Extract

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR.org, cited in Hamilton, 2011), “the make-up of the global workforce is undergoing a seismic shift: ‘In four years Millennials–the people born between 1977 and 1997 – will account for nearly half the employees in the world. In some companies, they already constitute a majority.”’ This shift in society has radically changed the way we do business and organizations need to be in touch and in tune with changing landscapes. It has become more noticeable that the children born in the last two to three decades have been born into a very different world than the world that the Baby Boomers were born into. Changing world events from 1989 such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, symbolizing the end of a decades-long struggle between communism and capitalism, creation of the world wide web in 1990 (opening the Internet to those outside the scientific community and resulting in the Internet becoming the world’s fastest growing communications medium) and other technological changes, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (The List Blog, 2011) and in South Africa the release of Nelson Mandela from jail on 11 February 1990 (Codrington and Grand-Marshall, 2006) have contributed to the radically changed landscape.