Youth worship will put economy on its knees

The reasons given for venerating ‘tech-savvy’ Generation Y are not new and yet again fail to convince.

Where is work going? In a recent Financial Times supplement entitled Understanding the Culture of Collaboration, London Business School professor Linda Gratton outlines the conventional wisdom. Individualistic competition at work is out, and collaboration is in, she argues, for four reasons.

First, firms are partnering more with other firms. Second, a shift to the knowledge economy has put a premium on innovation, which is a collective enterprise, requiring teamwork and thus respect and trust. Third, Generation Y, aged up to 27, differs from post-war baby-boomers in its fondness for communities and collaboration. Last, new IT has made such fondness something that can be acted on. As Gratton puts it: “You may not be on Facebook or Second Life – but your teenage children certainly are.”

Am I alone in being annoyed by this tendency to berate a philistine older generation for its failure to “get it” about IT? Ever since McKinsey’s pioneering article of 1998, The War for Talent, management gurus have singled out youth as an increasingly precious resource. Today, the obsession with demography continues, but with the rise of Web 2.0, paeans to collaboration, along with hip put-downs of competition, turf wars and all that, have reached a new pitch.

The lack of historical consciousness is striking. People seem unaware that, just as the Cold War was drawing to a close, Gary Hamel and Yves Doz wrote a seminal piece for the Harvard Business Review titled Collaborate with Your Competitors – and Win. Nobody can remember Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff’s Co-opetition (1996), at the time a highly rated text. Today, it’s enough endlessly to repeat the words “culture” and “behaviours” for every reader over 40 to believe that he’s history – a macho head-banger at work, whose social-Darwinist, survival-of-the-fittest attitudes are just so last-century.

I don’t buy it. With the exception of Managing the Talent Crisis in Global Manufacturing, a useful study by Deloitte, the willingness to indulge youth is immense. Older members of the workforce have experience, we are told, but it’s younger ones whom we must adapt to – not least by providing them with sexy bits of IT, as well as alluring workplace design.

Worse, it’s forgotten that today’s corporate trend toward partnership often marks a desire to outsource innovation rather than do it yourself. Similarly, expenditures on R&D as a proportion of GDP have, since 2000, stagnated throughout the OECD area.

These are the reasons why we hear so much about how youth is wonderful, and about how the big questions at work are now all to do with empathy and “face time”.