SPOTLIGHT ON LEADERSHIP: THE NEXT GENERATION

Spotlight

ARTWORK Gus Powell, Still Life: Raspberry, from the series Lunch Pictures, 1999—2007

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Tamara J. Erickson (tammy@ tammyerickson.com) is the author of a trilogy of books on generations in the workforce and has written several articles for HBR, including “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” (March 2004), which won a McKinsey Award. A member of the Boomer generation, she is based in Boston.

The Leaders We Need Now
Generation X will produce executives who bring a distinctive sense of realism to the modern corporation. by Tamara J. Erickson
A NEW COHORT of leaders is poised to take senior executive roles and is bringing with it a whole new mind-set. Baby Boomers have been firmly in charge for the past few decades, and as a rule they have been willing to operate by a well-understood set of corporate practices and policies related to compensation, hierarchy, and expectations for the way work “works.” Generation Xers, born from 1961 through 1981, have different ideas. They’re more apt to reject status-quo definitions of success and seek their own paths. The differences can be traced to the times during which each group came of age and formed its attitudes toward work and society. Although it’s impossible to draw neat boundaries along generational lines and unproductive to overgeneralize, we are each, in part, a product of our time. The formative years of Xers looked very different from those of Boomers. For one thing, Baby Boomers grew up in a world that was fundamentally too small for them. The infrastructure couldn’t expand fast enough to accommodate the sudden growth of this cohort. Boomers went to high school in Quonset huts behind the actual schools because there weren’t enough rooms to hold them all. They’ve competed for everything

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throughout their lives—from spots on high school