According to preeminent generational scholars William Strauss and Neil Howe, the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1960, are 76 million strong and the largest generation in the history of the United States. Boomers were brought up in the post-war prosperity of the Eisenhower era which placed a strong emphasis on teamwork and highly codified social norms as a way to maintain the “American way of life” in the face of the McCarthy-era threat of Communist intervention. These children grew up as Mouseketeers, watched television instead of the radio, and were raised during the worries of the Korean War and the early Cold War. As they grew, the Boomers retained their ethic of power and solidarity through teamwork but refocused it on what they felt were the overly conservative societal rules of the generations before them. In this sense, Boomers viewed themselves as agents of social change and out of this shift in thinking arose the hippie and civil rights movements. As the Boomers grew into their thirties and watched America change, many traded in their VW Minibus for a traditional family, a desk job and a home in the suburbs. And it is here through their lens of social change and teamwork that they have spent the last 30 years transforming how American business operates, moving from Industrial Revolution-era large corporations to smaller, more nimble companies as seen in the rag-tag, upstart nature of early Silicon Valley.

Coming after the Boomers is Generation-X, who were born between 1961 and 1980 and number around 52 million. These children were raised in an era of great uncertainty, where a post-Watergate America lost faith in the Presidency, Vietnam veterans attempted to reintegrate into a society that seemed to shun them, the Cold War began to come to a close, and AIDS had parents and educators scared for their children. As gender roles loosened and the economy slowed, many Gen-X children had two full-time working parents and were likely raised by a combination of daycare, latch key programs and other family members. Thus many children were left to their own devices for increasing amounts of time and quickly learned a strong self-survival instinct. Gen-X was also the first generation to grow up during the Computer Age, as technologies developed during WWII and the NASA space programs began to make their way into the public sector with the help of Boomer start-ups like Microsoft and Apple. Increased availability of technology combined with lessened supervision saw many Gen-X teens turn towards computer technology as a way to entertain and inform. They embraced pinball and video games, built home computers, and experimented with completely new forms of instrument-less music like electronica and hip-hop – all arts that stressed individual interaction. In short, Gen-X adopted an experimental, do-it-yourself ethos where trial and error trumped social consensus or the instruction manual. In business, this ethos manifested itself in the DotCom Boom of the 90’s, where disruptive technologies and brash start-up companies became the norm.

Managing the Transition