Travis Robertson

Late last week, I received an email from my friend Bobbi Howe. She’s a real estate agent in Saint Joseph, MO, and one of the coolest people I’ve never met in real life. I was introduced to her thanks to my friend Brian Copeland and a webinar I did early in February for the Council of Residential Specialists on The Millennial Revolution.

Bobbi recently moderated a panel called Bridging the Gap (Gen X/Y) at a big event called Sell-a-bration. After the session was over, a gentleman in his 60′s approached her and recounted a story of a female Millennial in his company who told him, “I can learn everything I need to off the internet and you cannot teach me anything.”

Bobbi was curious if I had any resources or research on this seeming arrogance. Given that I hear stories like this so frequently, I thought I’d share with you the same things I shared with her.

Management as we know it is a dead man walking. I believe the future of management isn’t even management as we have it defined today – a type of command-and-control centralization of power and information.

I’ve written on the difference between leadership and management before and was met with a dichotomy of viewpoints – some heartily agreed while others adamantly disapproved with my characterizations of the two styles.

But, the truth is, management is broken. It’s a system designed for a world that no longer exists except in the management books of yesteryear. Don’t get me wrong. Management worked quite successfully for hundreds of years when the bulk of our economy and industry centered around the manufacturing and distribution of product. However, that world no longer exists – at least in the United States (which is where most of my readers reside).

I’ve been speaking a lot lately on Millennials and have an increasing number of engagements lining up for this year which I’m looking forward to.

However, in every audience exists a batch of people who wonder why they should care what Millennials want, think or feel. It’s a fair question that deserves a straight answer.

I know I’ve been a bit silent lately but I’ve been hard at work on some exciting projects. I’ll be announcing more as I can, but in the meantime, I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve revised and updated “The Millennial Revolution” e-book.

If you want to skip all of this and get it, just enter your email address below and I’ll send it out to you.

Last week, I sent out a copy of the e-book to those who downloaded the first version. Now I want to share it with everyone who reads the blog.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a video and I figured since I’m on vacation, I use this as an excuse to not hole up indoors on my computer. If you want to find out about BarCamp Nashville and my sessions, click on the “Read More” link.

The Millennial Revolution is happening whether leaders within organizations choose to acknowledge it or not. In this e-book, you will learn three things that every organization must do if they wish to attract, hire, and retain the best workers of the Millennial generation. It’s all free and you’ll get an MP3 to boot!

Oh…YouTube…and Digg…and Facebook…and anything else that lets me vote. Thank you for teaching us a valuable lesson about Millennials and how to understand my generation.

If you manage or work with Millennials, take a second to look at all of the sites where Millennials spend so much of their time and ask yourself one thing: “Why do they all have some sort of voting or ‘like’ feature?”

Coming off my last week of looking at Millennials in the workplace, I want to tackle the idea of “working for” vs. “working with.” Understanding this concept will be critical to attracting and retaining Millennials.

If you want to attract and retain Millennials, you are going to have to overhaul your company’s culture. Let me just spoil the surprise: almost everything you’re doing right now is repelling them.

When polled, Millennials consistently respond that fiscal motivators don’t matter to them once their basic needs are met. Instead, they place three things above monetary rewards as the most important part of their job.