Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation Is Remaking America

8. Confronting Corporate Life

138 Chapter 8 Confronting Corporate Life One of the more popular sitcoms of the past decade is The Office, a running satire on the pain and surreal nature of working in the world of corporate cubicles and hierarchy. Mining the same rich vein of the humor-of-the-absurd portrayed in the cartoon strip Dilbert, the show constantly reminds its viewers how unpleasant it is to have what you do and how you do it determined by either fools who outrank you or peers who dislike you. One character in the show, Jim Halpert, captured the desperation of today’s workplace this way: “This is just a job. . . . If this were my career, I’d have to throw myself in front of a train” (Murray 2010). There are, however, distinctions among generations in their reactions to the show’s portrayal of office life. Many Boomers laugh at scenes from a work environment they know all too well, without recognizing their own images in the generational stereotype of self-important blather from the clueless boss who supplies the comedic dynamic for the show. Generation Xers use the show as an emotional cathartic to help them deal with the frustrations of their daily existence. Millennials laugh at the quaint beings working in cubicles, certain that they will never be forced into such a life and if, unfortunately, they are, confident that they somehow can change its culture in ways that will benefit everyone. But the fundamental truth for all generations is that an office is not a place where most people want to work. Fewer than half of employees surveyed in 2009 were happy in their jobs, the lowest level in twentytwo years. Millennials were the least happy, with only 36 percent expressing satisfaction with their jobs. This was the lowest level of job satisfaction among workers under twenty-five years old since 1987 (Hsu 2010). When an institution reaches that level of disrepute, its days are numbered. Creative Destruction in the Workplace Julian Simon’s controversial idea that more people, and therefore growth, were an asset, not a liability, to a country’s economy made him one of the most famous American libertarian economists. He began his career as a cost accountant for the Prudential Insurance Company shortly after getting his degree in experimental psychology from Harvard in 1953. In his autobiography, A Life against the Grain, he describes the working conditions he encountered in his first day on the job. Work in the office began promptly with the ringing of a bell at 8:30 AM. Each clerk was given pen and paper and assigned to check individual expenditures in a ledger, which was audited and inspected by a boss sitting in the front of a football-field-sized room filled with rows of identical desks. At precisely 10:17 AM the bell rang for mid-morning coffee break, which ended with the ringing of another bell at 10:32 AM. At noon, the bell announced a forty-five-minute lunch break. After another fifteenminute break for afternoon coffee, the day ended with a final bell at 5 PM, and everyone went home. The environment was so bizarre, Simon quit before the week was over (Simon 2003). But Prudential was very typical of corporations in the 1950s, almost all of which were run by former military commanders who had no model of how to organize large-scale work other than a drill-sergeant-inspired, top-down approach. Part of the Baby Boomer rebellion against GI Generation institutions was directed at this stultifying corporate environment. Those protests led to modern office designs that provided more personalized, semi-enclosed spaces for workers and offices with walls and windows for bosses. But the overall command-and-control approach to organizing work, introduced by America’s last civic generation, remains all too familiar today. Millennials are determined to change the world of work once and for all. They want to create economic entities whose products or services reflect their generation’s values and whose work environments generate energy and excitement among employees who, in turn, feel a sense of ownership and commitment to achieving an organization’s goals. Successfully creating a new and better way to work is the key to America’s economic success in the Millennial era. As Rob Shapiro, economic advisor to businesses, governments, and nonprofits, wrote in his Confronting Corporate Life 139 book Futurecast, “The most prosperous advanced...