A Baby Boomer and a Gen X walk into a bar ...
This podcast episode delves into the generational shifts within the consulting profession, specifically focusing on the Baby Boomer generation. We explore the motivations that drew them to consulting, examining the societal and intellectual awakenings that shaped their perspectives during a tumultuous era. The conversation encompasses their experiences, challenges, and the evolving landscape of consulting as they navigated through hierarchical structures and changing organizational dynamics. Furthermore, we reflect on the values and ideas that influenced their careers, including their views on stability, loyalty, and the pursuit of purpose. As we embark on this exploration, we aim to glean insights that not only honor the legacy of Baby Boomers but also inform the practices of future generations in consulting.
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The Consulting For Humans podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting LLC
Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker A:Welcome to Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about life in consulting.
Speaker B:You're with Mike and Ian, and in.
Speaker A:Each episode, Ian and I will be shining a light on a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and.
Speaker A:And successful.
Speaker B:So if you're a human trying to be a consultant, or who knows, a consultant trying to be a human, then this show is for you.
Speaker B:Thank you for joining us once again.
Speaker B:And, Mike, I'm just going to introduce a theme that we're getting into here.
Speaker B:We wanted to talk for a long time now about the generational shifts in consulting.
Speaker B:I mean, everybody's got this vocabulary that we're using these days about Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Z.
Speaker B:We wanted to take a chance to talk about that from a consulting perspective.
Speaker B:So this week, beginning with the baby boomer generation, we're going to be talking about what attracts them to consulting.
Speaker B:What are the big ideas that influence their thinking?
Speaker B:What are their likes and what are their skepticisms?
Speaker B:And what have they struggled with and what have they faced in their careers as consultants?
Speaker B:And what can we learn from the experience of these generations?
Speaker B:Mike, I'm looking forward to this.
Speaker B:Let's get into it.
Speaker B:Who knew that we had our first laboratory subject among us?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:It's funny.
Speaker A:And when I thought about this episode, I thought, two consultants walk into a bar, a Gen Xer and a boomer.
Speaker A:And I thought, I'm the boomer, you're the Gen Xer.
Speaker A:But here we were, and we started talking about what was the same, what was different.
Speaker A:And then that filtered out to our colleagues, to our friends, and to our memories about what's happened during our careers.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So I'm sure there were consultants before the baby boomers, but none of them are around for us to talk to.
Speaker B:And let's just talk about what we're talking about here.
Speaker B: e born into the world between: Speaker B:They graduated college from 68 to 82, which means they were really entering the consulting profession in the early 70s onwards.
Speaker B:They are now, Mike.
Speaker B:I hesitate to say this.
Speaker B:They are now in their 70s or older, but surprisingly young for their age, Right?
Speaker A:Oh, I think the only thing worse than having a birthday at that age is not having one.
Speaker A:So I'm quite grateful for those.
Speaker A:I'm delighted.
Speaker A:Pin them on.
Speaker A:For a guy who never thought he'd live past 30 or that you'd want to, hey, 70 is great, especially compared.
Speaker B:To the alternative, Right?
Speaker A:Exactly.
Speaker B:So in my notes from the show here, it says we have Learned and reflected by looking and researching that.
Speaker B:But baby boomers are folks who had a sense of purpose.
Speaker B:This is a generation that was driven, you might say, by the social and intellectual awakening, especially among college educated people of that era.
Speaker B:The kind of Vietnam and post Vietnam era.
Speaker B:How did careers look and how did life look to you as a boomer?
Speaker B:As you were thinking about entering this profession?
Speaker A:It's interesting.
Speaker A:I came into consulting sideways, so I never thought.
Speaker A:Thought about entering this profession.
Speaker A:And it's funny, I think I was thinking about a lot of things back then.
Speaker A:Most of them, as you said.
Speaker A:When you think about sense of perp and the social, intellectual and awakening.
Speaker A:I'm thinking back to those times, thinking our lives were at least mine.
Speaker A:A lot defined around things like assassinations and as you said, Vietnam and turmoil at home and the Chicago National Convention.
Speaker A:For folks listening to this around the world, there was a lot of turbulence here in the 60s, rolling over to the 70s, and we had a lot of folks like hippies and yippies and radicals who went on to be great insurance sales people and other things.
Speaker A:So it was a really interesting time.
Speaker A:And that I.
Speaker A:I think there was a time when we really were in some cases wondering about institutions.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:But not so much so that we didn't change very much into being attracted by prestige, by opportunities, or just going with the flow.
Speaker A:You had to go to college, you had to get a job, people of certain things.
Speaker A:And I was right on the edge there.
Speaker A:My dad had gone to a tech school, was probably one of the first people, other family members that also did schooling.
Speaker A:But for me, college was a given in my mind.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yet it was new to our family, such that I also had to make my own way into college.
Speaker A:And college, to me was not about finding a career.
Speaker A:It was like a kid in a candy shop.
Speaker A:It was just all this, oh my gosh, look at what all is here.
Speaker A:To the point where I know my dad was appalled when he saw my schedule some semesters.
Speaker A:What are you taking all this for?
Speaker A:And I loved it.
Speaker A:Even majors.
Speaker A:I just.
Speaker A:I want to do this.
Speaker A:I want to do this.
Speaker A:I would do this.
Speaker A:I started with three, I ended with two.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker B:That's very restrained.
Speaker A:Would have done even more.
Speaker A:Just loved it.
Speaker B:So it's interesting you're describing a world where organizations, including consulting organizations, are still quite hierarchical.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:Still quite traditional in the way that they are structured.
Speaker B:And the behavior of people is expected to show kind of deference to the hierarchy.
Speaker B:And yet the newly graduated college hires who are coming in are People who've got new ideas and are interested in changing the world from the inside out.
Speaker A:So some, and some of whom were, I think, almost carbon copies of their parents in terms of about organizations and careers and very linear.
Speaker A:The gold watch was hanging around in everybody's consciousness, right.
Speaker A:Some of us wanted to change the world, but then probably also get the gold watch, right?
Speaker B:So I think consulting back in that time must have been a sufficiently small, sufficiently narrow and rare profession really, that it didn't have the scale that it has now.
Speaker B:And that if you get into it, it's either going to be because you're a new grad and you're into the prestige of being at a very kind of secret society level of rarity, or you're getting brought into it sideways.
Speaker B:Which I guess was your experience, right, Mike?
Speaker A:It was.
Speaker A:And I'm sure there were folks who always knew they were going to business school or always knew they had that kind of corporate career mentality or new people in consulting or grew up in consulting related families.
Speaker A:But for me, I honestly on graduation, I had no idea what I was going to do job wise, much less career wise.
Speaker A:I had thoughts about perhaps which graduate programs I wanted to go to next.
Speaker A:They were more about psychology, they were about religion, they were about other masters things.
Speaker A:I just wanted to learn more and experience more.
Speaker A:But I knew that I also had to pay for this because I was having to pay for all that stuff myself.
Speaker A:And scholarships and scholarship opportunities were huge in my life.
Speaker A:And that also had an element of give back to it.
Speaker A:Some of those.
Speaker A:The big one that I was on was about what were you doing?
Speaker A:You got it for part of what you did in your life to give back.
Speaker A:And you had to show that you were giving back every semester somewhere.
Speaker A:So the.
Speaker A:Which was also very resonant with my life.
Speaker A:So learning, giving back, that was there.
Speaker A:And I thought, okay, so to continue on, I've got to make some money.
Speaker A:Let's find out.
Speaker A:And I stumbled into this firm, which actually was a credit union.
Speaker A:I didn't know what a credit union was.
Speaker A:It's collective financial collectively member owned financial institution.
Speaker A:And it was in North Carolina, where I graduated in North Carolina.
Speaker A:And they would only hire liberal arts graduates.
Speaker A:And the idea was we know business and we can teach you the business that you need to know.
Speaker A:What we need are people who know and are interested in people, hence the liberal arts slide.
Speaker A:And there was a bit of the times of what I would call a kiddie crusade, but it's part of a credit union kind of Thing that we interpreted as let's get the blood sucking bankers and we're going to do things for people without the exorbitant fees and without we're going to help them in their lives and their financial lives.
Speaker A:And we're going to be doing that as part of a mission and a purpose too.
Speaker A:But that was the organization that allowed me to grow very quickly and to meet consultants for the first time.
Speaker A:And that was where my was like, wow, you do what now?
Speaker A:I was the business representative as at a time it introduced me to a lot of things.
Speaker A:So one was consulting.
Speaker A:But the consulting project was around.
Speaker A:These were the days of paper based process, batch processing, IT systems, moving to some organizations and state employees Credit union was one of them.
Speaker A:An online real time system which was really, that would have been not the thing there.
Speaker A:And it was, yeah, how do you take what we're doing in, in the teller transactions?
Speaker A:How do we take what we do in lending?
Speaker A:How do we take what we're doing in real estate and automate that more?
Speaker A:So it got me introduced to business technology and being the people interface.
Speaker A:So working with what people were doing and making this happen in order to benefit people, meaning the credit union's owners, their members.
Speaker A:And so all of that became touchstones for my career and kind of resonated with the times and the ideas I grew up with.
Speaker A:And I was, so I've mentioned, I think on the show before that the litmus test that I failed to pass there was they said, but you're married so we can't hire you to join our consulting firm because we have a 90% divorce rate.
Speaker A:So it was a little bit about work ethic back then that was perhaps different for consultants certainly today.
Speaker A:And that probably evolved over the generations too.
Speaker B:So we're getting a picture here of a culture, a worldview that says we still accept to some extent hierarchies and big organizations and we work within them.
Speaker B:We're getting the idea that consultants are about making things better and a little faster and maybe a little cheaper and more efficient.
Speaker B:That all sounds very familiar.
Speaker B:Doing that using new ideas and new process thinking and new technology.
Speaker B:That all sounds pretty familiar.
Speaker B:I'm looking for a point of difference here.
Speaker B:And it strikes me that one of the things that we all are as consultants is we are skeptics in a positive way.
Speaker B:We are skeptics.
Speaker B:So what would your average baby boomer accept as gospel and what would they be skeptical about?
Speaker B:What would they want to examine?
Speaker A:It's interesting.
Speaker A:There were a lot of people who Weren't very skeptical.
Speaker A:It's funny, in my own mind, I'm giving my perspective, I think my perspective was in a lot of ways a minority perspective, but it was a pretty big minority.
Speaker A:The world was changing and it wasn't changing.
Speaker A:And I think we see that on a lot of different levels that there was bifurcated a little bit or you had people in and out, like I said, hippies and yippees who became corporate people and a lot of corporate people who came from generations of corporate and organizational people.
Speaker A:And there was still a lot of institutional loyalty.
Speaker A:And like I mentioned, the gold watch, this idea that you went for a company and you stayed with that company and that was the right thing to do and your parents would be proud of you for doing that and that sort of thing.
Speaker A:But for me it was about learning and making a difference.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:And consulting was like a magical place.
Speaker A:You got to do that the same way the university was a magical place for doing that with all the things you could learn about.
Speaker A:And the fact that you were the reason you got this scholarship was so that you would go out and make a difference in the world and make a difference right here in the world that you're around in your college environment that day to day as well.
Speaker B:We're starting.
Speaker B:I say we.
Speaker B:I'm imagining myself alongside you, but I would have come a little bit later.
Speaker B:We're starting out with a sort of accepted view of the world as stable.
Speaker B:A bit of passion being kindled there for making the world a better place and some new things coming along like technology and new ways of working.
Speaker B:That all sounds very fruitful for somebody who wants to be a consultant.
Speaker B:What was difficult, not just for you, but for consultants of that generation.
Speaker A:Clearly at that point, I like to think that my parents generation was the generation that said I had it tough, you're going to have it tough.
Speaker A:The way you succeed is by just giving it your all and pressing on.
Speaker A:And the idea was still pretty prevalent that everybody was telling stories about.
Speaker A:When I was a junior, I had to walk in the snow uphill both ways every day.
Speaker A:And that was going on too.
Speaker A:And I think that we were, as consultants, pretty.
Speaker A:We love the firm, we love to work hard, we love to have an influence and make things happen.
Speaker A:But we worked hard, hard.
Speaker A:And there was a skepticism about a shortcut.
Speaker A:You don't do that.
Speaker A:You have to go the linear process and you have to put in the hours and you have to do the work and you have to.
Speaker A:Even with developing methodologies, doing client work, doing Research, doing analysis.
Speaker A:And it's a time when there wasn't a whole lot of data laying around.
Speaker A:There wasn't a lot of easy access to information.
Speaker A:You were working more and more, increasingly, at least I was across starting in industries, but across industries.
Speaker A:The world was changing, not certainly as quickly as it was here, but there still was a lot of change going on.
Speaker A:And it was tough.
Speaker A:I told you about the 90% divorce rate at that firm that I initially talked to and I found some of the same stuff.
Speaker A:And I found myself getting really sucked into that, that.
Speaker A:But on the one hand it was a rush, but it was also 24 7.
Speaker A:It was.
Speaker A:And as you moved along, you were selling business, you were doing business, you were building your firm, you were, you were doing all or your practice or whatever, you were doing all of those things.
Speaker A:But everybody, everybody wore as a little bit of a badge of honor just how hard they worked, how little they slept and that sort of thing.
Speaker A:So that was a piece of it.
Speaker B:So that was some of the challenges.
Speaker B:I want to talk about what ideas influenced people, especially in consulting, because you and I've talked a lot about books and authors and thinking frameworks already on the podcast and it's interesting to see how many of those have changed and how many of those are new.
Speaker B:If I've got my sort of chronological head right here.
Speaker B:Mike, the boomer generation was mid career when some of what I think of as the big, the big ideas about breaking down traditional organizations when they first appeared.
Speaker B:The one I'm thinking of is the Jan Carlson book Moments of Truth.
Speaker B:And he came up with this idea of inverting the pyramid and thinking in a new way about people who are in customer facing roles.
Speaker B:What are some of the other big authors or big ideas or big works that were influential in thinking back then?
Speaker A:There was the one minute Manager and a whole series of one minute Manager kind of things and how you work with people and develop people.
Speaker A:I think that I remember as a big one and interesting.
Speaker A:You mentioned Jan Carlson and Moments of Truth.
Speaker A:My dad drew what was essentially an inverted pyramid for me when I was in high school about his ideas about who's important important in organizations.
Speaker A:And Carlson was not saying that we should invert the pyramid.
Speaker A:What he was trying to do was say you got to pay attention to the moments of Truth, the moments that your organization touches the customer.
Speaker A:And my dad was saying we give too much focus, too much attention on who's at the top of the pyramid.
Speaker A:And forget that oftentimes you know people from the top Through a lot of the pyramid, don't actually touch the customer directly.
Speaker A:And a lot of times it's the people at the bottom of the organization who are actually have these customer facing roles and provide the experiences that customers have for your organization.
Speaker A:So they weren't necessarily talking about let's change organizations, but let's focus on those moments of truth.
Speaker A:The one minute manager.
Speaker A:This whole thing about starting to give people a little bit more autonomy and some guidance.
Speaker A:The same thing back then.
Speaker A:Stephen Covey 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and storytelling this was great.
Speaker A:How do we influence.
Speaker A:We didn't have like massive amounts of data and big analyses.
Speaker A:We told stories and we learned from stories a lot.
Speaker A:Not unlike generations and generations of the world through, but they were different stories here.
Speaker A:I still remember Covey talking about kind of stewardship delegation.
Speaker A:He would tell his kids about, you know, tending to the yard or the garden and saying clean and green or something.
Speaker A:That's the outcome I want.
Speaker A:You can figure out how to do that as opposed to I'm going to tell you every specific thing.
Speaker A:And I think that some of those things were great, began with the end in mind and some of that, but some of it was the way of doing that.
Speaker A:And there was this feeling like you could figure out secrets for success.
Speaker A:Peters and Waterman back then.
Speaker A:In Search of Excellence.
Speaker A:Oh my gosh.
Speaker B:Written by two Uber boomers.
Speaker A:Exactly.
Speaker B:Tom Peters and Robert Waterman.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:We had all of a sudden the answer.
Speaker A:Look at these companies that do amazing things and do that.
Speaker A:And so there was a tendency to look for silver bullet to sell answers.
Speaker A:And that drove a lot of consulting back then.
Speaker A:There were all the frameworks and the big firms.
Speaker A:There was a huge growth in consulting firms.
Speaker A:There was a huge growth in industry.
Speaker A:You'd seen so much grow, develop extra money to spend more.
Speaker A:Good times to be had.
Speaker A:A rising tide floats all boats.
Speaker A:It was a target rich environment.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And it was a growth in the success of industry.
Speaker B:And the era of professional management in big organizations was absolutely the thing in the Luminaries episode that comes out alongside this one.
Speaker B:Mike, we're going to take a closer look at a couple of our favorite books from the era.
Speaker B:Dissect what they've got to tell us and maybe reflect on the value of dipping back into them today.
Speaker B:Getting back to the story of boomers, Mike, in the long term, was a career in consulting likely to be something that a baby boomer would stick with?
Speaker A:Oh, all careers were something people stuck with, but particularly in consulting, not unlike anything else.
Speaker A:It's the gold watch again, you didn't see as much, I think back then of people coming in and out and moving around.
Speaker A:There were.
Speaker A:It was seen that people went with a firm, did well.
Speaker A:There was a bit of up and out.
Speaker A:But the idea was keep staying with the up, keep staying with the up.
Speaker A:It's not necessarily the way I went, but I think I got influenced by a lot of the generations I got.
Speaker A:There's not a lot of the generations that came after me, but a lot of the people in the generations that came after me.
Speaker B:I'm with you.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:And it's interesting, Mike, that generation of owner partners, there will be people who founded their own consulting firms that went on to be successful who are retiring now.
Speaker B:Who are that generation?
Speaker B:If you're sitting in a mid sized specialist consulting firm anywhere and it's called Bradley and Shank, and Bradley and Mr.
Speaker B:Shank are both on the golf course right now, the chances are that they are from that generation and they will have seen it as their life's work and they would have cultivated stability and the good ones will have learned and flexed and, and evolved as they went and we'll have recruited younger partners.
Speaker B:But it's interesting.
Speaker B:That generation are the ones who are just retiring and selling out.
Speaker B:Which brings me to ask our final question today, Mike.
Speaker B:What next for your average boomer?
Speaker A:I'm not sure what's next for the average boomer.
Speaker A:I think that really varies.
Speaker A:I think there are people who, like you say, I remember in university seeing Maslow's goal purpose line.
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker A:And his life expectancy line for males.
Speaker A:And the idea was that if you followed a person's goal, a man's goal purpose line at the time, that he either achieved what he set out to achieve or he realized he wasn't going to.
Speaker A:Right after that, people died like flies.
Speaker A:So I was very worried along my career trajectory that my dad was going to retire one day and he actually ended up doing very well and retired early.
Speaker A:And so as a good consultant, I was running around like crazy trying to find an organization that we could acquire and run together because I was afraid he would die.
Speaker A:And he looked at me one night as I was pitching him yet another firm that I thought would be great for us and said, mike, have I ever told you that I wanted to go back to work for another day ever?
Speaker A:And I said, no, you don't.
Speaker A:He said, God, no, I'm really happy being done.
Speaker A:And he loved his work and he did great things with that.
Speaker A:But he was also delighted to be Done now.
Speaker A:He was never not busy a single day.
Speaker A:He had other things that he wanted to do.
Speaker A:And I find, I'm thinking back to some of my contemporaries and colleagues and peers, that some of them feel that way and felt that way and did great things and also were really smart.
Speaker A:Some of them were brilliant because they invested in the firms that we saw the future of.
Speaker A:I was one of those people that said, you can never invest in those firms because that would be a conflict of interest.
Speaker A:And I kick myself to this day.
Speaker A:And I went, what were you doing, you idiot?
Speaker A:Why weren't we were doing these things and we saw this.
Speaker A:Why weren't you buying those stocks?
Speaker B:There were positions to be taken.
Speaker A:Yeah, but I think there are others who, like we said, have loved it and still love it.
Speaker A:And it's kind of part of your being.
Speaker A:It's why you do what you do and want to either do it or help others who are doing that and bring part of what you learned from that back to other people.
Speaker B:Mike, there's a really good point for us to touch on finally, which is what do we get?
Speaker B:What do we appreciate as non boomers from having a boomer around in the consulting context?
Speaker B:And I think part of it is perspective.
Speaker B:You and I'm not personalizing this directly to you, Mike, but to the, to people of that generation, you've got perspective.
Speaker B:You've seen things ebb and flow and rise and fall.
Speaker B:You've seen good times and bad times.
Speaker B:And I think that perspective is hugely important and it's something that the rest of us can miss.
Speaker A:I think it's ever.
Speaker A:I can't tell you the lessons and the motivations I took away from watching my grandmother who was widowed earlier in her life.
Speaker A:But I, I'm saying early, she's probably in her 50s or 60s, but then went on to live 30 to 40 years the way she wanted to live.
Speaker A:And the perspectives that she brought that were amazing in terms of her ability to look back over generations and be Switzerland and mediate between my dad and I and our conflicts of generations.
Speaker A:So that wisdom in our elders sometimes really helpful to have.
Speaker A:And that perspective.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker B:So, Mike, I think this has been a great conversation.
Speaker B:I like all of us who have a boomer around us in our lives and in our consulting firms to appreciate them.
Speaker B:It's been really great as well to pick up on some of the themes that I think we're going to have to touch on to compare with the other generations, like what do they care about?
Speaker B:What are they skeptical about?
Speaker B:What do they bring?
Speaker B:What are they trying to break down?
Speaker B:Because some things I think are fundamental about the way we do consulting, some things have changed massively as individuals have changed.
Speaker B:So, Mike, thanks so much.
Speaker B:It's been a really great conversation.
Speaker B:I hope that everybody who's listening has enjoyed it as much as I have.
Speaker B:We're looking forward to talking about Generation X next week.
Speaker B:I have no idea who we might talk to.
Speaker B:I'm sure we'll come up with something.
Speaker A:We look forward to talking with you again on consulting for Humans next week.
