Subject: Barron's Online Placement
From: "Merilee Kern" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>, "Condon, Heather - Hoboken" <[email-masked]>, "Raoul Davis" <[email-masked]>, "Tina Wells" <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>, "Merilee Kern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 10:46:14 -0700

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424053111903617204576411783139072772.html

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 | SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011 
Perennial Desire: Success, Millennial Style 
By ROBIN GOLDWYN BLUMENTHAL | 

Boomers' kids don't question authority-but that doesn't mean they aren't competitive or ambitious.

"Millennials," the generation born between 1980 and 2000, want to succeed just as badly as their influential baby-boomer parents, according to several new studies. It's just that they need to be told how.

Baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1963, are known for challenging corporate America; however, they still succeeded in business. But boomers place less importance on complying with authority than do Millennials, claims a recent study presented at the Wharton Business School. Millennials' birth rate of about four million a year, similar to the boomers', has created such competition-especially in this difficult economy-that they've become test-takers and box-checkers.

William Waitzman for Barron's 
Inherited? Millennials are just as ambitious as their boomer parents, but they need guidance. 

"Millennials may want more direction than you think they desire," says Jennifer Deal, author of the study, with the Center for Creative Leadership, and of Retiring the Generation Gap: How Employees Young and Old Can Find Common Ground. 

For the younger generation, "it isn't necessarily about following your bliss. It's about doing what people in authority tell you to," because they dole out the benefits, Deal says. 

Yet Millennials are as ambitious as boomers, and are putting their own stamp on the workplace. For one thing, they've made tattoos mainstream at work (much like women wearing pants in the 1970s). Tina Wells, author of Chasing Youth Culture and Getting It Right, notes that unlike any other generation, Millennials are wired into technology, each other and the world. 

One thing remains the same. As author Roger Allen said: "The younger generation's going to grow up and start worrying about the younger generation."

-- Erin E. Arvedlund