Business Class
After graduation, Fan Bi was thrilled to get his first job at one of the major accounting firms. But a year later, he was gone. The 22-year-old is now CEO of his
own company, Blank Label, an online
custom designer shirt company.
“I wasn’t used to being a really small
worker bee in a tiny cubicle,” says Bi. “I am
definitely a product of my generation.”
Whatever the boundaries, Gen Yers
share certain characteristics. Coming
of age in the “decade of the child” and
raised by “helicopter parents” to believe
in themselves and their abilities, they
Managing Generation Y
They’re young,
they’re hungry, and
they’re coming to a
workplace near you
BY CATHIE GANDEL
are educated, confident, tech-savvy and
consummate multitaskers and have
high expectations of themselves and
others. They want instant gratification
and flexible schedules and they expect
their jobs to fit into their lives, not the
other way around.
“Many older, more-experienced
people in the workplace tell me that this
group is high maintenance,” says Bruce
Tulgan, author of Not Everyone Gets the
Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y.
“High maintenance to hire, high main-
tenance to manage, high maintenance
to develop.”
Still, if managed well, Gen Y can con-
tribute a lot to the workplace, says Jason
Ryan Dorsey, himself a Gen Yer and the
author of Y-Size Your Business: How Gen Y
Employees Can Save You Money and Gro w
Your Business.
“I think the core issue is that the
emergence of Gen Y in the workplace
is going to be an amazing opportunity
or a fast-growing problem, depending
entirely on how companies and managers choose to embrace us,” Dorsey says.
