CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Baby-Boom Problems

THERE HAVE BEEN REPORTS recently that several management consulting firms are offering starting salaries of up to $60,000 a year to top MBA graduates of prestige business schools. Pity the suckers who swallow such bait. Five years hence many are quite likely to find themselves frustrated, defeated, and embittered. And they may then be lucky to find a $30,000 job by way of promotion.

Fancy starting salaries may be tempting to the young graduate and seem like a good way for the firm to gain attention for itself. They may even be justified in some cases. But more than ever the job applicant and the employer need to be taking a close look at what is really being offered.

The class of 1979 wasn’t the last class of the “baby boom” years to reach adulthood. Five more such classes are still ahead of us. But the class of ’79 may have been the first one to find that the bases ahead of them were loaded.

The very early birth cohorts of the baby boom were thirty years old in 1979. They are assistant vice presidents or even vice presidents in big banks and large companies; associate professors and high school principals in the field of education; deputy administrators in hospitals or public agencies. But they are also, in many cases, at or close to their terminal jobs. The newcomers, the baby cohorts born in the late 1950s and now entering the executive training process, may find that every rung on the ladder ahead of them is occupied.

Earlier baby boom cohorts had it different. They entered the job market when the executive groups in most fields were getting to be overaged. They also reached adulthood at a time when the economy was expanding rapidly. The result was that they were sucked into high positions at a fast clip.

It used to take twenty-five years in a respectable bank to become assistant vice president; in the late sixties and early seventies one reached that position in three or four years. Similarly, it used to take twenty years in a major university to reach full professor; in the sixties and early seventies it often took only five or ten. When I joined the faculty of a major business school in 1949 I was, at age forty, the “baby” of the faculty and the youngest full professor. When I left twenty-two years later, in 1971, the place was full of able and accomplished teachers with full tenure in their late twenties and early thirties.

But the same demographics that made for fast progress in earlier years are going to slow down the ones now entering the job market. The path to rapid advancement will be blocked by people who are just as well educated but only a little older—people who will be on the job for another twenty-five to thirty-five years.

For the ones now entering the executive job market—the ones who are being offered high salaries—there is thus a huge and widening gap between their expectations and the reality they will encounter. What they expect, quite understandably, is modeled after the experience of their older brothers, sisters, and cousins. After all, they are at least as well educated, just as ambitious, just as bright and eager. It’s not their fault they were born five years later.

There is need for them to realize that they will have to take control of their own careers far more carefully than their older brothers and sisters. There will be little room for error. They will have to think through at each stage where they really belong; where their strengths can produce results and will be recognized and rewarded; where their temperaments best fit.

Above all, they will have to accept that only continued self-development and advanced education can make them stand out—and they will be lost in the ruck unless they make themselves stand out.

The challenge may be greater for the employers. I am not sure that it still makes much sense to do intensive college recruiting—there is a good deal to be said (especially for the smaller company) in favor of looking for slightly older (and sadly disenchanted) people available for their second job. But surely employers will have to change drastically what they now promise the graduate. They won’t be able to deliver the rapid promotion they are still holding out as bait.

More important—and more difficult—they will have to restructure jobs for the young. In the last twenty years we have tended to make entrance jobs smaller and smaller and less demanding; we had to get young people ready for promotions fast. Now we will have to structure jobs on the assumption that even a capable and hard-working person may have to spend many years on or near the entrance level. Early assignments will have to be made more demanding and more challenging; the ambitious young person must have an opportunity to achieve—or to fail.

In the last fifteen years the main emphasis in many organizations has not been on the job at all but on promotions: When will the new employee be ready to move up? This was shortsighted even when promotions were plentiful; even then, most employees weren’t moving up. Promotions have always been the exception and now the emphasis will be back where it belongs: on the job. This will mean drastic changes in incentives, appraisals, job structure, and manager development.

But, above all, there is need to counsel the young. There is need to make sure they have someone to whom they can talk in the organization, if only to unburden themselves. There is need of someone who is concerned with the problem of the young getting to the place in the organization—or outside the organization, for that matter—where their strengths are most likely to be productive and recognized.

There is need for someone who realizes that the young, through no fault of their own or ours, are going to have it tough in the coming years.

(1979)