Virgin on Business: The Next Generation

Are you a millennial? Great! Congratulations! The world
is your oyster (or veggie loaf, if youre not into shellfish).

Everyone wants to hire you, market to you, configure entire cities to meet your every desire. Just a few details to clear up. Born roughly between 1980 and the late 1990s? Check. Heres your list of what you wear, what music you like, what political and social views you hold, the kind of job you want, the sort of housing youll live in, the form of transportation youll be using, your plans for marriage and children…

Whats that? This list doesnt match your preferences and beliefs at all? Too bad. Generational homogenization and stereotyping are how America rolls these days. The baby boomers and Generation X got lists just like this one. So will your successors, whatever well be calling them.

This practice of generational generalizations started with who else? the baby boomers, but at least with them there was some legitimate reason for making sweeping assumptions about who they were, what they were thinking and how they were behaving. There were so many of them. How many schools are we going to need to build to educate the little dears? What can we sell to them?

But as with any trend in American life, the practice of lumping millions of Americans together with nothing more in common than a multiyear range of birth dates into a distinct, well-defined group quickly devolved into an exercise of wretched excess. Generation X found itself denoted with a grab bag of pop-culture references and pop-psychology cliches for a few years. In a case of sociological backdating, those who were trying to do nothing more than survive a depression and win a world war found themselves heralded as the greatest generation.

Now the millennials are under the microscope; since the titles of greatest and loudest/most self-absorbed (the baby boomers) are already claimed, the millennials (who at least had the sense to shrug off the mantle Generation Y) are being measured to see if theyll be a pretty good generation, or at least an adequate one.

So far, what we know is that the millennials want to live in cities, not the suburbs or small towns, arent that interested in owning homes or cars, want to work at tech jobs that are meaningful and interesting, skew leftward politically when they evidence any interest in the subject and live on social media to the exclusion of any other form of information or communication.

Or at least thats what we think we know about one small niche of the millennials, a slice to which Seattle has chosen to market itself. Maybe thats a smart strategy, given the citys attributes and limitations.

But its a risk-intense strategy for broader regions and companies to rely upon, for three reasons.

First, the millennials are not monolithic. No generational group is. Remember that for all their supposed radical leanings, the baby boomers, at the height of their influence on American politics, twice gave Ronald Reagan landslide electoral victories.

Second, generational groups age. Even if what we believe about our local millennials is true today, at least a few may decide in a decade or so that a house in the burbs, complete with spouse, kids and a minivan in the driveway, isnt such a bad way to live.

And third, something newer, shinier and brighter will come along to make the politicians and marketers swoon. Sorry to break it to you, kids, but enjoy your moment in the limelight now. Before long, therell be another generation to replace you. Theres always a next one.

Monthly columnist Bill Virgin is the founder and owner of Northwest Newsletter Group, which publishes Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News.