How many of you have noticed more and more younger folks opting for entrepreneurship over the last 5 years as compared to ever before?  And this number is steadily increasing each year. No longer are cozy corporate jobs the big thing. More and more management graduates out of B-schools are getting frustrated with their corporate jobs, even if it is with a fancy investment bank. More folks are suffering from burn-out and are opting to try their own thing. For many folks reading the articles on this website, your 9-6 jobs are no longer their primary source of income. More and more graduates are looking at getting into their own groove and doing their own thing whether it be photography, fashion design, website design, games development, professional blogging, restaurants and much more.

Now, I’m not the foremost authority on economic patterns, in fact I am no authority on anything. (Or so my grades suggest) but I believe that besides the economy opening up and VCs opening their wallets, what has propelled a lot of youngsters, popularly referred to as Gen Y, to turn to entrepreneurship ventures is the attitude of the older generation (the old men on the board of directors) which refuses to accept and adopt the new restless attitude of the younger generation.

Don’t mistake me for this being a rant on office politics, but instead look at this as a mere observation piece. Allow me to illustrate, the older generation understand that there is this thing called ‘Social Media’ and that it is now a hygiene factor for any corporate entity to be present on facebook, twitter and linkedin and have a corporate blog and wiki running. So the poor chaps in the marketing team fish out a budget to get all of these setup and that’s where the buck stops. Company has a nice Wikipedia page with twiiter updating them about ‘trivial’ corporate matters and that’s about it. Gen X is yet to understand how to capitalize on these tools which Gen Y have more or less understood. Those in Gen Y who have not understood the same have been spending too much time with the older Gen X folks and have pretty much dulled their sense of imagination and have become myopic. Take a ‘wiki’ for example. In a services company, it is important to have all the information about a certain service readily available to everyone. Take something like Ms Exchange 2010 migration. You have a marketing guy, a sales guy, the engineer implementing the migration, the consultant who went for the initial evaluation. And they all need info regarding the entire picture. Rather than each reading up on resources and creating those oh-so-precious ppts with killer animations, it would make sense to have a common repository for people to just pick up information from. But unfortunately, Gen X has no clue on how to capitalize on a wiki and a lot of time is spent waiting on people for email.

Another factor that drives a lot of youth to give up high paying jobs (this is an assessment from general conversation…so I cannot be held in any court of law) is the fact that Gen X still operate most organizations as though they were running a shoe making factory during the industrial revolution. Importance given to hours at work and not quality of the output. More stress on deadlines than having fun. Company before self anf everything else. Most youth today want to have fun and if they’re not having fun, it’s probably not worth doing at all. Most of Gen Y want a Google type work environment where besides deadlines, productivity is given importance and one can sit on bean-bags and take naps in the afternoon after a luscious meal. Now, we all cant work for Google, but we all can strive to make a more employer centric environment. But most of these are dismissed as new fangled ideas and idiosyncrasies of this new IT driven crazy restless generation. My simple argument to all, take a look at Google’s revenues….they must be doing something right.

While a lot of the old school ideas and work ethics still hold good, they need to be changed to meet the needs of the new generation of workers and thought leaders. And this is where a lot of the old school traditional giants fail leading to a high number of youth opting for productive work on their own rather than caged secure job, which is not half as bad a thing. But it is something a lot of the companies would want to seriously think about because most of the guys with fresh ideas who can help churn the old blood running through the veins of any organization are no longer contributing to a company but to their own start-ups, leaving organizations with folks who are all but glad to follow orders rather than challenge the conventional.

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