Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: How More Is Less (New York: Ecco, 2004).

Throughout the book, quotations from Y’s are from focus groups conducted as part of Re.sults Project YE, Engaging Today’s Young Employees , The Concours Institute (now nGenera), 2007.

My blog, “Across the Ages,” is available at http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/erickson/.

For a broader discussion of issues facing Gen Y’s in other countries and those headed into other job categories, I hope you’ll post your comments and questions on my blog.

Harris Interactive YouthPulse, 2006, http://www.harrisinteractive.com.

“Background on the Millennial Generation,” Young Voter Strategies, a nonpartisan project of the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University, February 2007.

A Global Generation Gap: Adapting to a New World, Pew Research Center, February 24, 2004; Yale Online, www.yaleonline.edu.

Ibid.; ibid.

Year 2030 statistic: Carrie Sturrock, “We’re Living Longer—Is That a Good Thing?” San Francisco Chronicle, March 6, 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/03/06/MNGICHJ8311.DTL; life span of 120 years: Bruce J. Klein, “This Wonderful Lengthening of Lifespan,” The Longevity Meme, January 17, 2003, http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles.

“Life Expectancy at Birth, 65 and 85 Years of Age, by Sex and Race: United States, Selected Years 1900–2003 (LIFEX03a).” National Center for Health Statistics, http://209.217.72.34/aging/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?Reportld=357.

David Brooks, “The Odyssey Years,” New York Times, October 9, 2007; “emerging adulthood” from Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Year 2000 statistic: Brooks, “The Odyssey Years”; today’s: E. Fussell and F. Furstenberg, “The Transition to Adulthood During the 20th Century: Race, Nativity and Gender,” Network on Transitions to Adulthood, 2004, MacArthur Foundation.

U.S. statistic: Nadira A. Hira, “Attracting the Twenty-Something Worker,” Fortune, May 15, 2007; international: Arnett, Emerging Adulthood.

Emily Flynn Vencat, “Narcissists in Neverland,” Newsweek, October 16, 2007.

Data in this paragraph from “Background on the Millennial Generation; “How Young People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, January 8, 2007.

Data in this paragraph from “2006 Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators”; Gary Orfield, ed., Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2004); “Dropouts in California: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis,” Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, research report, 2006.

“Are They Really Ready to Work? Employers’ Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century Workforce,” published jointly by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21 st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management, October 2006.

Cited in Deepak Ramachandran and Paul Artiuch, “Harnessing the Global N-Gen Talent Pool,” New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), July 2007.

Discussion of llTs in India: Anand Giridharadas, “In India’s Higher Education, Few Prizes for 2nd Place,” International Herald Tribune, November 26, 2006, www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/26/news/india.php?page=1; Gen Y potential in rising economies: Ramachandran and Artiuch, “Harnessing the Global N-Gen Talent Pool.”

Diana Farrell and Andrew Grant, “Addressing China’s Looming Talent Shortage,” McKinsey Global Institute, October 2005, www.mckinsey.com/mgi/reports/pdfs/China_talent/ChinaPerspective.pdf.

“The Emerging Global Labor Market, Part II: The Supply of Offshore Talent in Services,” McKinsey Global Institute, June 2005, www.mckinsey.com/mgi/reports/pdfs/emerginggloballabormarket/Part2/MGI_supply_executivesummary.pdf.

Undergraduate figures: “At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust,” New York Times, July 9, 2006; graduate school figures: U.S. Department of Education Mini-digest of Education Statistics 2006.

Brooks, “The Odyssey Years.”

From “Across the Ages,” http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/erickson/.

“2006 Employee Review,” Randstad Work Solutions, 2006.

Greenberg Quinian Rosner/Polimetrix YouthMonitor, Coming of Age in America, Part III, January 2006, 3.

Survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles and cited in Sharon Jayson, “Generation Y Gets Involved,” USA Today, October 23, 2006.

College Explorer Study conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Alloy Media + Marketing, 2002; Jayson, “Generation Y Gets Involved.”

Sheila Kinkade and Christina Macy, Our Time Is Now: Young People Changing the World (New York: Pearson Foundation, 2005), 9.

Both quotations cited in Jayson, “Generation Y Gets Involved.”

Scott Keeter, “Politics and the ‘DotNet’ Generation,” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, May 30, 2006.

The New Employee/Employer Equation, The Concours Group (now nGenera) and Age Wave, 2004.

Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw Hill, 1998); and Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Their Parents, Kaiser Family Foundation Survey, 2006.

“Schools Dial Up New Communications Plans,” eSchool News, May 19, 2006, citing survey by Student Monitor LLC in 2006; “Cellphone-Only Use Growing Among Youths,” USA Today, May 14, 2007, citing research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Schools Dial Up New Communications Plans”; and “Home Truths About Telecoms,” Economist, June 7, 2007, citing research conducted by Stefana Broadbent, an anthropologist at the User Adoption Lab at Swisscom

Jupiter Research, quoted in “Getting Out the (Text) Message,” Investor’s Business Daily, April 20, 2007; and “Teens and Technology,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 27, 2005.

Statistics on Internet use, mobile access, online purchasing, content creation, social networking, and the metaverse from the Pew Internet Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/231/report_display.asp (U.S. data); and John Geraci and Lisa Chen, “Meet the Global New Generation,” report by New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), 2007. Based on a survey fielded using the Harris Poll Online panel from April 5 to May 3, 2007, among 5,935 members of Generation Y, aged sixteen to twenty-nine years, in twelve countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, China, Japan, and India).

Women in the Labor Force: A Databook, 2006 edition, Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS Report 996, 2006.

“Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” New York Times, September 20, 2005; and Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce, “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success,” Harvard Business Review (March 2005): 43–54.

“2005 National Study of Employers: Highlights of Findings,” Families and Work Institute, 2005.

“The First Measured Century: The Other Way of Looking at American History,” host/essayist Ben Wattenberg, Public Broadcasting System, 2000.

D. Baumrind, “Rearing Competent Children,” in William Damon, Child Development Today and Tomorrow (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989), 349–378. The Western reverence for the young that has emerged over the past half-century is not necessarily shared in the East, which tends to revere its older generations. This is an important cultural difference between Y’s reared in Asia and those who grew up in North America and Europe.

Dr. Peter Markiewicz, “Who’s Filling Gen Y’s Shoes?” Brand Channel .com, May 5, 2003, http://www.brandchannel.com/features_effect.asp?pf_id=156. (Quoting research conducted by Applied Research & Consulting LLC.)

Gallup poll cited in “The Good-News Generation,” U.S. News & World Report, November 3, 2003.

Pamela Paul, “The PermaParent Trap,” Psychology Today, September–October 2003, http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20030902-000002&page=1.

Paul, “The PermaParent Trap”; and Re.sults Project YE, Engaging Today’s Young Employees, 2007.

Re.sults Project YE, Engaging Today’s Young Employees: Strategies for the Millennials, The Concours Institute (now nGenera), 2007, 15.

Ben Grill, quoted in “Teen Trends: Inside the Minds of Today’s Teens,” Partnership for a Drug-Free America, http://www.drugfree.org/Parent/Knowing/Teen_Trends; and poll by Experience Inc., quoted in “Attracting the Twenty-something Worker,” CNN Money, May 15, 2007.

Quotation: Nadira A. Hira, “Attracting the Twentysomething Worker,” Fortune, May 15, 2007; survey: Neil Howe and William Strauss, Helicopter Parents in the Workplace, New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), November 2007.

Sharon Jayson, “‘Helicopter’ Parents Cross All Age, Social Lines,” USA Today, April 3, 2007. See also the work of Patricia Somers, an associate professor of education at the University of Texas-Austin, whose analysis is based on more than fifty interviews with officials from ten four-year public universities across the United States.

Statistics: “Parent Involvement in the College Recruiting Process: To What Extent?” CERI Research Brief 2-2007; quote information: Barbara Rose, “Gen Y’s Parents Staying at Helm,” Chicago Tribune, April 23, 2007, http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/chi-0704210029apr23,0,2583512.column?coll=chi-business-hed

“Parent Involvement in the College Recruiting Process,” CERI Research.

Tara Weiss, “Are Parents Killing Their Kids’ Careers?” Forbes.com, November 9, 1996, http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/08/leadership-careersjobs-lead-careers-cx_tw_1109kids.html.

Nadira A. Hira, “You Raised Them, Now Manage Them,” Fortune, May 28, 2007.

“The World Is Your Oyster,” Economist, October 5, 2006.

“Gen Y Shaped, Not Stopped, by Tragedy,” USA Today, April 17, 2007.

“How Young People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics: A Portrait of Generation Next,” The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, January 9, 2007.

Quarterlifecrisis.com survey conducted in 2001 of 153 recent high school graduates, as quoted in Abby Wilner and David Singleton, The Quarterlife Crisis: The N-Gen Transition to Adulthood (Toronto: New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), 2007); Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005). See also A. Robbins and A. Wilner, Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001).

Wilner and Singleton, The Quarterlife Crisis: The N-Gen Transition to Adulthood.

Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Free Press, April 2006).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004).

Quoted in Jeffrey Zaslow, “In Praise of Less Praise,” Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2007.

As cited in Don Tapscott and Bill Gillies, “The 8 N-Gen Norms: Characteristics of a Generation,” New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), February 6, 2007.

Ibid.

Wilner and Singleton, The Quarterlife Crisis: The N-Gen Transition to Adulthood. Based on New Paradigm (now nGenera) Study of the N-Gen, n = 1,750 thirteen- to twenty-year-olds in the United States and Canada, 2006.

As quoted in ibid.

“Generation & Gender in the Workplace,” American Business Collaboration, 2004, Families and Work Institute, http://familiesandwork.org/eproducts/genandgender.pdf.

The drive for additional responsibility appears to be slightly stronger in the Asia Pacific region, where 11 percent of employees are more likely to pursue jobs that provide an opportunity for promotion, compared with 8 percent in North America or 7 percent in Europe. Geraci and Chen, “Meet the Global New Generation,” New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), 2007.

Nadira A. Hira, “Attracting the Twenty-Something Worker,” Fortune, May 15, 2007; “State of the Career Report 2007,” BlessingWhite, 2007.

“State of the Career Report,” BlessingWhite, 2007.

Geraci and Chen, “Meet the Global New Generation.”

Deepak Ramachandran and Paul Artiuch, “Harnessing the Global N-Gen Talent Pool,” New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), July 2007; Eva Kolenko, “Parental Consent,” Fast Company, December 2006/ January 2007, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/111/next-dispatch.html.

Pamela Paul, “The PermaParent Trap,” Psychology Today, September–October 2003, http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20030902-000002&page=1.

“How Young People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, January 8, 2007.

“The $180,000 Diploma,” The Week, May 18, 2007.

Beyond.com, as quoted by Garry Kranz at Workforce.com.

A 2006 survey by Hewitt Associates, as quoted in “Start Young, Retire Early,” CNN Money, March 31, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/28/pf/expert/ask_expert1/index.htm.

Personal interview conducted by author, November 20, 2007.

Global numbers from [add most recent KPMG study as source]; U.S. numbers from Abby Wilner and David Singleton, The Quarterlife Crisis: The N-Gen Transition to Adulthood (Toronto: New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), 2007).

Re.sults Project EMP, Excelling at Employee Engagement, The Concours Group (now nGenera), 2004.

“The Power of Praise and Recognition,” Gallup Management Journal , July 8, 2004, an excerpt from Tom Rath and Donald Clifton, How Full Is Your Bucket? (New York: Gallup Press, 2004).

The notion of flow was developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. See, for example, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: BasicBooks, 1997).

The New Employee/Employer Equation, The Concours Group (now nGenera) and Age Wave, 2004. This research project included a nationwide survey of more than seventy-seven hundred employees conducted in June 2004 by Harris Interactive.

Ryan Healy, “How Gen-Y is Decentralizing Corporate America,” July 17, 2007, Entrepreneurship, employeeevolution.com.

Ken Dychtwald, Tamara J. Erickson, and Robert Morison, Workforce Crisis: How to Avoid the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

Gen Y entrepreneurship discussed in Anastasia Goodstein and Mike Dover, “The Net Generation ‘Dark Side’: Myths and Realities of the Cohort in the Workplace and Marketplace,” New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), 2007. Self-employment discussed in Sharon Jayson, “Gen Y Makes a Mark and Their Imprint Is Entrepreneurship,” USA Today, December 8, 2006.

Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

American Express, OPEN Ages Survey, April 26, 2007.

Quoted in P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham, Breakthroughs! (Amsterdam and San Diego: Pfeiffer, 1994).

A 2002 study of the Inc. 500, as quoted in William D. Bygrave, “The Entrepreneurial Process,” in William D. Bygrave and Andrew Zacharakis, eds., The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship, 3rd edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 4.

American Express, OPEN Ages Survey.

Lindsey Gerdes, “Undergrads’ 25 Most Wanted Employers,” BusinessWeek First Jobs, May 11, 2007.

Harry J. Holzer and Robert I. Lerman, “America’s Forgotten Middle-Skill Jobs,” Workforce Alliance, Washington, DC, November 2007.

Statistics in this section from “Within Reach ... But Out of Synch: The Possibilities and Challenges of Shaping Tomorrow’s Government Workforce,” Council for Excellence in Government and The Gallup Organization, December 5, 2006.

Based on a personal interview conducted by the author on January 31, 2008, and subsequent e-mail correspondence.

Thanks for this observation to Martha Finney, personal conversation with author, March 2007.

Interview conducted by author on February 8, 2008.

Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003), 16.

Unless otherwise noted, quotations in this chapter are from conversations my colleagues and I have had with Gen Y’s who are in the work world about what they like, what they don’t, and what they wish they’d known before they made these choices as part of Re.sults Project YE, Engaging Today’s Young Employees, The Concours Institute (now nGenera), 2007.

Rebecca Ryan, Live First, Work Second: Getting Inside the Head of the Next Generation, (Madison, WI: Next Generation Consulting, 2007); “Attracting the Young, College-Educated to Cities,” CEOs for Cities national meeting, May 11, 2006; U.K.-based workplace consulting firm Croner, as quoted in Garry Kranz, “Employees Want Location, Location, Location,” Workforce Management, August 7, 2007, www.workforce.com.

Company references in this chapter are drawn from BusinessWeek’s “The Best Places to Launch a Career,” surveys in 2006 and 2007, each based on three extensive surveys: of career services directors at U.S. colleges, the employers BusinessWeek identifies as the best for new graduates, and college students themselves.

Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson, “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” Harvard Business Review, November 2007: 100–109.

“Millennials Make their Mark,” Steelcase Inc., 360Steelcase.com, 2006.

CollegeGrad.com.

As quoted in Nadira A. Hira, “You Raised Them, Now Manage Them,” Fortune, May 28, 2007, 38.

“The Baby Bust Hits the Job Market” Fortune, May 27, 1985, 122–135.

“Meeting the Challenges of Tomorrow’s Workplace,” Chief Executive, August–September 2002.

“Population Projections 2004–2050,” Eurostat, press release, April 8, 2005.

Testimony by Edward E. Potter before the Special Committee on Aging, U.S. Senate, September 20, 2004, page 5, cited by The Employment Policy Foundation in Ken Dychtwald, Tamara J. Erickson, and Robert Morison, Workforce Crisis: How to Avoid the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

“The Battle for Brainpower,” The Economist, October 5, 2006, w w w .economist.con/surveys/displayStory.cfm?story_id=7961894.

“The Seventh-Annual Workplace Report: Challenges Facing the American Workplace, Summary of Findings,” Employment Policy Foundation, 2002.

Anne Fisher, “Holding on to Global Talent,” Fortune, October 19, 2005.

Robin Dunbar is “a professor of psychology at Liverpool University, correlated preference for group size with the size of the animal’s brain; the larger the animal’s brain, Dunbar found, the larger the size of the group. The brain limits the size of the biggest group that a human being can handle to 150” (Edward de Bono and Robert Heller, Thinking Managers, http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/management/management-profile.php).

Janet Kornblum, “Meet My 5,000 New Best Pals,” USA Today, September 20, 2006.

Michael Carter, “Digital Youth Research: Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media,” as quoted in Re.sults Project YE, Engaging Today’s Young Employees: Strategies for the Millennials, The Concours Institute (now nGenera), 2007, 8–9.

Lowell L. Bryan, Eric Matson, and Leigh M. Weiss, “Harnessing the Power of Informal Employee Networks,” McKinsey Quarterly 4 (2007): 44–55.

Stephanie Armour, “This Is Job Recruiting?” USA Today, March 26, 2007.

Bruce Stewart and Brendan Peat, “The Wiki Workplace: Leveraging Collaborative Technologies in the Enterprise,” New Paradigm Learning Corporation (now nGenera), July 2007, 6.

National Association of Colleges and Employers 2005 Job Outlook Survey, as quoted in Abby Wilner and David Singleton, The Quarterlife Crisis: The N-Gen Transition to Adulthood (Toronto: New Paradigm Learning Corporation, 2007).

Research by the American Institutes for Research, as quoted in Ben Feller, “Most College Students Are Not Literate Enough,” Associated Press, January 20, 2006.

Based on Barbara Minto, “The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, and Problem Solving,” Minto International, 1996.

This line comes from a verse that I’m particularly fond of:

Lyn Chamberlin, “Being Good Is Not Enough,” July 9, 2007, http://www.employeeevolution.com/archives/author/thebranddame/.

John T. Molloy, Dress for Success (New York: P.H. Wyden, 1975).

Based on work by Chuck Westbrook, “6 Ways to Get Respect Quickly, Despite Your Youth,” August 6, 2007, http://www.employeeevolution.com/archives/2007/08/06/6-ways-to-get-respect-quickly-despite-your-youth/.

“Within Reach ... But Out of Synch,” Gallup Organization and The Council for Excellence in Government, December 5, 2006.

Terry West (director of WorkSpace Futures Research at Steelcase, who was part of a group that recently studied how workers pass on their knowledge and experience, a project sponsored by the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre of the Royal College of Art, London, along with IDEO, DEGW, and Steelcase), as quoted in “Millennials Make Their Mark,” Steelcase Inc., 2006.

Westbrook, “6 Ways to Get Respect Quickly, Despite Your Youth.”

Based on Peter Scott-Morgan, The Unwritten Rules of the Game: Master Them, Shatter Them, and Break Through the Barriers to Organizational Change (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1994); and “Hidden Logic Imperative,” The Concours Group (now nGenera), January 1, 2005.

Ibid; ibid.

Westbrook, “6 Ways to Get Respect Quickly, Despite Your Youth.”

Kerry Patterson et al., Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002).

Lance Armstrong and Sally Jenkins, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (New York: Berkley Books, 2001).