Scenes from the Culture Clash

And if they don't want to--well, they'll have to, because this is our future workforce. Eighty million boomers will retire over the next 25 years, and there are only 46 million gen-Xers. Millennials will dominate the workforce for, oh, the next 70 years.

Stickers, hundreds of them, splatter a conference-room table. They represent Elvis, multiculti Barbie, cell phones, peace signs, disco balls, poodle skirts, even a TV dinner. A bunch of thirty-, forty-, and fiftysomethings have been sent to this room in Sonoma, California, by their companies as they wake up to what happens in the office when the millennials land. This is a three-day seminar led by intergenerational consultant Lynne Lancaster--and another unlikely front in the generational clash. The nostalgic stickers serve as therapy. She asks these reps from health-care companies, banks, law firms, manufacturers, and city governments to plaster the stickers to their name tags to identify every political, social, and pop-culture icon that's influenced who they are today. The point: to understand that what's shaped us as children directly correlates to who we are at work. Know where the millennials are coming from, Lancaster says, and you're that much closer to getting along with them.

After a cathartic exercise in which boomers and gen-Xers role-play the "clash points" they have with millennials (a chance for them to get improvised tongue rings and the word "phat" out of their systems), the silliness ends and the real issues rise to the surface. Cindy Pruitt, a professional development and recruiting manager with the national law firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, shares with disbelief a recent incident in which one of the firm's summer associates broke down in her office after being told his structure on a recent memo was "a little too loose." "They're simply stunned when they get any kind of negative feedback," Pruitt says. "I practically had to walk him off the ledge."

Womble Carlyle, like many companies, is also dealing with an incentive structure and culture that doesn't work for this new generation. Young lawyers were once willing to sacrifice the next 10 years of their lives chained to a desk in the law library, working 100-hour weeks, for the chance to make partner. But increasingly, law-school grads want work-life balance, flexible schedules, and philanthropic work. They couldn't care less about partnership. "The older lawyers think the younger lawyers are lazy," says Kristin Carretta, director of professional development at Womble Carlyle.

Womble Carlyle can't afford to think that way. Top-tier firms all compete for the same elite law-school grads, and Carretta says that it costs firms $400,000 to lose an associate. So this October, Womble formalized a part-time track, in which attorneys can work with supervisors to shape personalized schedules. Carretta tells the group that so far two lawyers have decided to pursue it--but not without lingering resentment from the top. "I think the struggle going forward is opening the eyes of the other generations that it's okay to have a different type of law employee," she says.

A handful of other companies are making profound changes to harness the talents of the new workforce. Deloitte & Touche USA, the accounting and consulting firm with 32,000 U.S. employees, heard from its gen-Y workers that brutal audit schedules, in which teams had to camp out at client companies for weeks or months at a time, seemed superfluous in an age when client records are digitized. They felt they could get the same work done remotely. Deloitte's clients told the firm that they didn't care whether auditors were on-site or not, as long as the quality of the work didn't suffer. After a successful test in its New York office in which employees had the choice to work off-site, Deloitte is rolling the program out nationally over the next 18 months.

Marriott International decided it had to change its approach to training in recognition of millennials' multisensory, rapid-fire style of information consumption. "They have exacerbated the need for brevity--on-demand, short sound bites," says Michelle Lapierre, a baby boomer who helps run Marriott's global salesforce of 415 people across 70 countries. She's now developing bite-size "edutainment" training podcasts so workers can download information to their cell phones, laptops, and iPods as they need it.