MANAGEMENT SPECIAL ........................... GENERATION FLUX'S SECRET WEAPON (8)

GENERATION FLUX'S SECRET WEAPON (8)

In a world of rapid change and great uncertainty, the greatest competitive advantage of all may be at your very core.

WRITE A NEW FIELD MANUAL

Many women in business may value mission over money, but gender alone will not be the key factor in determining the long-lasting impact of this trend. The young workers of today already embrace mission and meaning.

"Millennials are thinking that there's a double personal-professional bottom line," as Krawcheck puts it. "You've got to make a living, and you want to have an impact. Your work and values have got to be aligned." Millennials don't share the antiestablishment fervor of the '60s-era baby boomers. While 90% of respondents to a Change.org study said they would give up some financial reward in exchange for making a difference in the world, the notion that business can be a vehicle of change and progress seems only to have grown.

This year, the graduating class of the Harvard Business School chose Casey Gerald to be a student speaker at graduation. It was an inspired choice. Gerald's 18-minute speech has been viewed online more than 100,000 times. Sure, he invoked the usual calls to action of the standard graduation speaker, all the language about changing the world and making a difference. But what set his speech apart, aside from its vibrant rhetoric and sincere emotion, was Gerald's embrace of what he called "the new bottom line in business . . . the impact you have on your community and the world around you. No amount of profit could make up for purpose."

As a child, Gerald was abandoned first by his father, and then by his mother. Back then, his mission was simple: survival. Growing up in inner-city Dallas wasn't easy. He and his older sister lived with relatives and friends. "We were like the Boxcar Children--on our own," he says. A few years ago, gun-toting thieves broke into his apartment and threatened to kill him, fleeing only when police sirens sounded nearby.

Gerald stayed positive and eventually made his way to Yale as an undergrad. As was true for so many twentysomethings in recent years, things didn't suddenly get easy after graduation. He had a job lined up at Lehman Brothers, but the firm imploded before he arrived. He tried his hand at a not-for-profit in D.C.; worked on an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in Texas; and explored the New York City startup scene, "living on tuna fish and peanut butter," as he puts it. Understandably, Gerald entered HBS hell-bent on his own financial security. He promised himself that once he'd procured his MBA, he'd avoid startups and not-for-profits.

Yet now, after graduating this May, Gerald and a couple of classmates are running a startup not-for-profit called MBAs Across America. It matches MBAs with local entrepreneurs, in a quest to revitalize American enterprise. So much for Gerald's financial security, at least in the short-term.

"We are trying to write a new field manual for business across America," he says. "It can't be about hierarchy, leaders sitting in the corner office and going to the Hamptons while everyone else is pressing sheet metal. It can't be just pursuing quarterly-earnings considerations. Leaders can't just say, 'Let's do this because it optimizes efficiency.' There's got to be a larger vision of our future and ourselves."

Maybe MBAs Across America will follow the path of so many other student startups and peter out. Maybe Gerald will be recruited away by a higher-prestige, higher-paying opportunity. Harvard's MBA graduates are still predominantly focused on the outside-in world. More than a quarter take jobs in finance, and another quarter go into consulting. But those numbers are down from years past, in a trend that has been accelerating, especially in finance, for a decade. Change is afoot. Go online and take a look at Gerald's commencement speech. Then ask yourself if it seems likely that a young man like Casey Gerald will ever commit himself to an enterprise simply because of the compensation package, as previous generations of star MBAs might have. It seems more likely that he would employ the power of no. And isn't that a good thing?

BY ROBERT SAFIAN