Interesting article from Neil Howe. I got 9 out of 11 right on the quiz and I haven’t had a puppy in 30 years. His description of Gen X as young workers fits me to the tee. When I went into the workforce I just wanted to get the job done with no nonsense. Then I wanted to go home and play basketball or go out drinking with my friends. I required no feedback. I knew if I was doing a good job. I was self motivated. I didn’t need mission statements and rah rah HR bullshit. I still don’t.
There are quite a few Millenial workers in my office. They are all motivated and intelligent, but they do need a lot of mentoring, guidance, and hands on managing. These puppies will ultimately succeed or fail in leading this country through this Fourth Turning. Mentor them well Xers and Boomers.
Managing Millennials… or Breaking in Puppies?
OK, prepare for a totally derivative post. To understand it, you need to go to mentalfloss.com and take this quiz.
It all revolves around the following question: Do you know the difference between managing Millennials and raising puppies? Are you sure? Most of the people I know who have taken this test get at least a couple of the questions wrong.
I had to laugh when I took the quiz myself. When I talk to audiences about Millennials in the workplace–these are often audiences full of Xers and Boomers–I admit to them straight up: This is a high-maintenance generation. They like to think of themselves as VIPs, no question. They demand lots of structure, feedback, moral support, mentoring, and some sort of deep connection with the organization they work for. You need to offer all of the above if you want the best of them to stick around.
It’s work–a great deal more work than the “low-swet” Xers who came along before them. In many ways I really miss young Xers. Their day-one attitude toward their employers was simple: You don’t ask much of us and we won’t ask much of you: Let’s just all get what needs to get done quickly and efficiently, so we can all go home. I don’t think young Xers were ever puppies. They seemed pretty “broken in” before they ever showed up at their first career job.
Yet here’s what’s really interesting: The puppiness we see in these first-wave employed Millennials is going to become a lot more exaggerated by the time we meet the Xers’ own late-wave Millennial children when they show up en masse in the workplace starting around five years from now. Why? Because these Xers are raising their own kids with behavioral handbooks that actually do resemble puppy-care guides. Many Xer parents look at Cesar Milan’s “Dog Whisperers” for tips on how to be the alpha-dog in their family. I first started writing about the new behavioralism in Xer parenting on this site a couple of years ago. Here is an excerpt from that post:
…A lot of Boomers really wanted to change society with the way they raised their kids. And in trying to do that, they believed all that mattered was the intensity and quality of their relationship with their child and the correctness of the values they taught them.
With Xer guides, everything has changed. Xer guides are much more prescriptive, full of do’s and don’t’s, and much less attitudinal. Many of the Boomer guides looked a bit like the Whole Earth Catalogue: It showed how raising children was part of a whole world view. To Xers, hey, child rearing is just like any other technique or business–there must be a good way and a bad way to get the job done. I want to do it the good way.
Xer guides are much more scientific in the sense that the authors need to show that there’s empirical evidence favoring one way over another. Skeptical Xers don’t take advice on pure faith. Amazingly, Boomer guides rarely talked about evidence: We just “knew” e.g. that Lamaze just *must* be a vastly superior way to give birth. Just look at those Hopi designs on the book cover! (btw, I’m a big supporter of Lamaze; I just acknowledge that it was never sold to us as an evidence-based practice.)
As I’ve mentioned, Xer guides are putting a lot more stress on behavioral techniques. Dog whispering is, admittedly, an extreme example. But apt. As in so many other things, Gen-Xers know how to take their own ego out of the equation, which is what behavioral parenting requires. The whole behavioral point of view is very Xer in that it looks at the human condition as a matter of external conditioning and adaptation–a useful antidote to the endless Boomer fixation on interior motives and values.
Here is a story I hear all the time from Boomer and Silent Generation grandparents who have Xer children. When the Xers drop off their grandkids with their grandparents–en route, perhaps, to a rare vacation alone–they typically include a list of “do’s and dont’s” and a strict schedule regarding their kids. The grandparents express surprise, “A list? Why do we need a list? After all, we raised you.” To which the Xers rejoin, “Yeah, mom/dad, that’s why we’re including the list.”
I’m a Milennial and I’ve noticed a lot of my generation has the entitled attitude. Most of us were raised by Boomers and never really experienced much struggle such as prior generations have. This has certainly influenced my generation. I think humans naturally expect a better and brighter future so when your past hasn’t been a struggle, the transition can be ugly.The global financial crisis is going to change my generation and future generations.
Boomers are spoiled rotten self-centered live-beyond-your-means gimme gimme gimme-more-credit fat slobs, and they raised kids that are just as bad or worse. No morals, no ethics, no guilt or shame, fat brain-fucked dipshits just like their parents.
Gen-X has had to clean up after their (boomer) messes their whole lives. X’ers are the real deal. Boomers are delusional parasites, which pretty well describes their offspring. X’er kids will kick the shit out of boomer spawn and will restore this country. Gen X has always been realists, hard working, and never felt entitled to everything like the boomers. Boomer spawn can’t find their ass or a toilet without their iphone and a “find the shitter” app.
What would we do without historians and moral philosophers? (excuse the c&p but there’s more even):
I found myself mulling over a discussion in our class in History and Moral Philosophy. Mr. Dubois was talking about the disorders that preceded the breakup of the North American republic, back in the 20th century. According to him, there was a time just before they went down the drain when such crimes as murder were as common as dogfights. The Terror had not been just in North America — Russia and the British Isles had it, too, as well as other places. But it reached its peak in North America shortly before things went to pieces.
“Law-abiding people,” Dubois had told us, “hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, home-made guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed. This went on for years, right up to the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony. Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places — these things happened also on the streets in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings. But parks were so notoriously unsafe that honest people stayed clear of them after dark.”
I had tried to imagine such things happening in our schools, I simply couldn’t. Nor in our parks. A park was a place for fun, not for getting hurt. As for getting killed in one —
“Mr. Dubois, didn’t they have police? Or courts?”
“They had many more police than we have. And more courts. All overworked.”
“I guess I don’t get it.” If a boy in our city had done anything half that bad … well, he and his father would have been flogged side by side. But such things just didn’t happen.
Mr. Dubois then demanded of me, “Define a ‘juvenile delinquent.'”
“Uh, one of those kids — the ones who used to beat up people.”
“Wrong.”
“Huh? But the book said — ”
“My apologies. Your textbook does so state. But calling a tail a leg does not make the name fit. ‘Juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms, one which gives a clue to their problem and their failure to solve it. Have you ever raised a puppy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you housebreak him?”
“Err … yes, sir. Eventually.” It was my slowness in this that caused my mother to rule that dogs must stay out of the house.
“Ah, yes. When your puppy made mistakes, were you angry?”
“What? Why, he didn’t know any better; he was just a puppy.”
“What did you do?”
“Why, I scolded him and rubbed his nose in it and paddled him.”
“Surely he could not understand your words?”
“No, but he could tell I was sore at him!”
“But you just said that you were not angry.”
Mr. Dubois had an infuriating way of getting a person mixed up, “No, but I had to make him think I was. He had to learn, didn’t he?”
“Conceded. But, having made it clear to him that you disapproved, how could you be so cruel as to spank him as well? You said the poor beastie didn’t know that he was doing wrong. Yet you inflicted pain. Justify yourself! Or are you a sadist?”
I didn’t then know what a sadist was — but I know pups. “Mr. Dubois, you have to! You scold him so that he knows he’s in trouble, you rub his nose in it so that he will know what trouble you mean, you paddle him so that he darn well won’t do it again — and you have to do it right away! It doesn’t do a bit of good to punish him later; you’ll just confuse him. Even so, he won’t learn from one lesson, so you watch and catch him again and paddle him still harder. Pretty soon he learns. But it’s a waste of breath just to scold him.” Then I added, “I guess you’ve never raised pups.”
-Robert A. Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”
There’s a lot I’m not pasting about crime, delinquency and punishment… I jump to the puppy theme:
He had singled me out again. “Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house … and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken — whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. Comment, please?”
“Why … that’s the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!”
“I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?”
“Uh … why, mine, I guess.”
“Again I agree. But I’m not guessing.”
“Mr. Dubois,” a girl blurted out, “but why? Why didn’t they spank little kids when they needed it and use a good dose of the strap on any older ones who deserved it — the sort of lesson they wouldn’t forget! I mean ones who did things really bad. Why not?”
“I don’t know,” he had answered grimly, “except that the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’ It was too simple for them, apparently, since anybody could do it, using only the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy. I have sometimes wondered if they cherished a vested interest in disorder — but that is unlikely; adults almost always act from conscious ‘highest motives’ no matter what their behavior.”
-Robert A Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”
(So whose fault is it that our children and society aren’t exactly fitting an acceptable mold? I find the “vested interest in disorder” a not-so-crazy question, though)
Boomers are spoiled rotten self-centered live-beyond-your-means gimme gimme gimme-more-credit fat slobs, and they raised kids that are just as bad or worse. No morals, no ethics, no guilt or shame, fat brain-fucked dipshits just like their parents. -AWD
You should put that on your office wall. It would do wonders for your business.
Bill:
Did you read the book yet? (4th T)
“Yet here’s what’s really interesting: The puppiness we see in these first-wave employed Millennials is going to become a lot more exaggerated by the time we meet the Xers’ own late-wave Millennial children when they show up en masse in the workplace starting around five years from now. Why? Because these Xers are raising their own kids with behavioral handbooks that actually do resemble puppy-care guides. Many Xer parents look at Cesar Milan’s “Dog Whisperers” for tips on how to be the alpha-dog in their family.”
I read this, above, from the article. Xers are control freaks with a handbook, for the little trainable puppies, wrtitten by some pavlovian professor to make them respond and not think.
And AWD rants against the boomers.
Is it true that “use a rolled up newspaper and provide a gentle but firm smack on the nose” is used in both books?
Do I need to read Krugmans, or Coulters, Cheneys, Pelosi, Condi Rice, Peter Schiff etc etc books to disagree with them?
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Any questions about Mr. Dubois’ class?
History rhymes. Or was Heinlein just a psychic channeling when he penned this stuff in the late 50’s?
Mentoring is sorely needed right now. There is NO effect without a cause. Any solutions to the problems we cause that dare to look in the mirror?
My end of Gen X was raised by boomers, not silents. We were latch-key kids. We were moved here and there by parent’s searching for that utopian meaning that existed solely in their heads, externalized almost to the point of disaster. From holy-rollers to drug-riddled ex-dirt-heads, waking up from some shamble of an idea, the pendulum has nowhere to swing but away from that paradigm, for better or worse… Unfortunately the better qualities of the Boomer generation may be the momentary casualty of the phenomenon.
When raised in that fashion, is it any wonder that the Xer parent yearns to care and raise their children in an often micro-managed fashion? Mr. Howe realizes this and consults on the situation…
Linear thinking is rubbish. It’s ignorant.
I will thrash, with ease, those who deny it.
Bill:
You’re probably more in agreement with Mr. Howe than you think.
I agree with most of that article. I guess my shitty upbringing is a blessing nowadays, I much prefer the X-er way of looking at things, even though its not something I can apply in my current position.
Xer jealousy of the boomers never fails to amaze me. 8 out of 10.
I am an Xer, and I always hated that rah-rah bullshit at work (and don’t get me started on “annual reviews”). I just wanted to do my job and go home to other things. I did contract work for ten years, and it was the best. I always thought it was just my personality, I never realized it was a generational thing.
I am a late x’er and the rah-rah shit runs rampant in our office, it comes across as so vapid and artificial. It is the boomer managers trying to get the young millenials excited about running into the proverbial gunfire so they can be rewarded but the managers take credit for the successes and fire the millenials if they fail, very little accountability at the top. I just want to know what is expcted, the deadline and that my paycheck cleared, fuck all that other noise.
@Drtypierat –
That happens to my wife a lot in her current position. She prepares all of the reports and presentations, as well as all of their articles that get published. In return her boss “reviews” it before its submitted, changes a couple of words and somehow manages to leave her name off of things. She gets zero credit, he gets to look good.
Luckily for her, upper management has caught wind of it and is taking the following action:
1) My wife is the top candidate for two positions, both of which are substantial increases in pay. She has her third interview for them both in a week or so.
2) He’s coming under fire. Lately he’s been asking my wife to prepare presentations and documentation showing “his worth to the company, and the community.” Ironic, isn’t it?
Colma says “Linear thinking is rubbish. It’s ignorant.” Very important point, Colma — thank you.
This is a key concept to internalize and apply. Much of life is a series of actions and reactions, ebbs and flows, progressions and regressions that cannot be explained simply as part of a continuing trend. Rather, we have trends, countertrends, trend reversals, and entirely new trends that take off in new directions.
Once you understand this, you will be able to better understand economics, politics and other important things.
TPC, I quit a job over that. I was home sick and our secretary sent me some technical questions regarding a pasteurizer design I had created. I wrote a three page letter to address their concerns and emailed it back. When I returned to the office a few days later, I discovered that the project manager had added one paragraph of bullshit to it, then released it under his name. I was furious.
I never thought much about what group age wise i belong to.I have watched for years as people kept showing uo to drive the big rigs,after they saw how much work it was and all that it took they would quit.Out of fifty new people who go through orientation the company was lucky if one was still with the company six months later.The work ethic has changed over the years.So have people.
Right now a lot of people are showing up at trucking companys since so many job fields
cut back,many college grads.
A lot of people want more out of life than the grind of work.Who dosent desire a better life?
But yes you get out of it what you put in.I didnt take the test.I did like the citizen thing in starship troopers.
I wonder what Millenials think about one important question:
L.A. King’s over New Jersey in 4 or 5?
My thought is 5, but I am an X’er.
From cute puppies to rabid dogs.
I’m sure this will end well for all as soon as the millennials began practice the morals they were never taught….er, but maybe their morals are on the list their genx parents left for them?
http://www.barnhardt.biz/
The hip-hop culture is one of the most satanic, brutal, disgusting collections of human foulness ever seen on earth. When I look back at history and see that men in relatively benign and stable cultures gleefully turned to rape as soon as the Rule of Law disappeared and they knew that they could get away with it, the pangs of dread in the pit of my stomach begin. The hip-hop culture is like a foreign exchange program from hell itself. Those people are so demonically influenced and their humanity so reduced that they are like ravenous animals just waiting behind a grate to be loosed on the populace – and this culture has all been cultivated and brought to its satanic fullness before the hot war even breaks out. When you look at rap music, with its satanic, pornographic lyrics and culture of near-constant animalistic, inhuman sex, and you combine that with the fact that many hip-hop culture men who have spent time in prison are already very comfortable with homosexual sex acts and homosexual rape, you realize that everyone will be a rape target – women, children (including infants) and men. If the Mexican Federales, who were mostly men raised in a far more stable culture than today’s inner-cities, raped nuns without hesitation, then you all need to face and prepare for the reality of the far-worse hell that is coming soon to a subdivision near you.
My family grew up poor and in the projects, none of us live their now.
My brother drives this kids everywhere, new gameboys, new cell phones, new soccer shoes, new karate garb, the list goes on and on…
Yet he has to yell threated, scream and threaten to get them to do homework and housework. Or even to go to school. And schools just push them along…
I have a neighbour whose, maybe 20 -21. Face piercings, big holes in his ears, neck tattoo, brush cut. Wonders why it’s so hard to find work. Kids at my work brag every day about being shitfaced and how much coke they did on the weekend…
Maybe I’m just getting old but kids born in the nineties, are in for a rude awakening (as are we), and parents are gonna have to take care of these kids till their 40 (and maybe after that)…
From a late genx/early millenial who’s lived in NYC from 2005-2011 and had hundreds of genx/millenial friends and acquaintances from around the country – the vast majority of millenials now are just zombie shadows of their boomer parents’ superficial traits: narcissism, shutting off the mind in response to any unwanted thought or stimulus, pointless one-upsmanship, consumerism. They grew up watching TV designed by people with decades of experience programming impressionable minds, and eating a diet that from a historical point of view is entirely experimental. Most of them are not fully formed adult individuals by any rational measure, much as their boomer parents are beginning to revert to some demented, pre-adult state as their ridiculous belief system no longer even remotely explains their surroundings yet they refuse to change their sport, democract/republican, drive to the office send the kids to college concept of reality in any way. The millenials’ picture of reality is completely unbalanced and many of them are emotionally fragile and have problems with alcohol and hard drugs. Most of the intellectually capable millenials, which is a small percentage to begin with, are uncritically doing some pointless jobs in finance or writing code for corporate websites.. we’re totally fucked, and we never had a chance. No one could have formed a real adult human personality under the barrage of bizarre stimuli and ideologies we were exposed to as children..
should also mention – the ‘successful’ millenials I know from college are all poorer than their parents, and 90% of them take multiple prescription drugs, without which they suffer from ‘panic attacks,’ or severe freakouts brought on by a deep feeling of wrongness about their entire lives. I graduated from a good college in Boston MA in ’05 with friends in lib arts, comp sci, and engineering, and not one of my friends has even any plan to buy a house, and only one I know of owns a car.
It’s a slow weekend, so I’ll keep the paste going. If anyone wants to know what it has to do with the post, I say “UNRAVELING”. These quotes from Starship Troopers (THE BOOK!!!! NOT THE MOVIE!!!) are really some of the most thought-provoking and uncanny, and the puppy comparison is too much to resist. I wonder if he’s projecting a future by describing the “lost generation” re-emerged a 100 years later. Why not…
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“I agree. Young lady, the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives), but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry. The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray. You see, they assumed that Man had a moral instinct.”
“Sir? I thought — But he does! I have.”
“No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not — and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind. These unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to acquire any; their experiences did not permit it. What is ‘moral sense’? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do.
“But the instinct to survive,” he had gone on, “can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. Young lady, what you miscalled your ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale. And so on up. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive — and nowhere else! — and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
“We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: ‘Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.’ Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.
“These juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to ‘appeal to their better natures,’ to ‘reach them,’ to ‘spark their moral sense.’ Tosh! They had no ‘better natures’; experience taught them that what they were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; therefore what he did with pleasure and success must be ‘moral.’
“The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’
-Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988 aka GI Generation) in Starship Troopers (1959)
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“An UNRAVELING begins as a society-wide embrace of the liberating cultural forces set loose by the Awakening. People have had their fill of spiritual rebirth, moral protest, and lifestyle experimentation. Content with what they have become individually, they vigorously assert an ethos of pragmatism, self-reliance, laissez faire, and national (or sectional or ethnic) chauvinism. While personal satisfaction is high, public trust ebbs amid a fragmenting culture, harsh debates over values, and weakening civic habits. The sense of guilt (which rewards principle and individuality) reaches its zenith. As moral debates brew, the big public arguments are over ends, not means. Decisive public action becomes very difficult, as community problems are deferred. Eventually, cynical alienation hardens into a brooding pessimism. The approaching specter of public disaster ultimately elicits a mix of paralysis and apathy.”
– Strauss & Howe, The Fourth Turning (1997)
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Are our “puppies” being “raised by wolves”?
Old people pissing and moaning about young people. Some thing never change.
“should also mention – the ‘successful’ millenials I know from college are all poorer than their parents, and 90% of them take multiple prescription drugs” – anon
You know, I’ve noticed this a lot as well. I don’t necessarily think its millenials’ fault though, often times they get hooked on those drugs in elementary/middle/highschool by parents who would rather dope their kids up then actually learn how to parent.
My mom used to have me on such high dosages of ritalin that I would go numb. Quite literally numb. The first weekend I was on the stuff we went on a trail ride. I got tossed from my horse into a patch of nettles and didn’t feel a thing. Later that day I was cleaning some switches for roasting hot dogs and cut my finger to the bone. Again, didn’t feel a thing. I wasn’t happy, or sad or anything. I’d lose track of entire days and not do anything.
Of course, thats just one example. The list goes on and on and on….
That being said its a damned shame people look at those medications as a permanent solution, rather than actually facing down or confronting their problems internally, they medicate and avoid the issue.