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So I am thirty. Y
ou can breathe a sigh of relief. I’ve crossed that bridge and it’sactually nice to follow jay because I can say with some confidence this won’t be anovercommitted generation. So strike that from the problems list. So I’m here to talk 
about generation. I
’m a member of gen Y, as I said I turned thirty in October. So I’mover that rubicon and I’m sure many of you have sat through lections about thisgeneration so you probably think I’m going in one of two directions. On the left, it’
llbe we
’re really annoying. We’re really entitled. Twenty somethings are always that way and we wear jeans to everything and here’s how you suffer thr
ough that without having a nerv
ous breakdown. On the other side it can be we’re really fun
and enthusiastic we
’re really excited
about work and we wear jeans to everything so
you’ve got that to look forward to. Right. But the surprises I’m not going to talk 
about either of those things. Because they are at this point irrelevant. And really thenumbers bear that out. So if you look at the demographics of the united states, the
baby boom generation are the folks born between 1946 and 1964, and they’re about 
78.5 million of those folks. And I see some of you might be boomers. The generationafter them is generation X and these are the disaffected people that hate everyone
else. They’re older brothers and sisters and they’re born between 64 and 77 andthey’
re about 48 million of those people. And then comes generation Y which is bornbetween 77 and the mid 90s so about 95, old enough to remember 9/11 and some of 
those formatives events. And they’re 80 million of us. So they’re no getting aroundthis generation. There’s no way to fix kind of whatever’s going on without reallyrecognizing that you’ve got to work with this 80 million that’s c
oming up behind for
good. Form my part if we’re going t 
o talk about the future of work and about generation y we really have to go to the next level. We need to talk about leadershipand what happens when we need to move this generation y group into thesuccession plan for our major organizations. And it kind of makes sense becausewhat you see now in the workforce is really a barbell in a lot of places. You have the
baby boomers at the top on one end and they’re not leaving but eventually they will,
you ha
ve x’s in the middle who are hoping their bosses will eventually leave but already they see this generation y group coming up behind them we’re into ourthirties now and moving into management roles so there’s this real question mark 
about what happens with this group as we age. And what impact this will have onindustry. So what I want to talk to you about today is really how to cultivate the best of this gen y group. What are the things you need to know as you bring the best gen
y’ers forward in your orga
nizations and hopefully turn them into the leaders that you want to work with and that will bring your companies into the 21
st 
century. Andthese kind of fall into three key categories from my perspective. And the first one isdesire. So now, do generation
y’ers want to be leaders? Do we actually want to takeon that mantle? That as I’ve said is going to be laying them on the ground before too
long. And you might have read
and I’m sure you have. You’d say Nadira, I’ve seenthat gen y’ers all want to be CEO’s. I know this. I know some annoying gen y’ers that 
come and work for me and they tell me that they want to tell me how I should to
things and I’m the boss. And in that regard don’t you all want to just come to work 
and do what we do and think that you ca
n do it better. And what’s interesting isthat’s actually the opposite. So I’m in the process now of writing a book about this
very issue of gen y and the future of leadership because I see so much of what the
 
perception is really being the opposite of some of the reality. We read the
newspapers, we know that it is not fun to be CEO, we know it’s not fun to be
president, and we come to work and see that 
it’s really hard to be a boss i
n thecurrent environment. So when you talk to a lot of young people even at the highest 
levels right now nobody’s saying I want to come to w
o
rk and be number one, I don’t 
want to be a cog in the machine but 
I don’t want to be master cont 
rol. I want to havean impact when I come to work and I want to be able to contribute but I
don’t 
necessarily want to do the job that you are doing because that job does not look like
much fun. And that’s hard to hear sometimes because when
we are at the top of theladder we think this is awesome. Right. This
is what I’
ve wanted to do all this time,
even if it is really stressful and really hard and requires so much from me. But I’ll
share with you a conversation I had with a wire to just illustrate this point. This manwent to a top ten school, studied computer science, recruited by all the bigtechnology firms coming out of school for computer science and development jobsand he ended up getting hired in marketing because they loved so much how he
thought. You’re an out of the box thinker and this is the kind of young person we
want helping us to form our strategy moving forward. And he said you know Istayed there and I worked in this company and I worked on all these huge projectsthat kind of never went anywhere because there was so much bureaucracy and Iwould look around and see other companies that were smaller and more nimblethan we were doing the things I was trying to get moved up in our ladder and theneventually I had this moment of realizing that five years down the road or ten yearsdown the road I could be coming in here to this same desk or this same office ormaybe whoa the office down the hall and that would be my life. And why would Iwant that. Why would I want that and so he quit his job. He quit his high paying youknow upwardly mobile trajectory exciting tech silicon valley job and
he said I’m
done. And he said he had coworkers than his who were older call him and say areyou okay? Are you having a mental breakdown, this is horrible decision, what areyou doing. And he said I would sit in their office and talk to them and kind of closethe door and give me their speal and I would look at them you know if I come in five
years and of course hes thinking this thought you’ll be sitting in this same office. Andhe said he left the company and he’s gone back rece
ntly to visit and many of hiscoworker are still in the same office in the same department doing the same work.
And to him that was the worst possible thing he could imagine. Because there’s nogrowth there. There’s no excitement there. So maybe I don’t get to be ceo of my
tech
nology company, maybe that’s
not the track i
’m on and
 
I won’t make as muchmoney as that person going to make but I won’t be sitting in the same department 
with the same grey walls doing the same things forever and maybe never having anypath. So you got to think about desire from the perspective of impact. Whether ornot it is worth it to some of these young people to be at the top of that ladder. Nowyou might say nadira that sounds great now, but what happens when you all get married and have kids. Cause
we know we’re waiting a little bit longer out of necessity or design, who knows? But there comes a point where we’re going to get married, we’re going to have children, and there’s responsibilities that come withthat. What’s funny is folks like just sayi
ng the minute that happens your all going to
be over this. This will be done. And you’ll be coming to work and excited to have a
 
job and your going to be really really working hard when you realize it’s going to
cost your children hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to college so good luck with this right now but were over it. And this is a funny thing because the notion of family as you all heard this morning is also changing. So to give you another insideinto conversation I had with a young person. Another super successful young manworking in a great law firm doing great work and is that that point now turning
thirty realizing that he’s got to make some decisions about his career and he’s
engaged. And he said to me you know I look at my wife to be, a
nd we’re talkingabout having kids and we live in a big city where it’s really expensive and I know
that if I stay here and do this kind of work and climb this ladder I will be able to buy
an awesome expensive house and our kids won’t graduate with any debt and we’ll
be able to have all the things we want in between now and then. And he says youknow I look at the people though in my office who are in that position now and they
work really hard all day, when we’re working on a project, they’ll leave for hal
f anhour so they can see their kids and kiss them goodnight and put them to bed and
then they’re back in the office and their kids don’t know them, and so if not the way Iwant to know my kids, so if there’s some sense that my kid may graduate and have
to takeout a loan or he may not live in the nicest neighborhood or have the biggest 
house or maybe he’ll share a room with his brother or sister that isn’t the worst thing that I can imagine. I have different sets of expectations for what it is I’m
looking
for and they don’t necessarily include that model. And
interestingly I sawthis evolve over the course of the recession because at the beginning I saw this wasstarting to happen and percolate up to the top, I was here and executives say it is allover now
, we don’t have to work on this gen y stuff because you all need paychecks.
Good. Done. And what I was hearing from my cohert was actually the opposite.Because the very best people again who of course think about this stuff first because
they’re confident 
they have the resume they have the resources were saying wait a
minute. So I went to an awesome ivy league school and I’ve got all those things in mybackground but it kind of seems it’s not awesome to be at merril or leiman so what 
am I working toward. Maybe I need my own shingle or I need something about work 
that making me excited because the bets we’ve been placing don’t seem to be
making a lot of sense. And of course they were seeing their own parents paying theprice for making that gamble and putting their money on organizatio
n that weren’t 
as committed to them as they were to those organizations. So, as that time haspassed, and in an interesting way the recession has recalibrated the way that a lot of us think about what we want. a lot of the entit 
lemnent that you’ve al
l heard about has been shifted a lot of ways so that our expectations from one perspective may belower but the actually from another perspective much more holistic. Much smarter
in the long term. So that’s kind of notion number one w
hich is desire. Notionnumber two is ability. So as great as we are, there are some challenges. And I knowyou know what they are. So it is interesting to watch how this generation has I think evolved because we talk a lot about technology about we talk about the great thingsthat have come of that we a
ll know there’s an underside to that entire conversation
right. It is very difficult for this generation to communicate a lot of the time, and Ifirst realized how this was going to play out a couple years back when the new york times did a blog called the graduates and it was a young journalist at colleges who
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