Words are made to categorize reality so that we can be better at handling it.

For a traditional person there is snow, when you ski, you may have 3 snow words: powder, ice, and compacted. For an eskimo there are over 50 words for snow.

If I am about to ski and I ask you “How is it?” and you say, “There is snow”, that would not be very useful.

If an eskimo asks me about the snow and I tell them “It is powder.”, that is probably not very useful for them.

Similarly, if I ask you to give me a red and a green apple, you should know what to do.

This works when colors are distinct, but if I ask 2 people to draw lines on a rainbow where red becomes orange and orange becomes yellow, we are likely not to have the lines at the same place.  In this case the categories or words are only approximate.  Most of us will agree on purely red, yellow and orange, but much debate can happen in between, so words or concepts and their effectiveness becomes contextual.

I guess you get the idea, in life and business it is the same, we come with categories and try to capture the reality in order to deal with it more efficiently.    

Today we hear a lot about generations, GenX, Millennials,... even though it is a categorization that is far from perfect, it can be useful for marketer or HR people when they are considering retention or recruiting strategies.

That is what we are going to discuss with an expert on generations, Melissa Lavigne-Delville during a webinar on "How to Keep and Attract Millennials", June 6th at 11 AM PST.

Register here.