So what’s it like to have a boss who’s half your age?
That’s the situation JACKIE ANNESLEY found herself in when she lost her job at 54, and joined a tech start-up. The clash of generations that followed was comical – and enlightening
Lunchtime and i’m in an office in north London surrounded by twentysomethings. they’re trying to name the Queen’s four children and it’s not going well. ‘Anne, charles…erm, Andrew?’, says one. ‘Let’s do them in order,’ i say. ‘OK, charles, Anne … Andrew …’ ‘Oh, yeah, eugenie!’ someone chimes in. it is as if edward never existed. i assure them he’s a fully fledged member of the Royal Family, goes by the name of the earl of Wessex and is married to a woman called Sophie who used to be in public relations. i am met with blank faces by the three people who are my new work colleagues.
We stand on diametric sides of a generational gulf, the Baby Boomers and the millennials — those who reached young adulthood in the early 21st century — bookending British society with our vast numbers on either end of the age spectrum.
Perhaps never before has the gap spanning two generations been so wide. Between me and my young colleagues lie 30 years of familiarities and experiences.
When i tell them that at my first newspaper job i used a typewriter and carbon paper, they howl: ‘no way! that can’t be true!’ i refrained from adding that when i was a child, our home phone was made of bakelite. (not that they would have known what that was, anyway.)
the chasm between us means language goes misunderstood and 20th-century social references are simply missed.
in disparate conversations over the past few months, the quote ‘All right, mr Demille, i’m ready for my close-up’, the idiom ‘knit your own lentils’, the song toot Sweet in chitty chitty Bang Bang and the words ‘befuddled’ and ‘commensurate’ have been met with ‘What do you mean?’.
OF cOuRSe, it works both ways. to be honest (or tBh as a millennial would write), i never knew what they were talking about when they’d say: ‘the party was lit’ (meaning the party really took off). So, how did i get here? Last november, i was tipped out of my job as an executive on a Sunday paper to join the ranks of the Great Fired. i faced two choices: to remain in an industry i knew and loved, or transfer my skills into a world completely unknown to me. i recalled a book extract we’d published about Vogue’s formidable editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who was quoted as saying: ‘everyone should be sacked at least once in their career because perfection doesn’t exist.’
Buoyed by her words, i leapt off the print media ship. it was not the easiest of manoeuvres to perform at the age of 54, and i spent a long winter both cheerfully waving and quietly drowning.
As my mother would have said, nobody died. except my selfesteem. And that was on life support by the time i came face to face with Grace Gould, to whom i’d been recommended by a contact, in the lobby of the Landmark London hotel in February. She was 26, glossy-haired, super clever, ex-Apple Retail, a woman with both nike-shod feet firmly in the future. And she wanted me to join her in her new business called Soda, an online reviewer and seller of innovative technology products mostly aimed at women.
i am no mark Zuckerberg but Grace needed a creative director for her brand, and i’d built a reputation for fresh ideas.
A month later i stood staring at a dozen different names on the entry phone at no 23 tileyard Studios, a mini tech hub of cream-bricked angular buildings on the outer reaches of King’s cross, London. it was about as far away from the imposing glass edifices of my former media offices as i could imagine.
upstairs, i shook hands with various friendly millennials in their uniform of jeans and trainers — all part of the lean working machine of the 21st century.
no formal induction day, no security pass. Just plug in your macBook Air, get out your iPhone, grab a coffee, join that meeting and off you go: you’re in business. maybe even one that, five years from now, could be bought for lots of zeros.
in a space the size of the department i used to head up, four companies reside, dealing with everything from video production to social sciences. it was all bleached grey wood, tall plastic plants, unstructured ceilings and neon green and orange-backed chairs.
A jumble of food filled the four window sills near the galley kitchen: teas, Diet coke, Rude health muesli, Dorset cereals granola, popcorn, two dozen eggs and avocados. Berries and total yoghurt sat in the fridge. All of it there to feed the champions of this brave new world.
there were no petty memos to management about purloined food — you just help yourself. the same with the dry shampoo and the deodorant in the loo.
my new working environment was so bereft of the corporate safety nets i’d known, that in the early days i found myself quelling a rising sense of panic.
even the language was foreign, a coded vernacular wreathed in acronyms. On day two i discovered what cRm and Btc stands for (customer relationship management and business to consumer).
i know, i know, what can i say? in my defence, i can only tell you that i’d been deep in Planet Fashion for a few years.
But fast forward six months and what exactly have i learned from this generation born in the eighties and nineties?
THINK BIG … THEN EVEN BIGGER
WiLLiAm StRAuSS and neil howe, the two American authors who coined the term millennial, attribute these core traits to them in their 2000 book millennials Rising: special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured and achieving.
the latter is definitely true. their world is global and the businesssavvy ones think big.
Although sales have exceeded expectations in our pop-up concession in Selfridges, i’m still wor-
rying about Christmas staff. Grace, meanwhile, has already talked to lawyers about our American launch next year.
They all appear more confident and less concerned by traditional pillars of authority than I ever was in my 20s, working my way up the corporate media ladder.
THE WORKING DAY NEVER ENDS
ALTHOUGH they all put in the hours, being physically present is not an essential part of their working life. For them, business can be done from home, at the weekend, or on a train platform en route to a meeting.
When I told them I broke my arm a few years ago and took one day off before going back to my two-hour commute, they looked horrified.
The pressure to succeed equipped them to cope with this peripatetic, free agent lifestyle. Perhaps they saw their own parents’ lives dominated by endless office hours and didn’t want to be like them.
Looking back at the decades I’ve spent at an ugly desk drinking bad tea, perhaps they’ve got a point.
THE PRESSURE CAN GET TOO MUCH
SO WHERE did the pressure come from in their lives?
‘Parents, schools, everyone,’ says Lily, operations director, who was born in 1995. They learnt to push themselves, so now they know they can.
It means they’re equipped to work all night to get something done. ‘I learnt that my body could go through that,’ says Tamar, the engineer, born in ’94.
But the downside of hothousing the Millennials is that almost everyone knew someone who had taken his or her life.
I felt sad for them. I knew no one at school or college who’d committed suicide. No one.
PARENTS DON’T NEED TO BE FRIENDS
ON A happier note, they all seem closer to their parents than we were. When I asked them what their biggest fear was, it was not being made unemployed or something trite like losing their mobile, it was the death of a parent.
Although listen up, Boomers: ‘We don’t want to be friends with our parents.’ What they do want is for their parents to live close, to maybe help with bills, to come up with some sort of inheritance, to feed them now and then, and — in the future — to play a big grandparenting role.
THEY’RE PRUDENT AND RESILIENT
THEY may have grown up participating in sports days where everyone wins a medal, but as a result they have robust selfesteem which seems to translate into general resilience.
Refreshingly, they lack our cynicism. And having worked with drinking, smoking Boomers all my life, they seem more prudent without being boring. Are they happy? Generally, yes. But as with their views on pensions, money, lovers, debt and monogamy, they are cautiously realistic. Incidentally, unpaid internships, even for a few weeks, are frowned upon by the start-up community.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS TOO PC
ONE thing that did surprise me: how politically correct they all are. Eliciting any humour from national stereotyping is
verboten (though they didn’t know what that meant).
We have suppliers in Estonia and I dared write that it was a ‘former Soviet state’.
‘You can’t write that!’ I was told. ‘It’s like saying Germany is a former Nazi state!’
WE’RE MORE ALIKE THAN YOU THINK
THERE are many bridges that traverse our two worlds. These Millennials have taught me that everyone can start again, that leaving corporate life can be a lot of fun, and that Google Drive (a place where you can upload and store your files and pictures) is not so hard to navigate.
Also, that you can be great friends with someone who wasn’t even born the day you got married. They are more socially inclusive than my generation ever was, and seem genuinely to believe age is irrelevant. And that is music to my aged ears!