"The premiere shame-based association for scions under 33"

Memes and WhatsApp forwards are the new, crowdsourced court jester, lacing brutal truths with just enough humor to render them palatable. One millennial in the family business world sent me this:

Laugh or cringe at your peril -- decoding millennial interests and concerns is hugely important to wealth managers, private bankers, and client managers competing to retain family accounts amidst intergenerational wealth transfers (as well as the rise of the family office?)

Guilt and shame are not self-indulgent topics, but have been subject to rich sociological expositions, and feature in the plotlines of 96.8% of all literature ever written everywhere. WEF and YPO are powerful machines and so will probably always find ways to maintain relevance, but their stature and popularity will fall if they are seen as too-conspicuously encoding forms of powers that too many next gen millennials find distasteful. And in any case, new networks are already forming that acknowledge, and in some cases even center the guilt and shame of inheritance, rather than brushing guilt and shame aside something to be sorted with one's therapist.

Nexus, a philanthropy/social business/impact investing community (profiled in last fall's FT special issue on family office), seems to do this. So do elements of Peggy Dulany's (née Rockefeller) Synergos/Global Philanthropists Circle (GPC). Nexus and Synergos/GPC foreground meditation, 'consciousness,' and other forms of secular spirituality to acknowledge and then move beyond individual suffering, focusing on how to transform individual privilege into positive community impact.

The comparison with the WEF and YPO--the old guard of networking--is certainly stark.

Which organizations and networks do you/your kids/grandkids/nieces and nephews gravitate toward?

#nextgen #millennials #guilt #meme #YPO #WEF