Meg Murphy

Advertisers are crazy about the millennial generation. Now top brands have landed on a radical new way to seduce the largest consumer demographic in the modern era. They are subtly leading them into a deep relationship that is as fascinating as it is foreign. And it’s all leveraged by millennials’ aptitude for electronic devices, something that 80 percent of respondents to Bentley University’s PreparedU study said will enable millennials to transform the workplace. Could it also change the global consumer landscape?

Millennials have called it the great problem facing their generation: How to introduce the rest of the world to a technological culture so billions are not left behind? Digital natives want a networked planet — and they are mobilizing to make it happen.

Millennials have heard it all before.

They are technology addicts and would rather fire off illiterate text messages than entertain a deep thought. They are narcissists darting from one virtual stage to the next. They have zero attention span.

Those are only a handful of the unflattering media assessments millennials have been hit with in recent years. There’s plenty more where those came from: show-offs, shameless, and selfie-absorbed, for a start.

Get ready, corporate America. The millennials are coming.

The largest generation in the modern era is arriving in the workforce with a different set of values and the power to shift business culture to meet them. Whether employers believe millennials are lazy entitled narcissists or savvy pragmatic idealists, it’s time to take them seriously. Especially because there are “issues.”

We know the millennial generation is the most racially diverse in American history, but the question is: Do they know it?

Much has been made about their diversity being key to the liberal attitudes characteristic of this younger generation. Politicians have surveyed and courted the non-white youth vote as if it’s a defined political bloc. Millennials’ higher tolerance of other races and groups has been praised as a conscious progressive stance.

NowUKnow examines millennial minds and issues, informed by research data, expert opinion, and reportage about the professional and personal lives of Generation Y.

We are on the brink of a technological revolution that will lean hard on fresh ideas from young start-ups and reward innovative millennials with membership in a small but rising meritocracy.

NowUKnow examines millennial minds and issues, informed by research data, expert opinion, and reportage about the professional and personal lives of Generation Y.

We know the millennial generation is the most liberal in the modern era — but, beyond that, familiar categorizations fail. Frustrated analysts have described millennial politics as a smorgasbord of paradoxes, self-opposing beliefs in constant metamorphosis, or, simply totally incoherent. 

NowUKnow examines millennial minds and issues, informed by research data, expert opinion, and reportage about the professional and personal lives of Generation Y.

Millennials are possibly the most optimistic generation this country has ever known.  

There’s one career strategy that is rarely considered but could prove useful, even pivotal, in the advancement of young women in the workplace.

It is simply this: Stop and find out if women exist in the upper echelons at a given company. Are there any women in the executive suites or on the board of directors? If you can’t find any, watch out.

Let’s not fool ourselves. Qualified women of today are unlikely to find themselves on the board of directors at top companies in Massachusetts. However sad and counterproductive, this is a statistical reality. 

Yet there are reasons to hope for strong and lasting change. Every year, the business world is held accountable and pushed forward by the annual Census of Women Directors and Executive Officers of Massachusetts Public Companies.