- First published in the April 2008, Mortgage Solutions magazine
The era in which you were born has an extraordinary effect on your value system, your expectations of the workplace and how you approach life. In this article, Dr Graeme Codrington, one of the world’s leading experts on generational theory, gives an introduction to the concept of the generation gap.
… Continue Reading
I must give The Economist website the credit for this awesome headline. And I must agree with them that John McCain is in trouble. If elected as President later this year, he will be the oldest person ever elected American President. While this should be no factor, since life expectancy has been steadily increasing over the past half century, and McCain is sprightly, healthy and the very model of what today’s elderly can be, there is a problem.
McCain is not a Boomer. The Boomers (born after World War II and into the 1960s) are old and aging (although they will hate to read that bald fact stated so bluntly). They’re now in their mid 40s to mid 60s. But, they feel 25. Or, at least 35! Any decent marketing efforts aimed at them cannot treat them (or show visual images of them) as they are – i.e. over 50, ageing individuals. Marketing efforts aimed at Boomers should think of 35-39 year olds, and use similar images, too.
Americans are not ready for an old President. (There is a website devoted to things that are younger than Mr McCain – including the Golden Gate Bridge, plutonium, Coke-in-a-can, Velcro, 91% of Americans…). Or more specifically stated, Americans are not ready for an old President who is not a Boomer. In 20 years time, they’ll be ready for 70 something President, but not yet.
So, this should be a really fun election to watch. You will have either your first woman, or your first African-American. Or your first septuagint. Which of these is America more ready for. I’m not sure. But I am prepared to put my generational credentials on the line, and say that Boomers and Gen Xers would rather have a Boomer than someone from either the Silent or Veteran generations. So, for my money, on generational theory alone, McCain has no chance. But, then again, who would have thought that Indiana Jones would get another run at his age (actually, Harrison Ford is a Boomer in his 60’s – so maybe there is your answer!!)
I am a huge fan of Eric Chester, an American author, speaker and consultant who focuses on understanding what he calls “Generation Why” (what a cool title!! I wish I had thought of that first). You can see his excellent work at http://www.generationwhy.com.
He has a nice summary of the three generations now in the workplace. The dates on his summary reflect the consensus among American researchers. My own dates (Boomers 1946-1965; Xers 1966 – 1985 and Millennials 1986 – present) reflect more of an international bias, recognising that different countries arte slightly ahead or slightly trailing these median date ranges.
Read Eric’s summary at his website (and spend some time looking around while you are there), or see below.
Springwise recently carried the following report on a new concept targeting the 50+ Baby Boomers, who don’t want to accept they are getting old.
Brain Gymns for Boomers
Our brains resemble our muscles in one key respect: don’t exercise them, and they’re likely to lose strength. Conversely, many experts now believe that brains stimulated in a healthy manner can better resist debilitating mental conditions such as Alzheimer’s. Which begs the question: how to keep brains in top shape?
The solution offered by vibrantBrains, a San Francisco start-up, is to create a workout centre for the brain, patterned after a health club. Instead of exercising muscle groups via a series of circuit-training machines, vibrantBrains members hone their mental skills using a variety of computer software programs and other tools, for a monthly membership fee of USD 60. vibrantBrain’s health-club-for-the-mind approach should appeal to the millions of baby boomers who’ve spent their adult lives regularly visiting gyms. As they approach retirement age, they’ll want to maintain their mental agility, too, as attested by sales of Nintendo’s Brain Age, which sold 10 million copies, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
No doubt we’ll see plenty of additional products and services aimed at enhancing baby boomers’ brain power, joining a long list of companies already selling everything from vitamins to training seminars. Still, vibrantBrain’s model is unique. And from a business standpoint, it has a couple of profit-enhancing advantages over the traditional gyms that it’s based on. Space requirements are minimal compared to health clubs, and entrepreneurs won’t have to lease or buy an expensive array of exercise machines.
If the mental health club idea catches on, the real competition eventually may come from traditional health clubs, which could add brain-exercise routines as easily as they’ve added yoga and martial arts instruction. However, even if that happens, there should be plenty of opportunities for start-ups to differentiate themselves—from rehabilitative clinics for the elderly to centers focused on mental and physical exercises for kids.
Website: www.vibrantbrains.com
A week or so ago, Dean noted that the Tories in the UK were trying to target (or needed to try and target) a younger generation of voters. In the same week, I read an article in The Economist about how British politics was using (or not using) digital communication technologies and Web-based tools. Read it online here, or a summary below.
The internet and politics
Semi-connected
Apr 17th 2008
From The Economist print editionBritish politics is missing out on the potential of new media
EVEN the least fogeyish of politicians have been flummoxed by the internet. Tony Blair, champion of all things modern, paid no end of lip service to the potential of new media as prime minister but was comically technophobic himself. Still, the internet plays a role in huge areas of British public life: party politics, punditry and government itself. But web aficionados lament a yawning gap with America, and with the most go-ahead corners of Europe.
The official websites of the main political parties—Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—get less web traffic than the most popular political blogs, and much less than even the far-right British National Party. No surprise, say cyber enthusiasts; they do a passable job as repositories of information but offer little scope for users to get involved beyond signing up for e-mail distribution lists.
According to The Sunday Telegraph, April 20, 2008, David Cameron, the Conservative Leader is channelling considerable resources into targeting people between the ages of 29 to 40. The Tories see this group of 3 million voters as being key to their success in the 2010 general election.
Research shows this group, often referred to as Generation X, to be a demanding and less forgiving than older generations. The Tories have identified that issues such as housing, transport, the environment, crime, education and the NHS are more relevant to Generation X than tax cutting pledges of the Labour Government. This may be so but David Cameron should well consider the core driving values of this Generation especially as all their literature is aimed at them. Generation X are highly suspicious of marketing especially political marketing and if the Tories want to connect with Generation X they will need to have an in depth understanding of the formative events that shape the attitudes, views and norms of this very dynamic and constantly changing Generation. Our experience shows that research is often already out of date before the ink is dry because once you define Generation X they have an uncanny knack of changing. Understanding their core values will help the Tories to predict these changes and connect with Generation X, a generation that is coming of age and reaching positions of economic and political influence.
To read the full article see The Telegraph
Marketers have long identified that Baby Boomers are attracted to products endorsed by celebrities. Louis Vuitton the French fashion design house has outdone itself with their current “where will life take you” marketing campaign. The list of celebrities is impressive with no less than Stefi Graf & Andre Agasi, Mikhail Gorbechev, Catherine Denevue and Rolling Stone’s guitarist Keith Richards all fronting the face of the campaign! “Countless Emotions…countless journeys” Louis Vuitton also tugs on the emotional heart strings of Boomers living life to the fullest and there is even a hint of nostalgia as all the celebrities are of yesteryear. Great campaign…if you are a boomer! Not sure how many Generation Xers this ad campaign will appeal to but I can’t imagine many and yet I’m sure that as Generation X approaches the heights of their careers (the oldest of the Gen Xers are nearly forty) they would form a large proportion of LV’s target audience.
Have a look at the campaigns micro site by following this link to the Louis Vuitton
site and then click on the LV core values film
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… Continue Reading
The Fast Company magazine of Dec 2007 ran a story that combines some of my favourite topics: young generations, technology and personal finance. It was called “Easy Money”. Read the full story here.
Here is a summary:
Americans under 35 spend 16% more than they earn, on average. College graduates leave school with an average of $20,000 in student loans and almost $3,000 in credit-card debt. This demographic, in sum, is sorely in need of an easy-to-use solution to their ample money woes. “There’s this dull throbbing sense of guilt that we should be doing something, but where do we start?” says recent Stanford grad Ramit Sethi, who draws more than 150,000 readers a month to his blog Iwillteachyoutoberich.com.
In the past six months, a slew of free online services has popped up to answer this question, offering widgets for budgeting, automatic bill pay, mobile alerts, and social networking. All are fighting to be the anti-Quicken. Although Intuit’s venerable personal-finance software commands 70% of the market, its $30 to $100 price tag, hundreds of features, and required hour or two a week of data entry are unlikely to appeal to a generation raised on Halo and diagnosed with ADD. Sure enough, Quicken’s 15 million users have an average age of 47. If personal finance for most folks is like personal hygiene–an unpleasant chore motivated by necessity–Quicken is Old Spice.
Meanwhile, the Axe Bodyspray of personal finance–cool, fresh, and even sexy–is an upstart named Mint. Its unique features, wrapped in an exceedingly clean and appealing design, are winning tech-industry plaudits and brisk traffic. …It signed up more than 40,000 users in the two weeks after launch. So has Mint cracked the code on getting Generation Debt to buckle down and take responsibility for its finances?
This article is an excerpt from Connecting Generations: The Sourcebook by Claire Raines (2002).
For more about the work that Claire and her colleagues do, go to her website.
I get questions every month from businesspeople looking for something about the newest generation of workers. They’d like an updated version of Twentysomething or Beyond Generation X, books I wrote in 1991 and 1996. Along with Bruce Tulgan’s Managing Generation X, they’re the classics on managing and motivating young employees. The thing is, the young employees we were talking about in those three books are well established in the workplace today, and the next generation is showing up with a whole new perspective, a different set of values, a distinctive work ethic. They’re as different from Generation X as they can be. By and large, it’s the Gen-Xers who are managing them, and who are looking for help in understanding just what the Millennials are all about. Thus this article. I think you’ll find a fairly comprehensive treatment of Millennial employees.
Politics in America is hotting up and I’ve been curious to note that with all their charisma and pedigree the Clintons have started falling behind and even though Hillary did rally in New Hampshire primary they still trail Obama. Now I’m not into politics but what did interest me was what John Sviokla had to say on a new post in Harvard Business. He has identified that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama treat their supporters differently. Clinton considers her backers as “customers†while Obama sees his supporters as “membersâ€
For example, Sviokla points out that their two web sites differ radically. On Obama’s you received “points†for each activity you do such as creating a profile, making your profile public, logging in, or befriending a link and you can “climb†this social/political ranking by engaging more–hosting events, linking to others, raising money and many other forms of participation. To anyone in the MySpace/Facebook generation this type of functionality is expected. In contrast, joining the Clinton web site gives you an identification tag like TZ3QQ7, so that any donations can be tracked – sounds just like the old style “frequent purchaser†numbers that everyone from CVS to American Airlines uses.
It’s 40 years later! Prepare yourself for a year (or at least a few weeks) of breathless nostalgia as the Baby Boomers put on their misty eyes and remember back to one of their most defining years as young people (and just when you think it’s over, the 30 year reunion of the “summer of ‘69″ will be upon us next year).
For the record, I wasn’t there. My parents weren’t married yet (although that was becoming less and less of an issue for childbearing in 1968). But, in my studies of generational defining moments, 1968/9 is one of those periods of a few months in which it can be said, “everything changed”. (Probably the most defining such period in recent history was April 1989 to February 1990 – Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall comes down, Perestroika and Mandela’s release all within 8 months!).
But back to 1968. Before you look at my list of highlights below, why not take the “do you remember 1968″ online quiz.
Now, here are the highlights:
One of the issues we are tracking closely at TomorrowToday is the ageing Boomer generation, and the impact they are likely to have on the workplace, on retirement (we prefer to call it retyrement) and society as a whole. Here is a great piece I saw recently in an online mag called S+B (Strategy and Business). Read the original here, or scroll down.
How to Be a Demographic Realist
by Lord Andrew Turnbull
11/08/07To prepare for the implications of aging populations, individuals, organizations, and society as a whole must confront assumptions that are no longer valid.
Across the developed world, the demographic profile is changing. According to United Nations projections, the proportion of the global population over 65 years old will triple between now and 2100, from 7 percent to 21 percent. The population is aging more rapidly in some countries, such as Italy and Japan, and less rapidly in others, such as the United States and the United Kingdom. But in all countries, this demographic shift raises challenging new questions, not just for retirement and how it is to be financed, but also for the world of work — and the transition between the two.
Although most people understand that this change is taking place, they do not realize how large it will be and what its implications are for our working lives, for how we provide in advance for retirement, and for how support and care will be provided and funded in the future.
Boomers are variously defined as those people born from the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s around the world. Most researchers use the end of the Second World War as a reference point, which means that as of 2006, this group of people has started to turn 60. They are not old, though. Don’t be confused about that. This demographic tidal wave will have a greater effect on institutions and businesses than the aging of any previous generation. Because of the size and spending power of the boomers, mature values and trends will dominate marketplace realities.
The Chief Marketer recently put out a list of 5 ways in which the Boomers will continue to shape the marketing and branding landscape. Here is what they said (from author, Brent Green):
A frequently asked question when we present “Mind the Gap” – a presentation about different generations – is whether these generations can be found all around the world. People battle to believe that the elegant simplicity of the generations model applies in different countries and across multiple cultures.
Of course, the generational model is not applicable to every single individual everywhere (which model is?), but it IS exceptionally robust. And more and more research around the world is showing this to be true. The latest piece of research I picked up comes from one of the students my colleague Keith had contact with at the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme he teaches at every year at the University of Hawaii (read more about this amazing program at Wikipedia).
The title is: Shinsedae: Conservative Attitudes of a ‘New Generation’ in South Korea and the Impact on the Korean Presidential Election, By Park Sun-Young – click here to read it in full.
I was sent this recently:
The generation of young people who were born into the digital era may be more connected to each other, but less connected to their cultural heritage, warns sociologist Jos de Haan of Erasmus University Rotterdam. They are “chatting” more but reading less; playing more, but researching and learning less than preceding generations.
Though adept at finding their way around the virtual world, digital-era youth are not finding their way to institutions that connect them with the cultural riches of their past, according to de Haan.
The Internet is perceived as a rival to traditional culture, but it could become an ally: De Haan challenges museums, libraries, archives, and other institutions to do more to connect with the digital generation than merely digitize their collections.
SOURCE: Erasmus University Rotterdam, http://www.eur.nl/english/pressroom/detail/article/2177/
I was at a youth camp in a cozy little mountain campsite. The morning was cold, I remember, and as I sloped into the kitchen where the team were preparing breakfast, I was told that Princess Diana was dead. There was sense of disbelief. Except for that mind numbing piece of information, that youth camp may have slipped from memory forever. But the mist hovering mid tree height across the dull brown grass lawns, even the sound of the small stream that ran past the bottom of the camp – all these things are indelibly imprinted on my mind. Because that’s where I was when Diana died. It was 10 years ago exactly today!
There are moments like this that occur every few years. Because of global media coverage, the last 50 years have increasingly provided globally shared moments. These would include (in reverse order):
Generational theory says that moments like this become iconic for all people, but they are values shaping for the youngest members of society. It is these global events that have shaped people around the world over the past century. For more on generational theory, see “Mind the Gap“.
ibuyeco, a new eco-friendly car insurance scheme that offsets 100% of customers’ CO2 emissions for the duration of their policy, was launched in the UK at the end of April 2007. The company has just started a strong above the line advertising, including television and other national media.
Created by the Budget Group, one of the UK’s leading insurance intermediaries, ibuyeco is one of the first car insurance products to offset 100% of a car’s carbon emissions. Customers pay an additional amount to their premiums. Payments are calculated on the type of vehicle and the estimated mileage, details provided by customers. Using this method, the typical family car travelling a mileage of between 10,000 and 12,000 would require an offset fee of roughly £20, for example. ibuyeco buy carbon credits through The Carbon Neutral Company who in return puts the money towards projects that reduce carbon emissions. These projects fall into different categories including: increased energy efficiency, forestry projects and renewable energy, and are based in both the UK and overseas.
The launch of ibuyeco is the result of a social trend that TomorrowToday has been researching for sometime and which we are calling the “rise of the ethical consumerâ€.
In November 2006 Barclays announced the first carbon neutral debit card and we’re expecting a large number of companies to follow ibuyeco and Barclays. The important issue though is, are these companies jumping onto the global warming marketing bandwagon or does carbon reduction form part of the company’s values and long term strategy? Another question is why did Budget need to launch a new company and why doesn’t it position the Budget brand as an ethical brand? Hiding behind a new brand for marketing reasons will not pay dividends unless the company itself changes.
When it comes to targeting the “ethical consumerâ€, made largely out of Generation Y, companies had best practice what they preach. If they don’t, this generation who is highly connected via the web will spread the word and ruthlessly weed out the pretenders.
Companies need to do more than launch new products and advertising campaigns professing to support initiatives that reduce global warming. Companies need to be taking steps towards reducing their own carbon emissions and communicating their efforts, in carbon friendly ways! Carbon reductions need to be part of the company’s day-to-day strategies and way of work. It has to become integrated into the company’s culture and demonstrated in a number of ways, from the way they employ recruits to how they run their meetings and sell their products. There is no point a company asking consumers to buy its product so that they, the consumer can contribute to carbon emissions, when the company itself is contributing to carbon emissions by making clients fill out massive application forms and accept loads of marketing mailings.
Our advice to companies thinking about targeting customers using carbon reduction schemes, is to first integrate carbon reductions into the fabric of their company’s culture before they launch new products. The new ethical consumer will buy from your company because of who you are (your company’s values) and not because of what you sell.
Not many people think about maternity benefits when applying for a job, and yet organisations differ hugely in what they provide for parents. Some offer the bare legal minimum, others offer a year’s maternity leave on full pay. In an era of increased awareness of the importance of work-life integration, The Guardian argues, following a study of 250 organisations, that it is the smart organisations that take maternity benefits seriously who will attract and retain talented staff.
The survey discovered that companies often treat family life as being entirely separate from the workplace rather than being, as they are in the lives of most employees, tightly bound together. Very few corporations showcase strong parental benefits among their recruitment incentives or as evidence of high corporate ethics. And yet any working parent knows how damaging it is to productivity, creativity and mental health to work for organisations that blank out or are hostile to the beating family heart of its staff.
The Guardian argues that good support to parents is a social contribution as important as a companies charitable donations, recycling or carbon footprint reduction efforts.
A few years ago, some of the TomorrowToday team attended a workshop by Jennifer Deal. She certainly challenged our thinking. Her contention was that all the focus on generation gaps in the workplace was obscuring the fact that there are many similarities between people of all ages. She is right, of course – and it is a good “corrective voice” for business to hear. As much as there are certain distinctive characteristics of different generations, each person in your company is nevertheless still that: a person, a human being. As such, they have certain drives, ambitions, requirements and characteristics that should not be neglected.
Jennifer Deal has now turned that research into a book. We were sent a review and summary of the book, and thought you’d be interested in reading about the 10 principles for engaging staff, young and old. This is a great book that will help you not become stuck when thinking about different generations, and not overcompensate for generational differences.
You can purchase the book at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net.
I received this in an e-mail today….
There was a one hour interview on CNBC with Warren Buffett, the second richest man who has donated $31 billion to charity Here are some very
interesting aspects of his life:
His advice to young people: “Stay away from credit cards and invest in yourself and Remember:
A. Money doesn’t create man but it is the man who created money.
B. Live your life as simple as you are.
C. Don’t do what others say, just listen to them, but do what you feel is good.
D. Don’t go on brand name; just wear those things in which u feel comfortable.
E. Don’t waste your money on unnecessary things; just spend on them who are really in need rather.
F. After all it’s your life then why give chance to others to rule our life.”
Powered by ScribeFire.
Older supermarket workers, at Britain’s Tesco, are being given a guide to youth slang to help them understand younger colleagues and customers, in the form of a pamphlet handed out to staff. The pamphlet is being tried out in some of Tesco’s 1 500 stores with a high proportion of employees over retirement age.
Key phrases in the guide include:
A Tesco spokesperson said: “It aims to help bridge the generation gap and offer a guide for older members of staff looking to chat with younger colleagues and customers.”
In one of the most recent Fortune magazine editions, the Millennial generation made the front cover under a great headline: “Manage Us, Puh-leeze”. The subtitle of the article was: “Boomers, you raised them, now manage them!” It is a long article, but really worth while wading through. Get it free at their website, or read an extract below.
Attracting the twentysomething worker
The baby-boomers’ kids are marching into the workplace, and look out: This crop of twentysomethings really is different. Fortune’s Nadira Hira presents a field guide to Generation Y.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Nadira A. Hira, Fortune writer-reporter
May 15 2007
(Fortune Magazine) — Nearly every businessperson over 30 has done it: sat in his office after a staff meeting and – reflecting upon the 25-year-old colleague with two tattoos, a piercing, no watch and a shameless propensity for chatting up the boss – wondered, What is with that guy?!
We all know the type: He’s a sartorial Ryan Seacrest, a developmental Ferris Bueller, a professional Carlton Banks. (Not up on twentysomethings’ media icons? That’s the “American Idol” host, the truant Matthew Broderick movie hero, and the overeager Will Smith sidekick in “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”)
At once a hipster and a climber, he is all nonchalance and expectation. He is new, he is annoying, and he and his female counterparts are invading corporate offices across America.
Generation Y: Its members are different in many respects, from their upbringing to their politics. But it might be their effect on the workplace that makes them truly noteworthy – more so than other generations of twentysomethings that writers have been collectively profiling since time immemorial.
They’re ambitious, they’re demanding and they question everything, so if there isn’t a good reason for that long commute or late night, don’t expect them to do it. When it comes to loyalty, the companies they work for are last on their list – behind their families, their friends, their communities, their co-workers and, of course, themselves.
But there are a whole lot of them. And as the baby-boomers begin to retire, triggering a ballyhooed worker shortage, businesses are realizing that they may have no choice but to accommodate these curious Gen Y creatures. Especially because if they don’t, the creatures will simply go home to their parents, who in all likelihood will welcome them back.
Some 64 million skilled workers will be able to retire by the end of this decade, according to the Conference Board, and companies will need to go the extra mile to replace them, even if it means putting up with some outsized expectations. There is a precedent for this: In April 1969, Fortune wrote, “Because the demand for their services so greatly exceeds the supply, young graduates are in a strong position to dictate terms to their prospective employers. Young employees are demanding that they be given productive tasks to do from the first day of work, and that the people they work for notice and react to their performance.”
Buppies – Black yuppies. Black young upwardly mobile professionals. Research shows that this is one of the fastest growing demographic groups in South Africa, but many companies and leaders have no idea how to manage them. Aloysias Maimane, a new member of the TomorrowToday team and a top South African presenter and facilitator, provides some insights into this important group.
Every business has customers who are convinced they can design a new product that is better than the product they are being sold. So the question is why not let them? Crowdsourcing is a new and innovative research methodology that allows customers to help design the products they want online. It’s a methodology that is saving companies thousands of pounds on research bills and is proving highly effective because customers are getting the chance to mould and shape the products they are going to be buying. And because products are not being designed by remote head office R&D teams the chances of product flops are greatly reduced.
MIT’s Sloan Management Review recently published a paper, written by Susumu Ogawa, a professor of marketing at Kobe University in Tokyo, and Frank Piller, a professor at TUM Business School in Munich, on the concept of crowdsourcing. This is how these two professors put it “Forecasting the demand for new products is becoming increasingly difficult in many markets. But collective customer commitment (crowdsourcing), a new method to decrease the flop rate of new products, offers a solution by integrating customers deeply in the innovation process and asking for their commitment to purchase before development is finalized and manufacturing starts.â€?
Incredible, can you imagine the benefit in cost savings of getting your customers to design the products they want and then getting them to pre-order the product before it’s manufactured? 

This really is harnessing the power of the “connection economy!�
Boomers (in their 40s and 50s) and Xers (in their 20s and 30s) have very different communication styles and needs. In the workplace, they can drive each other crazy. Barrie Bramley provides some excellent insights into why this communication gap exists, and gives some great practical solutions for Boomers and Xers.
In sessions that we conduct on Talent management with both those who lead talent and those who are considered talent everything goes brilliantly until the end of the day when we ask: “So, what are you going to do now?” At this point there is generally a throwing up of hands into the air and a frustrated whining sessions begins. What it basically boils down is the passing of the talent ‘hot potato’ from one person or group to the next. Executives say HR has strategies in place, HR says it is the role of line management, line management says that they are disempowered by top-down processes or too busy with operational delivery to do anything differently…
As we facilitate these sessions we come in first hand contact with the frustrations that sit in this space. This article briefly deals with the conversations and frustrations most commonly raised. It will then propose options and actions that should be considered by the various stakeholders in this dynamic, from executives and other leaders right down to the talent themselves.
In our presentation on the different generations, “Mind the Gap“, when we talk about the Millennial Generation (born 1990s and 2000s, or slightly earlier in some countries – USA defines them as born 1984 to 2000), we often say, “they’re confident; so confident, they’re almost arrogant”. When I was a youth worker in the 1980s and early 1990s, the big issue was helping young people develop self belief and self esteem. I think we overdid it. Now, a new study of US college students proves this point.
The Associated Press reports:
Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.
“We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special’ and having children repeat that back,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. “Kids are self-centered enough already.”
[The research] examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006. The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” “I think I am a special person” and “I can live my life any way I want to.”
The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students’ NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.
Twenge is the author of “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (buy it at Amazon.com).
According to CBS News, and other sources, the FAA (US airline authority) is following the International Civil Aviation Organisation and raising the retirement age of pilots from 60 to 65 (as long as the co-pilot is younger than 60 years old).
The International body increased their age limit last year, and the FAA is set to follow suit this year.
Up to now, they have managed the Age 60 retirement by offering large retirement packages to their top pilots. This has worked well for the industry, since younger pilots were able to move up the ladder quickly into the empty slots.
But, like most industries, the Boomers have hit 60, and (1) don’t want to give up working, and (2) can’t afford to do so, and (3) find that there is not enough pension money going around, nor are the retirement packages as good as they used to be, and (4) they can’t leave because there are not enough qualified youngsters to take their place.
This is a problem across most industries, especially the professions. And, its only going to get worse in the years ahead.
I was asked again the other day what the “theme” of this blog is. It can sometimes seem like a collection of rambling musings on the world. Well…
Besides being just that, it is really the place that the network at TomorrowToday.biz put all their musings on the world. This is part of what we do at TomorrowToday – we track societal trends, trying to spot patterns and identify futures and scenarios.
Every now and again, we get glimpses of how major forces combine to shape societies and destinies globally. One such thought hit me today, and it brings together things we say around retiring Boomers, globalisation, governments, investment opportunities, emerging markets, and much more. Its a simple, yet profound thought.
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South Africa, a young democracy, is experiencing what almost every young democracy has experienced: an increase in crime, and other issues that threaten hard won freedoms. It often takes a tipping point, and an escalation to almost unbearable limits, in these situations, until society is shaken from its sleepiness and starts to fight back. I sense that this is where South Africa now finds itself. There is a feeling that crime, especially violent robbery, has increased dramatically in just the past few months, and I sense a heaviness in people’s hearts. But, is this the reality?
One of my favourite political analysts, JP Landman, has written on the topic. He is retained by BOE, a really future thinking bank, as an analyst and commentator. His thoughts on crime are really worth reading – not just for South Africans, but for everyone. He has some interesting comments on generations, and how countries with lots of young men also have high crime rates… But let me not steal his thunder. Read on.
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I’m not talking about the glib friendships companies try to encourage by inviting their customers to be friends or fans on Facebook, but rather intimate and deep relationships that come from having a vested interest in the people that make their business possible. I recently came across a study by Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson [...]
I spend a large part of my year in conversation with managers working hard to try and understand today’s younger workforce. The pain they’re feeling is palpable. The evidence of change is overwhelming. Making the necessary changes, at times, seems impossible. The hope is that the challenges are being interrogated and slowly but surely acted [...]
Everyone agrees that something must be done about executive pay. One of the major contentious issues emerging out of the financial crisis is the way that senior executives and manager, especially in the financial industries, are remunerated. These days, executive pay often seems to be unrelated to the company’s performance, and in many [...]
For years banks and credit card companies have held a strangle hold over the movement of money and charged exorbitant rates for doing so. Now this is changing and fast.
Michale Ivey the founder of Twitpay has devised a system, using code that PayPal made available to him, that allows people to make payments [...]
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