Are Millennials Less Decisive?

I attended a Junior Achievement dinner this week honoring the Michiana area's best and brightest. Bill Rancic, entrepreneur, author and winner of the first season's Apprentice, was the speaker. After an entertaining and thoughtful look at his own journey from JA to motivational speaker (with a detour into Donald Trump's empire) he offered that young people today need programs like JA because they are less comfortable making decisions. Fear of 'getting it wrong' causes them to be shy of making decisions at all. Could this be true?

Possibly.

Personal experience suggests that a theory of low decisiveness has some merit. My 14 year old son has instant buyer's remorse each time he purchases a new pair of $90 shoes.

May 1 is the deadline for incoming freshmen to inform their choice of college of their decision. My 17 year old daughter was paralyzed by the fear of 'getting it wrong' even though both of her admitted schools are world class and no wrong decision was possible. She chose GWU at the 11th hour but still has doubts whether Notre Dame might not have been a better choice.

I don't think my kids are unique. Each year I require my sophomore Marketing students to select a publicly traded company that manufactures products to analyze as their semester project. I give them two weeks to make a selection. Most wait until the very end, agonizing over this very simple choice.

Apparently, Bill Rancic and I are not the only ones to ponder this question. Even the American military has its doubts about whether the highly tolerant, tech savvy Millennials have what it takes to command decisively. Booz Allen writes:

"The next generation of soldier: tech savvy, open-minded, multitasking, and perhaps unprepared for command-and-control. (Military of Millennials, 3/10/08) http://www.strategy-business.com/resiliencereport/resilience/rr00056?gko=6681b-4284843-26726738

If true, lack of decisiveness has important implications for marketing, especially for big ticket items like college educations, careers and automobiles. Marketers need to be aware that Millennials will consider every aspect of the decision, and even then have trouble simply deciding. The key will be to make them comfortable enough in the outcome that they can let the alternatives go. Perhaps this explains the popularity of online customization options and automobile 'configurators'; they make it next to impossible to make a wrong choice since you selected each and every detail yourself.