T. Scott Gross - Millennial Rules: How to Connect with the First Digitally Savvy Generation of Consumers and Employees

I t has been a digital day. My digital day started when I punched the keypad (digital) to open the garage door. The digital display on my bike showed 82 degrees, and it was not yet 6:30 a.m. As I rode down the street, I looked toward my grandkids' house and chuckled over the idea that an old-fashioned analog clock would be tough for them to read.

After my ride, I grabbed the newspaper on the way back into the house and couldn't help noticing how few houses in my neighborhood had a newspaper waiting on their front lawn. Not to worry; I could see an upstairs light on in the neighbor's house, a sure sign that Joe was awake and reading the paper online.

Back in my kitchen, I spotted a thank-you note our eighteen-year-old grandson had left on the counter. His neat printing gave away the fact that he is a Millennial. To him and the rest of his demographic cohort, cursive writing is as good as secret code.

As I opened the local paper, I was surprised to see I had been featured in an article on digital seniors. I knew I was digital but never thought of myself as a senior, being just over sixty. Senior is for old people, not me! Still, I realized my grandson didn't wonder what had happened to thermometers filled with shiny but toxic mercury, watches with or without hands, cameras with eight millimeter film, and television sets with vacuum tubes and knobs labeled horizontal hold. Though we are both digitally savvy, his generation doesn't remember any of these things. I shook my head, finished my reading, and spent the rest of the morning in my office surrounded by my digital toys.

Later that day, I drove into town for a city council meeting to review the plans for a new city hall. In spite of our careful planning, I suspected our new structure would be obsolete the day we opened its doors. Several years earlier, we had built our dream house in the Texas hill country. I had prematurely congratulated myself for having the foresight to install category 5 wiring only to discover that the world had gone wireless in the time it took to finish the house. I didn't know what surprises technology would have for our city project, but I was certain there would be something unexpected.

When the architect unveiled the artist's renderings of the new city hall, if you looked closely, you could see that one of the figures walking across the still-imagined campus was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt and a knit cap pulled completely over his ears. I jokingly said to the architect, I see our new city hall campus comes complete with slackers.

Oh, we've got some young people in the art department, he said. I guess they were just having fun.

Well, those young people, just having fun, are about to take over the worldso the rest of us had better figure them out. Don't worry; they are smart and creative, and they seem to have their priorities straight. Best of all, they are amazingly tolerant of old people. (If you're one of them, thanks for that!)

Besides, if you want to fool with them, you can always leave them a note in cursive.

Change is interesting or scary, depending on your personality. It's also inevitable.

My grandmother taught me about change. She died about thirty years before she quit breathing. For the last several decades of her life, she didn't try different food, sample new ideas, or let technology encroach on her life if she could avoid it. For the last thirty years, she only took up space.

The last thing I want is to be seen as an old guy who has stayed too long at the party. So I try to stay on the leading edge rather than play catch up. I try to live by the motto, If you aren't living on the edge, you are taking up too much space. Or, as pilots like to say, Live like your tail is on fire!