If you’re writing off millennials, you’re missing out!

“They are a generation of coddled infants who developed into demanding tyrants.”

This quote sounds a lot like the statements I hear veteran board members make about “those damn millennials.” While the line certainly seems to capture a popular sentiment about Millennials, it wasn’t about them at all. Written in 1968 by Lisa Hammel of the New York Times, the quote actually referred to Baby Boomers. Isn’t it funny that so many board members wind up using the same disparaging words that were used to describe them only a few decades ago? How quickly we forget!

As it turns out, most of the complaints that today’s seasoned leaders have about Millennials stem from the same frustrations that previous generations had with the twentysomethings of their own era. Need more proof? Consider the way Susan Littwin described Boomers in her 1987 book, The Postponed Generation:

 

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