A lot of nonsense has been written about Generation Y – the cohort of young adults who are supposed to be characterised by their demanding expectations and their insistence on balance in their working life. Nonsense I have read recently includes:

“… Take Tanya…with her strong aspirations, her independence, her proactivity, and her need to achieve fulfilment as well as a good salary…she is typical of the Gen Y-ers born after 1980”

Now hang on a minute, since when was it sensible to describe any generation in this clone like way? Imagine this….

“… Take Henry… with his dutiful loyalty, his conformity, his obedience to organisational norms and his willingness to grind out a career…he is typical of the generation born after 1945”

What about Branson, what about Sugar, what about Roddick?

Since when did the generation you were born into have the power to determine the basic parameters of your personality? Yes, I do know some confident, independent, technically savvy, career minded twentysomethings: but I also know some insecure, lazy, daft ones, just like I do thirtysomethings and fortysomethings. In other words, people who have graduated since – say 2002 – are subject to the same variation in Big 5 personality characteristics as the rest of us; or did I miss some post millennial re-engineering of our brain chemistry? I believe that the most you can say about this cohort is that they were educated and sought jobs at a time when the employment environment was very benign and their expectations high.

Stereotyping a whole cohort of individuals in the way that the ‘Generation Y’ label does is, at best, lazy thinking and at worst an example of the kind of cognitive error that Richard Dawkins calls the ‘discontinuous mind’; characterised by a tendency to lump things together inappropriately and draw hard lines between them. I bet that sometime soon you will see an article called ‘How is Gen Y coping with the credit crunch?’ - as if a whole generation is fated – aspirationally of course – to wander in the employment desert for the next couple of years. Alternatively, expect articles and a new stereotype from the pundits*, describing the disappointed angst filled group whose dreams were brought to dust by sub- prime. The articles will be suspect – based on discontinuous thinking rather than much more relevant individual differences –as suspect as any leader article you have ever read that starts “The youth of today….”!

Yes, we can say goodbye to Generation Y, not because the employment environment no longer suits their psychological ‘DNA’ and thus dooms them to extinction, but mostly because they never existed in the first place.

* I’d place a small wager on a reawakening of the old Prodigy album title ‘The Jilted Generation’ – remember you saw it here first! .