Ten Workplace Changes Generation Y will demand

Five Steps Toward Building a Better Grocery Store

‘Voluntourism’ and Generation Y: Heart in the Right Place

Five Non-sensical things people do with email

Five Barriers to the Paperless Office

Full Boreout

The Modern Workplace: Creation and Collaboration

Five Rules for PowerPoint presentations that don’t suck

Facebook & Social networking as tools for career success (and there’s no such thing as privacy)

The Summer Job Hunt: Five things you shouldn’t do on your résumé

Eight Reasons Why This is the Smartest Generation

Always Looking for Best Practices Stifles Innovation

We’re not all about money, but money is important

Stop banning facebook at work: multitasking is here to stay

Twitter’s place at work

You want exceptions to be made? Be exceptional

And that approach to blogging is, in itself, demonstrative of the overarching nature of Generation Y. Our approach to living and working is irrevocably tied to the idea that everything we do is tangled up in other people. One of the biggest fundamental shifts in thinking that Y workers bring is that we find it extremely difficult — sometimes impossible — to accept artificial structural restraints. Compartmentalization, departmentalization, and rigid hierarchies are, for us, linked to an old-fashioned way of doing things, wherein everyone erected silos over top their work and held on to whatever it is they’re doing forever tightly, longing to control not only the original creation of that work — whatever it may be — but also the distribution, consumption and even perception of it out there in the world.

That doesn’t work.

We are experiencing now, every day, a shrinking — and, sure,flattening — world. We long ago tore down most of our artificial barriers — whether they’re office walls, foreign languages, fax machines or any kind of ‘protocol’ — to create a new kind of information-based Wild West, where knowledge and talent zips around like spastic insects and we are compelled to work together to capture it. You can use all the buzzwords you want: crowdsourcing, wikinomics, Web 2.0, but the unifying, plain truth of it all is simply this: the future of business is bigger than individuals, it’s bigger than individual businesses, even (though I say that with some cynicism), it’s bigger than individual countries — our new frontier is typified by the global whole.

So, yes, this blog is not about ‘you’ in the strictest sense. As tends to be the case with generalizations, you’ll read things about your generation that make you want to stand up and declare “That’s not me!” And that’s awesome. That’s something to be commended. But there will also be times when you read a generation generalization on this site and are struck by how much that emotion or tendency does apply to the way you live & work. And there’s nothing wrong with that, either.

And so…

We need to see things through a wider lens if we’re to even attempt to understand this new kind of world we’re living in. This blog, of course, isn’t really the best way to do that. I’m not an expert on the issues I’m writing about — I’m not really an expert on anything. What I do hope can happen, though, is that we’ll be about to use this platform as a catalyst to real conversation and analysis. That by providing a spotlight to these issues — and, sure, occasionally mix in my own opinion — we can better understand what it that we, as a generation, are bringing, and how we fit into this larger, and yet smaller, world we continue to live in.

We. Us. Not me. Not you. Thanks for reading.

Photo by anjan58. Licensed under Creative Commons