Hope - For Tomorrow

 

We found that more than half of them believe that in the future business will have a greater impact than anyone else in solving society's biggest challenges.  And 86% of them believe business will have at least as much potential as government to meet society's challenges.  Clearly, taken as a whole, millenials do not see business as a waste.

We live in interesting times.

In Canada, a country that's never had much need to be innovative, there's still a strong sentiment on Bay Street and in the natural resource extraction sector that nothing's changed, the way the world works remains the same as it's been for the past age.  For these folk, youth have gotten uppity and need to start developing the skills and expectations that will help them get ahead in the real world.

Meanwhile there are some firms who are bucking the trend and doing things differently - embracing Corporate Social Responsibility not as a PR gimmick but as a core value for their operations.  They want to empower youth, not manage them.  There's also a growing number of idealistic, cause-driven or simply passionate youth going the entrepreneur route, knowing what they want to achieve and not willing to compromise their integrity for old-guard, profit-driven enterprise.

Then there's government, saddled with an increasingly impossible mandate of delivering quality services to everyone, with both everyone and the cost of service expanding exponentially.

Then, of course, there's a festering sentiment of civic unrest slowly building towards critical mass.

I've written about all this before, and will probably do so again, but the threads that will weave the tapestry of tomorrow are being unspooled now.  You just need to look beyond yourself to see them.