Grant McCracken on the "Swift Self"
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:36PM Author and anthropologist Grant McCracken had a good line a few months ago on the conventional wisdom about the generational divide: The other day I found myself thinking that every time I hear Millennials described: 1. the tone is that of a smug outsider. 2. the speaker is not a Millennial. I'm a Gen X executive coach who works closely with Millennial students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and Grant's observation serves as a useful reminder of the dangers of over-generalizing, a perspective reinforced by a Millennial commenter on Grant's post: "[W]e have such fine control over our own identities that we don't need to resort to big, poorly-defined memes like generational labels." Points well taken. So with the foreknowledge that I'm getting into a "big, poorly defined meme" here, I want to talk about a concept of Grant's that isn't a generational difference per se but that has implications for Millennials and anyone who works with them. (And I sure hope I don't sound like a smug outsider, so please let me know if I do.)