Richard Connor: Millennials – moving fast in a high-speed world

Cash is probably still king but speed is tied – or might be the new king.

Everything we do is at warp speed.

On June 21, the Business Press hosted its monthly Business for Breakfast series, which regularly draws a crowd of over 100 persons. The topic was finding, hiring, and working with millennials, a group generally defined as having been born between the years 1981 and 2001 or 2004.

I cannot find an explanation of why the “ending” year differs from source to source.

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Maybe millennials can’t count?

There I go making a sweeping generalization.

The difficulty in pinning down the millennial generation’s years of origin, it turns out, might help explain a key point emphasized by the experts on our panel: Millennials, as individuals and as a group, are difficult to categorize.

They are a fast group, though, and thrive on immediacy, in communication and in their interaction with one another. Texting and social media such as Snapchat dominate.

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My 16-year-old daughter was born in 2000 and therefore makes the cut. Last week she took down her Facebook account because it’s irrelevant and, she said, “stupid.”

Her impatience with Facebook is understandable. It is a medium frequented by baby boomers – folks born between 1946 and 1964 – who can’t resist the urge to bore their friends with detailed accounts of where they are eating dinner and what they are eating.

I am a baby boomer – or at least I thought I was until I heard the experts discuss some of the defining characteristics of millennials. Highlights for me were learning that millennials are strongly inclined to take jobs in a “purpose-driven” work environment, that they will work long days and seven days a week if necessary, and that they expect to be heard and taken seriously at work.

“They would rather take a job with purpose for $40,000 a year than one for $100,000 year in a company that is not clearly purpose-driven,” said one panelist.

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They want their work to “matter,” and they want to be directly involved in decision-making.

They are not likely to either know or care how the Texas Rangers are faring this year – or any year, for that matter. Only 18 percent are interested in baseball, said a panelist.

Another said that millennials detest a highly structured work environment, viewing it as autocratic.

Those two nuggets proved to me I might be a millennial, in spirit if not by way of chronology. I love most sports but have no interest in baseball (until the World Series, anyway). Our workplace, I pointed out, is unstructured to the point of anarchy.

While process and structure are necessary in any workplace, today’s world moves at such speed that we need to be constantly evolving. Too many rules and slavish deference to tradition slow things down – which is probably why millennials don’t like baseball. Slowest game on earth.

Think about this.

On June 14, the world was frozen by the story of a man with a rifle who attempted to assassinate Republican congressmen practicing for a baseball game. The story dominated all media for 24 to 36 hours, but then life put the pedal to the floorboard and moved on to the next big headline.

A week later the event was almost forgotten. It’s true. We are moving that fast, or even faster. When the time comes to reflect on technology and the internet and mobile phones and texting and to ponder the enormous control these innovations exert over mankind, I wonder what historians and anthropologists will make of it all.

Has the speed we’ve brought to our lives enhanced, enriched, and emboldened us or has it made us mindless servants of technology, leaving us with no time to find the life balance often attributed to millennials?

Many years ago, when computers were first replacing typewriters in newsrooms, I worked with a reporter, a fellow boomer, who grew frustrated trying to learn how to operate his new machine. One day he jumped up from his seat and screamed: “I will not be a slave to technology.”

With that, he stormed out the door and ventured deep into the woods to become a lumberjack. There he stayed for several years. His company dropped food to him by air and literally lifted him out of the woods once a month to go to town.

I often think of him and would love to know how it all worked out. I might even like to join him, but I have no idea where he is.

I’d text him if I could.

Richard Connor is president and publisher of the Fort Worth Business Press. Contact him at rconnor@bizpress.net