrive. Corporations that exclude culture deny themselves crucial intelligence. There's a solution: engage Millennials. Take advantage of what they know. Promote them in the organization. Install them in the C-Suite. It's simple really. It's time to let Millennials roll up their sleeves, show off their tats, and get to work.
Acknowledgements: Ben Voyles, Susan Griffin
