Chickonomics Blog

Hello!

It has been a very busy 48 hours in my world. Yesterday I was a featured panelist at the Women in Leadership Summit in San Francisco where I educated HR execs and Boomer and Gen X managers on the Millennial Generation (aka Generation Y) entering the workforce. Lots of female execs attended the panel discussion where I, along with my co-panelists, Rayona Sharpnack and Pamela Whilhem, discussed Emerging Systems in the Workplace. My purpose was to discuss the Millennials and how they are driving changes in work environments…in a really big way.

And with the 60 Minutes segment on Sunday entitled “The Millennials Are Coming”, and feature articles about Millennials in publications like the Wall Street Journal and Fortune, and the number of executives that approached me at the event yesterday about speaking to their management teams, this is a VERY hot topic.

My interest in Millennials spins from the research I did about the new generation of women coming up after Gen X for my book, Chickonomics, coming out in 2008. I have one chapter called “Meet the Millennial Chicks”, and when people found out I was researching them, they started saying that if I wrote an entire book about Millennials they’d want to read it. So, I wrote Millennials Incorporated, and now corporations are hiring me to conduct my seminars about recruiting, managing and retaining them. It’s certainly a bit different from my overall Chickonomics platform, but it’s popular and the women’s conferences are interested in the topic, so I guess it is all working together.

I had released my first edition earlier this summer, but for marketing reasons decided to remove all the Chickonomics branding and change the title to Millennials Incorporated. I also added 3 new chapters, added more info throughout, and got a new publisher. So, you may see the Chickonomics Guide to Millennial Professionals edition floating around on Amazon but it will be removed soon as it is now out of print. The new title is much stronger and less confusing with Chickonomics not involved.

It has been an interesting journey researching the Millennials, and understanding the dynamics between the generations at work. Every time I conduct one of my Millennial seminars for a company (about recruiting, managing and retaining them) I always learn something new from the audience. It’s such an interesting topic, and I’m finding that many people really get into discussing it. The session I did yesterday could have easily turned into 3 hours (it was 1.5 hours) just with everyone in the audience sharing insights and experiences about Millennials that they have experienced so far at work.

I’m being interviewed tomorrow by Human Resource Executive magazine, so I’ll let you know how that goes. And I volunteered to write an article for Diversity Business (.com) magazine because I think that “age discrimination” is now becoming part of the “diversity” mix just as race and gender have been. I moderated a panel at Yahoo a few weeks ago with Millennial women as the panelists and they all said they experience “age discrimination” way more than race or gender discrimination.

I thought that was very interesting. The magazine did, too, so I’ll try to write something somewhat intelligent for them!

It’s sure interesting how life turns & twists! One minute I’m barreling down the Chickonomics path and now I’m on a minor detour (from that book) being a Millennial Expert…there’s the lesson: Go with the flow and be open to anything!

Cheers to Chicks (of all ages)!

Lisa

Millennial Speaking Topics