Who Is Gen Z: The New Rules of Thinking, Living, and Connecting

Generation Z gets described in contradictions. Lazy, yet starting businesses at record rates. Fragile, yet organizing movements and setting workplace boundaries older generations rarely attempted. Addicted to their phones, yet reporting more loneliness than any generation before them. These contradictions are not proof that the stereotypes are simply wrong. They are proof that an outdated vocabulary is being used to describe a genuinely new set of conditions.Who Is Gen Z traces those conditions directly. Drawing on established generational research, this book follows Generation Z from the compressed sequence of technological, economic, and social disruption that shaped its childhood, through the digital habits of mind that disruption produced, into the values, work life, relationships, and civic instincts built on top of it. Each chapter builds on the one before it, moving from how this generation thinks, to how it lives, to how it connects, and finally to where its habits appear to be heading as it moves into positions of real influence.Written for managers navigating a changed workforce, parents making sense of a teenager's world, and members of Generation Z looking for an accurate account of their own experience, this book replaces stereotype with traceable cause and effect. It takes the subject seriously without flattening a generation of hundreds of millions of people into a single description, offering instead a clear, evidence based framework for understanding who Generation Z actually is.