Why The Next Generation After Millennials Will Be "Builders", Not "Founders"

What’s in a name ?

Well, it seems everything when it comes to trying to name the next generation that follows the Millennials. In March this year, MTV ran a survey across 1,000 children who were born after December 2000 to find the name they most associate with. Of the 544 names including the Navigators, the Regenerators, the Bridge Generation, a winner was announced. The next generation want to be known as The Founders.

But while this is anything but official, and as a society that loves to label everything, we have to carefully consider the connotations and perceptions of what this really means. The best place to start is the generation they’re supposed to succeed: The Millennials

Exactly a year ago on Forbes, Micah Solomon wrote about the 5 key traits that Millennials share between themselves.
Millennials expect technology to simply work
Millennials are a social generation—and they socialise while consuming (and deciding to consume) your products and services
Millennials collaborate and cooperate–with each other and, when possible, with brands
Millennials look for adventure (and whatever comes their way) and crave discovery

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Millennials are passionate about values–including the values of companies they do business with

And this extends into the workplace also, not just as a generation of consumers to target. According to a PwC study, “Millennials want to be able to work in the way that suits them best….Millennials feel constrained by what they see as outdated traditional working practices. 65% said they felt that rigid hierarchies and outdated management styles failed to get the most out of younger recruits and 46% thought that their managers did not always understand the way they use technology in their work.”



What Millennials want from work

Millennials are taking advantage of an existing foundation of technology and advances in workplace culture, and pushing harder for continuing change and disruption across every aspect of their lives. This is echoes in the MTV survey, where MTV President Sean Atkins said to TIME that “…while millennials have disrupted society, it’s this new generation’s job to rebuild it. They have this self-awareness that systems have been broken, but they can’t be the generation that says we’ll break it even more.”

But this new generation to follow the Millennials cannot be Founders. Founders by definition are the ones who will establishe something. But we have plenty of that already. What we need the next generation to be are The Builders; ones who will build on the foundation that the Millennial generation have sought to put in place through disruption.

The best way to predict the future is to build it.

This is a maker generation, a far more pragmatic and practical generation who must architect and build the future we are all trying to imagine living in. The world doesn’t need more foundational layers, it needs a generation to create.