Megan Skiendel: June 23rd, Nitin Verma — CEO and founder of InstaAstro, this astrology startup out of Noida — posts on LinkedIn. And the post is about a Gen Z team member who walked up to him and said, 'Hey Nitin, will you join us for a drink?' First name. No 'sir.' No honorific. Just — hey, Nitin.
Miles Ashworth: You look like you've been sitting on this.
Megan Skiendel: I have been sitting on this. Because the rest of his team — his colleagues in the room — reacted with visible shock. Like the intern had committed some kind of offense. And Verma himself, he declined the invitation, but he posted about how it made him feel — wrote that the intern 'did not see a CEO, he saw a person.' That line goes viral across Indian media. Debate everywhere. And honestly, the analogy that comes to mind is: imagine a new employee calling their manager by first name at a family dinner. In some families that's Tuesday. In others, that's a firing offense. The reaction in the room tells you which family you're in.
Miles Ashworth: Sure. But he didn't go.
Megan Skiendel: That's — yeah. That's exactly the part that snagged me.
Miles Ashworth: He found it touching, wrote a very moving post about being seen as a person rather than a title, and then... went home. You see, the post isn't the cultural shift. The post is the announcement that a cultural shift happened to him, briefly, and he observed it from a safe distance.
Miles Ashworth: And now ninety-three percent. Ninety-three percent of India's GCC workforce is Gen Z and millennial — that's from Great Place To Work India. The demographic has already flipped. The hierarchy is numerically outnumbered. And yet the LinkedIn post is written as though this is a charming curiosity Verma stumbled across, rather than the operating reality of every Global Capability Centre in the country.
Megan Skiendel: But publicly validating the intern — on LinkedIn, at scale — that does change something. It shifts the permission set for every junior employee watching.
Miles Ashworth: Permission to what, exactly? He still declined the drinks.
Megan Skiendel: Permission to try. Look, I've watched executives use this move — the public validation — and it does lower the activation energy for the next person who wants to push on formality norms. That's not nothing.
Miles Ashworth: Well, it's not nothing, but it's also not power transfer. Because the colleagues in that room — his older colleagues — reacted with visible shock. That's your honest data point. Not Verma's reflection. The room's shock tells you the dominant operating system is still hierarchical, full stop. One LinkedIn post doesn't rewrite that.
Megan Skiendel: No, and — honestly, that's probably it. The shock is the signal.
Megan Skiendel: The take that's circulating online — the one that's actually gaining traction — is that Gen Z needs to learn professionalism. Hence the etiquette coaches. San Francisco employers, literal etiquette coaches, hired specifically to train Gen Z workers on communication norms. And that framing is wrong in a way that I find almost embarrassing.
Miles Ashworth: Oh, this is the contradiction, isn't it.
Megan Skiendel: You can't — wait, actually you can't simultaneously say Gen Z is inauthentic AND hire coaches to make them perform a completely different protocol. Those two positions cancel each other out. Pick one.
Miles Ashworth: Well, quite. And the same executives calling them 'undisciplined,' 'entitled,' 'lazy' — those are public labels, on record — are also shocked when a first-name drinks invitation crosses their desk. The behavior that reads as authentic enlightenment to Verma on LinkedIn reads as entitlement to the hiring manager writing the performance review. Same behavior. Entirely different power relationship doing the interpreting.
Megan Skiendel: That's the actual contradiction nobody's naming.
Miles Ashworth: The etiquette coach isn't a response to a values shift. It's a correction mechanism dressed as adaptation. The corporation performs openness — Verma posts on LinkedIn, everyone applauds — and simultaneously hires someone to police the very informality being celebrated.
Megan Skiendel: And the colleagues' shock — in that room, in Noida, watching the intern say 'Hey Nitin' — that's not an outlier reaction. That's the dominant operating system announcing itself. The coach-hiring confirms it from the other direction.
Miles Ashworth: Ninety-three percent. That's not a trend to monitor. That's a clock. And the clock is running on the people who are currently — very generously, very publicly — deciding whether to attend drinks. The Gen Z intern who said 'Hey Nitin' will one day be the person getting the invitation. That's not decades away. That's one promotion cycle.
Megan Skiendel: And then what. That's the part I genuinely don't know.
Miles Ashworth: Well, quite. Does he show up?
