CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Report on the Class of ‘68

THE CLASS OF ‘68—the class of the Vietnam demonstrations on campus and of the street battles at the Chicago Democratic Convention—was the most antibusiness class in America’s history and the most radical of all student generations. Right?

“Yes—but …” The class of ’68 has also turned into the most pro-business class among college generations in many decades.

It is the class that went into business careers more heavily than most of its predecessors, if only because job openings in government and education began to disappear as this class reached the job market. It is this class that marked the sharp upturn in MBA degrees which we have seen in the last decade. And it is the class of ’68 that has been more successful in business careers than any of its predecessors since the much smaller classes of the 1920s.

With the class of ’68, the first babies of the “baby boom” reached maturity. And they came on the heels of the very small birth cohorts of the thirties and forties, so that they entered what was almost a vacuum. As a result, the graduates of ’68, barely thirty or thirty-one years old in 1978 (1981 note: and not yet middle-aged in 1981) already are moving into leadership positions as assistant vice presidents and assistant treasurers and directors of corporate planning and directors of market research.

They are not yet by and large, in the decision-making jobs (1981 note: but now they are getting into them). But when I sit down with the “decision-makers” in my client companies, large or small, we frequently are joined by a member of the class of ’68, or at least a graduate of approximately that era. “Meet Johnny Jones, our assistant vice president, data processing,” the “big boss” will say. And it is Johnny Jones who has done the homework, who has worked out the agenda, who writes the report afterward, and who then drafts the policy directive for the “decision-maker’s” signature. Increasingly, it is not Johnny Jones but Jane Jones. For the class of ’68 was the first class with women in significant numbers going into business as management trainees rather than as secretaries.

I cannot claim to have made a scientific study. And I admit that my sample is totally unrepresentative. But the young people whom I see in client organizations and, above all, in businesses—the young people who are now moving into these positions just below the top, where they begin to have real impact and influence—seem to have many traits in common. Moreover, they are different, different from what one would expect from the class of ’68, but different also from the middle-aged people from whom they are rapidly taking over.

Contrary to what one would expect, very few—at least among the ones I see in businesses, in hospitals, or in law offices—are in the “soft” areas in business, in personnel, for instance; or in human relations; in environmental affairs; in social responsibility, or even in public relations.

They tend to cluster in the “hard” areas in finance, in accounting, in data processing, in planning, in economic analysis, in market research, and product management. When they come to my office for a day of consulting work, the first thing they put on the table in my conference room is the pocket calculator. They are the first generation for whom the computer is a household pet—neither a threat nor a scientific marvel but a daily tool.

They are not conservatives by such traditional criteria as attitudes on matters of race, creed, or sex. By those yardsticks they are flaming liberals. But they are not liberal in their attitudes toward government and government programs. There they are ultraconservative cynics. They are not isolationists. They are well-traveled and think nothing of taking their vacations cycling through Scotland. But they are not internationalists of the fifties. The Vietnam scars are still raw and bleeding. And development of underdeveloped countries is not a challenge to them.

These young executives of the class of ’68 have very different attitudes toward their careers from those anyone expected of them when they rioted against the “system” ten years ago. They tend to be workaholics. They are excited by their work and expect it to be challenging and demanding. There are very few dropouts among them.

They are, at the same time, intensely ambitious to the point of being pushy. They feel that they have to get to the top very fast if they are going to make it at all. For they feel themselves to be pushed from behind. They are conscious of the fact that the age cohorts behind them are even larger, and will continue to be very large for another twelve years or so, until the babies of the “baby boom” are being succeeded by the babies of the “baby bust” that started in 1960. “You have to be near the top by the time you are thirty-five or you’ll be trampled under,” several of them—men and women—have said to me within the last year when discussing their career expectations.

At the same time, they are definitely not organization men or organization women. They look upon the organization that employs them as their tool. “I think I should stay at my present bank another three years,” one of them said to me when he called me up to tell me that he had been given the vice presidency he was bucking for. “But then I will have gotten as far in commercial banking as I can go; and then I think I should shift into a business and into economic analysis or planning.”

This careful thinking about their own careers is quite typical. There also is a good deal of what can only be called cynicism, though the class of ’68 would call it realism, about inflation and its consequences, about taxes—and tax shelters—and above all about salaries. “We have learned,” a young woman in this group said to me, “always to take a raise in lieu of a promotion, but never to take a promotion in lieu of a raise. If they don’t pay you more money, it isn’t a promotion.”

But the greatest difference between the class of ’68 and their predecessors is in the attitudes toward management. They expect, indeed they demand, high competence from the boss and genuinely professional management from him. They expect that the organization that employs them actually plans and then carries out its plan. They expect it to have a systematic process for making decisions. They expect it to have a rational personnel policy, which includes, for instance, regular and thorough performance reviews.

They expect, in other words, that management be rational and that managers—and, above all, their own bosses in top management—be professional. They are very critical indeed of the management they see, sometimes hypercritical. Not having much experience themselves, they do not perhaps adequately value experience. They value, perhaps overvalue, system and method and plan.

Off the job, a good many of them are “into consciousness raising” and practice TM or attend est seminars. But on the job they expect, indeed demand, professional, systematic, maybe somewhat humorless management. Their main complaint about the “boss”—a complaint every one of them I have met these last three years has voiced, one way or another—is not that the boss is “an old fogey,” “reactionary,” or “stupid”—the complaints of young people before them. It is that the boss does not practice the management he preaches.

(1978)