In April, I’m doing a tour of corporations, in the U.S. and abroad, during which I’ll speak to C-level executives and managers about the current generation of twenty-somethings, also known as the Millennials, and the effect they’re having on the workplace.  Millennials are known for being empowered, ambitious, and devoted to changing business for the better.  They want to get ahead yesterday, and they demand a sensible reason for everything that happens in their world.  At eighty million strong, the Millennials are the largest generation to date, eclipsing even the mega-powerful Baby Boomers who they are already starting to replace in the workforce.

All of my research on Millennials got me thinking about my own cohort, late Generation Xers.  Born in 1976, I arrived on the scene a little too late to fully appreciate the Gen X culture of cynicism, lack of trust in authority, grunge wear, and dead-end jobs.  My friends and I watched our older siblings crash and burn in the real world, and relished watching movies like Singles and Reality Bites that chronicled their angst.  We were technically considered part of the same generation, but changes in the late 90s would make our coming-of-age a little different.

In high school and college at the dawn of the Internet, we were most innovative in taking advantage of all that this new medium had to offer.  When our cohort entered the workforce, the economy was booming and we faced little competition.  Like other Gen X-ers, we scoffed at corporate loyalty and focused on self-improvement and amassing skill sets that we could take anywhere, but unlike them, we understood the importance of diplomatically navigating office politics and creating an environment of cooperation.  The dot com crash and September 11 didn’t phase us all that much, because we’d grown up with compartively self-centered parents who were remote space stations as opposed to helicopters and were accustomed to fending for ourselves.

Everyone’s always talking about the Baby Boomers and the Millennials, but I think our little generation in the middle is headed for greatness.  As the Baby Boomers start to retire en masse, we’ll be the ones taking over public and private sector leadership positions, and because there are fewer of us (we're known as the Baby Busters because the population growth during our birth years was the slowest in American history), we’ll have to learn to work smarter.  Our unique problem-solving abilities will be essential as we struggle to support the elderly and capture their knowledge, mentor the young people who will be our successors, and create a safer, more productive world for future generations.  We were never naïve or complacent, and we never had any illusions, and maybe that’s why we’re exactly the right ones for the job.