There’s a lot of writing these days around the entry of Generation Y into the workforce. We hear how different they are from us older knowledge workers, how much they’re going to shake up offices and organisations, and how much companies need to change to accommodate these messengers from the future. As a recent CBS news broadcast put it, “A new breed of American worker is about to attack everything you hold sacred...”

As I listen to these discussions I’m reminded of a conversation I had a while back with a friend who published magazines. One of his titles was a bridal magazine, which, he said, was the easiest and most lucrative in his portfolio. When I asked why, he said, “Because we just keep republishing the same handful of articles – ‘How to hire a wedding planner’, ‘Dealing with in-laws’,  ‘The most romantic honeymoon destinations’ – over and over. We change the dates and a few details, and they seem as fresh as ever.”

“How the workforce is being shaken up by its youngest members” is another article in this category, though not for bridal mags. I’ve read it about Generation X (my cohort), about the Baby Boomers, and about the generation of GIs returning from World War II. The details change, but the theme remains the same: the new entrants are going to disrupt the existing world of work – a lot and quickly. And organisations need to accommodate them or risk starving themselves of talent and energy.

If all these articles were accurate, we would have witnessed almost non-stop convulsions in the workplace over the past 60 years and seen knowledge work environments that look nothing like they did a few generations ago. But instead we still have org charts that mean something, jobs with narrowly defined responsibilities, promotions, bosses and subordinates, and most of the other long-standing trappings of organisational life.

We also still have office politics and intrigue, careerism, coalitions and rivalries, informal structures and processes, and all the other elements of a dense and hierarchical social system. When I watch Mad Men, I’m always struck by how familiar Sterling Cooper, its fictional early 1960s New York ad agency, seems. There are a lot more women and minorities in today’s American offices, but to my eyes they’re mostly acting the same as their equivalents two and a half generations earlier (albeit with a lot less smoking and drinking).

I absolutely buy that “Millennials” have different technology habits and preferences to us older workers. In short, they consider Enterprise 2.0 the default rather than something scary and weird. But that’s about the biggest difference I see. I think today’s workplaces will change Generation Y more than the reverse. I realise this makes for a less splashy article. Good thing I’m not trying to sell magazines.

• Andrew McAfee is author of the best-seller Enterprise 2.0 and a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He blogs at: blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee and andrewmcafee.org/blog.

Do you agree with Andrew McAfee? Have your say by commenting below. See also this contrasting point of view from Kevin Eyres, European MD of LinkedIn.