When Millenials Take Over: An Interview with Maddie Grant

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What compelled you to write this book?

My co-author Jamie Notter and I have been writing and speaking for many years about how social media has been changing how we lead and manage our organizations, not just how we communicate and market to customers - which led to our 2011 book, Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World.

In that book, we spelled out how this was happening - social media pushing organizations to become more decentralized, more authentic, more trustworthy, more collaborative, more generative... And four years later, in 2015, we started to see how the advent of the Millennial generation entering the workforce was going to be a HUGE catalyst for these changes. The oldest Millennials are in their early 30s and are starting to fill management roles - and when that happens, they will not wait around to change organizations in ways that make more sense to them, having grown up in a digital world.

So our new book, When Millennials Take Over, helps companies understand this huge generation--which will be the dominant generation in the workforce for decades to come--and the impact it will have. We specifically explain this disruption in ways that are positive and forward thinking, to combat the current misguided discourse of complaining and negativity around the Millennial generation. 

If you could distill your message down to just one - what would it be?

All generations need to understand each other better and work together to bring our traditional organizations into today's reality, in order to be more successful in the future. 

How can business use this book to assist them in the work that they do?

The book is designed for executives at all levels to better understand Millennials and how to attract, retain and learn from them. The four main chapters are divided into four big themes - Digital, Clear, Fluid and Fast, explains why Millennials care about these capacities, and shows examples of how to build these capacities for your company.

Many of the specific examples in the book lead directly to HR processes and structures - recruitment, onboarding, performance management, and of course anything related to culture are things that can hugely impact the success of an organization and we believe HR has a much bigger and more strategic role to play than we are seeing currently. There are huge opportunities here and the book points to many ways to start. 

Do you have a personal motto that you live by?

Our motto is "proceed until apprehended", coined by Florence Nightingale. The secret about our book is that it was EASY to find many examples of companies doing amazing things - because there are actually many companies experimenting with different ways of working, which are NOT "how we've always done it." We are asked by hundreds of people at middle or lower levels of organizations how they might get started changing things, and we always say just try experiments and show small successes. Nobody can argue with data that shows that small experiments are working.

The more of us that try new things, the more data we can show that proves that positive change is needed--and working.

Maddie Grant, Founding Partner, WorkXOmgrant@workxo.comwww.workxo.com @maddiegrant