Companies and bosses have struggled over the last decade or so learning how to attract, manage and retain millennial workers.

Long before that they had to learn to manage Boomers — the original me generation.

This is a generation, after all, that thinks of itself as “forever young,” even as some near 70. Most of all, what came across onscreen as well as in Greenfield-Sanders’ portraits was an unapologetic affirmation of the essential Boomer mantra—yes, it is still all about ME.

Then came Gen X, the supposed slackers who are now running things.

For a small, and supposedly lost, generation, Gen X’ers have found their way to positions of power. (…)Gen X’ers, incidentally, are among the most highly educated generation in the U.S.: 35% have college degrees vs. 19% of Millennials.

We all know that everything moves faster these days — whether products, attitudes — or generations.

So, without more ado, meet Generation Z, which encompasses those born between 1995 and the early 2000s.

They present a new challenge to bosses, especially since they bear little resemblance to Millennials.

The question for most bosses and bosses-to-be is this: having finally wrapped their heads around Millennial dos and don’ts is it worth the effort to add Gen Z to the repertoire?

Unequivocally yes.

Actually, you don’t have much choice, since there are 79 million (and counting) of them.

Image credit: Kathryn Yengel

Summer time and the living is easy—but the thought of a date makes some people queasy…

People may date all year long, but there is something about summer that especially leads to thoughts of romance—or at least lust. Maybe it’s all those partially unclothed bodies…

Twenty and thirty-somethings aren’t hesitant to try new stuff and seem to love tech-driven solutions to the age old problem of finding love, think match.com, eHarmony and others.

Now there’s a new wrinkle in the dating scene.

“…a raft of newfangled dating tools are striving to better bridge the gap between online and real-world romance.

Some companies offer a combination of flirty calling cards and Web pages. Others operate dating applications that use the global positioning systems in cell phones to help local singles find one another.”

Then there is the all-important first date, because what you suggest tells more about you than all the studied (or drunken) prose you post, email or text.

7,000 of the four million single people in New York City have proposed first date on a new site called HowAboutWe.com and crunching them has yielded interesting insight.

New data from a Web site suggests that not only do many people plan similar dates, but like lemmings, they also collectively migrate from one theme to the next.

Gee, sounds a lot like high school.

All this is great fun, but the problems start when you and your new love/lust/friends start sharing all that fun online, because what you post today will be there forever. I was warning about this back in 2006, but not with the authority of Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University. His article is worth reading because what you post could cost you your future as it already has for others—and, no, I’m not being an alarmist.

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.

Read the article, then think at least five times about what you choose to give immortality.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/

I received a call from a reader, I’ll call him Doug, (I love calls, you may reach me at 866.335.8054, 9 AM to11 PM Pacific time.) who wanted to know why I kept harping on the need for long-term this and long-term that. He said that he’s 26 and part of “the online generation” and used to “instant gratification.”

We talked for quite awhile and I found him to be intelligent, well-spoken and, in his own way despite what he said, thoughtful—but also impatient.

Influencing others is always stressed as a major trait of leadership—maybe the most important trait. But to lead on any level requires an understanding of the larger picture, along with strategic understanding of what’s coming down the road.

Neither one of those offers much instant anything.

I’m not saying Doug speaks for his entire generation, but in a post last summer I linked to several books and articles discussing changes occurring in brain functions as a result of the digital world.

One of the links is to an essay in the Atlantic Monthly by author Nicholas Carr in which he says, “the net is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation”. He cited other high-powered thinkers and online commentators: what if the way I THINK has changed? asked one. “I’ve lost the capacity to read War and Peace any more,” said another, whose current best effort was to stay with a three or four-paragraph weblog entry.”

Another article talks about Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of a new book, iBrain, “who cites a Stanford University study that for every hour a person spends on a computer, personal interaction with others drops by 30 minutes.

“With the weakening of the brain’s neural circuitry controlling human contact,” Dr. Small writes, “our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss, subtle, non-verbal messages.”

You can think of it along the scale of Asperger’s syndrome, which is a mild form of it, where there’s not social connectiveness and difficulties with eye contact.”

And this isn’t just about the so-called digital generation, “Scans of the more practised internet users [55-78] during those search tasks showed increased activity in the front of the brain, where reasoning, complex decision-making, short-term memory and the processing of sensations and thoughts all originate. … Within five days though, the digital newcomers were showing the same neural activity.”

Along with greed, is it possible that this new style brain affected the people who ran the banks, hedge funds, and other businesses that played fast and loose with your money?

How will these new brains lead as they move into the workforce and the world?

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: sxc.hu