Are Boomers Through?

Hey guys, it's Tom Guarriello, um, back from Camden, Maine, where I was traveling to a conference I go to every year called PopTech. And PopTech is— I go to a couple of conferences every year, and PopTech is one that I've gone to now. This was my third year, and I go to this one because there's a lot of really smart people there, both speaking and in the audience. And I always get new ideas and pick up things at PopTech that are helpful to me in my work as a management consultant. You know, a lot of what I do is working with leaders and trying to help them to figure out what's new and how do we do it. So those are two things that we do a lot in my firm. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about new stuff, trying to figure out new stuff, and Places like PopTech are really good to help me to do that. So, there were two big— there were lots of great moments at PopTech this year, but I'm going to talk about two of them in this video. Two big things that felt kind of like aha. The first was from a guy named Tom Barnett, and I'll put the links to these guys over here, over there, there'll be links to their sites. And soon you'll be able to see videos of their talks up on the PopTech website. And when they're up there, I'll be sure to let you guys know. But Tom Barnett is a guy who talks a lot about geopolitical strategy and military issues and He's really smart and has lots of very insightful things to say, has written a couple of great books. And so he's one guy that I've seen before that I think is really smart and says a lot of cool things. The other guy who said something that really stuck out for me was Chris Anderson, and this is Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine. If you're a tech person, interested at all in what's going on in technology, you know that Wired magazine has for the last, I don't know, decade and plus been a great source of thinking about technology. So these two guys, Tom Barnett and Chris Anderson, both said things that kinda made me sit up and take notice. The first one was Barnett. Barnett said 'If you were born before 1960, I don't want to talk to you.' Now, this is a guy who does a lot of advising for the Pentagon and a lot of advising for corporate leaders around issues of— around global security. So, hmm, that was pretty interesting. And then Chris Anderson said, a couple of speakers later, later in the program, said, um, he's the editor of Wired magazine, and he said, look, I do anything my interns tell me to do. I do anything my interns tell me to do. Here's the editor of Wired magazine: I do anything my interns tell me to do. So it was like, well, those were two pretty big, for me, pretty big messages about my generation. I'm a baby boomer, and here's two guys saying, one of whom says, "I don't even want to talk to you if you're a baby boomer," essentially. And the other one saying, "Hey, I listen to my interns. They tell me what to do. They tell me things to try." So now both of these guys are Barnett was born in 1960, so that makes him, you know, either depending on your definition, either kind of a tail-end boomer or an early Gen Xer. And Anderson, I don't know when he was born, I couldn't find that anywhere on the web, but you know, he looks to be about the same age, somewhere in that same range. So, so look, these two guys, both of whom are maybe you know, trailing-edge Boomers, maybe early Gen Xers. One of whom is saying, "Baby Boomers, I don't even want to listen to you." And the other one is saying, "You know where I go for the smart ideas? The kids." Neither of these guys is Boomer insensibility, however. What does that mean, Boomer insensibility? Well, it means this: that these people are thinking changing models of things all the time. They're not thinking about the way things were. They're thinking about the way things are going to be. For example, these are the kind of guys who think Amazon, not Walmart. They think Netflix, not Blockbuster. They think iTunes, not Tower Records. They're thinking YouTube— hello— not TV networks. These are people who know that there are big things that are changing and they're always looking to changing models. Secondly, these are guys who are very tech savvy. It doesn't mean that they're gadget guys. It doesn't mean that they're into devices. It means that they recognize that technology is a great leveler now, that no matter who you are and where you are, you have access to technology that's going to give you an opportunity to change the way things happen. The churn that we see going on in the world is directly related to the amount of technological innovation that we've seen, particularly over the last decade. They also recognize that the new is happening elsewhere. The new is happening elsewhere geographically. It's not, you know, there's still new things happening in the US, but there's a lot of fast new things happening elsewhere. These are people who are not chauvinists about the U.S. They are true global thinkers. They're looking around the world and saying, "New things happening there, new things happening there." If you look at the pace of innovation taking place in China today, for example, you're going to see that very soon China's innovation is going to outstrip the U.S.'s innovation in all areas, not just in manufacturing and making things cheap, you know, the way we think about China and India today, but in innovating. This is inevitable. This is a matter of the strength of the numbers of people in both of those countries and the amount of creative thinking going on in those cultures that's been enabled by broader education and by technology. But our leaders are still leading as if the mentality that they grew up with— I'm sorry, that I grew up with, that we grew up with— is the predominant mentality that will make us successful in the future. What is that mentality? Well, basically it's a mentality of scarcity. We had a scarcity of resources and we had, as a result of the scarcity of resources, we had lots and lots of control being exercised on the way those resources were invested. For example, if you wanted to make a movie, you had to be very careful about the movies that you made because—

why?

Tremendous amount of money has to go into making a movie. Today, yes, these are not yet theatrical quality films. How long do we think it's going to take before the next Blair Witch Project born out of YouTube? How long do we think it's going to take before real commercial quality entertainment starts getting developed out of this medium? Excuse me. I don't think very long. I think it's not going to be very long before we start going, "That's the place to look." Why would you do a pilot anymore on a television network? Why wouldn't you just do the pilot here? Let us see it. Another part of the scarcity was the idea that because these resources were scarce, they had to— decisions about them had to be made centrally by a small group of people. Scarcity means we've got to control what goes on. But in the kind of abundant world that we have here now, where everybody has access to a lot of things and we all see opportunity, what is the decision-making mechanism? Well, We decide, don't we? Views decide what we like. You look and you see what people watch, it tells you what they like. If you spend a lot of time on websites, you see things like Digg, for example, where people vote. This is cool, this isn't cool. You don't have to decide beforehand whether or not something's cool, but boomer mentality, the kind of mentality that many of our leaders still have, still entails having that kind of centralized control. So what's the challenge? The challenge for leaders, for Boomers who want to lead is number one, listen. It's the hardest thing for us to do, to listen. We always thought we were the end of history. We were the Age of Aquarius. We were it. We changed the world and that was going to be that. After we changed the world, it was going to be the way we were going to make it and that was what it was going to be. Obviously not. So we have to listen. Secondly, listen to Chris Anderson. Do what the intern says. You know, it's one thing to listen to what the intern says. It's another thing to do what the intern says. Having the confidence to be able to say, "I don't really know what's necessarily best in this situation because that's not necessarily my world, but the intern," figuratively, the YouTube community or whoever it is, They do know, so I'm going to do what they say. And third, we got to stop fighting the last war. We're always fighting the last war, not just in the military, but we're always fighting the last war in business as well. We've got to be looking that way, not that way. We're very good at saying, well, Sarbanes-Oxley, for example. Yes, we have all these— we have to have all these financial controls because there were thieves, there were corporate thieves. Yes, there were corporate thieves, The new corporate thieves are the ones we have to watch out for, not necessarily the old corporate thieves. Point of all this is, are boomers through? Are we done? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, as always.

And, uh, I got a bit of a cold, but this stuff would swirl it around in my throat and my larynx. That's fishing. I leave her behind, but the kids are all right. The kids are all right.