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hbr.org
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July–August 2007
 
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Harvard Business Review
41
URING THE MIDDLE AGES,
travelers reported an unusualcustom among villagers in central France. Whenever anevent of local importance occurred, the elders boxed theears of a young child to make sure he remembered thatevent all his life.Like those medieval villagers, each of us carries deeply felt as-sociations with various events in our lives. For Americans, PearlHarbor, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the
Challenger
 explosion, and
9/11
are burned into our consciousness; it is im-possible to forget what we were doing at the time. As we growolder, we realize that the sum total of such events has in manyways made us who we are. Exactly
how
they affected us is relatedto how old we were when they occurred.
The Next 20 Years:
How Customerand Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve
Generations are among the most powerful forces in history. Tracking their marchthrough time lends order – and even a measure of predictability – to long-term trends.
by Neil Howe and William Strauss
D
BIG PICTURE
   M  a   t   t   V   i  n  c  e  n   t
 
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Harvard Business Review
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July–August 2007
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hbr.org
MANAGING FOR THE LONG TERM
 
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BIG PICTURE
 
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The Next 20 Years
This is what constitutes a generation:It is shaped by events or circumstancesaccording to which phase of life its mem- bers occupy at the time. As each gen-eration ages into the next phase – from youth to young adulthood to midlife toelderhood – its attitudes and behaviorsmature, producing new currents in thepublic mood. In other words, peopledo not “belong” to their age brackets.A woman of 40 today has less in com-mon with 40-year-old women acrossthe ages than with the rest of her gener-ation, which is united by memories, lan-guage, habits, beliefs, and life lessons.Generations follow observable his-torical patterns and thus offer a verypowerful tool for predicting futuretrends. To anticipate what 40-year-oldswill be like 20 years from now, don’tlook at today’s 40-year-olds; look attoday’s 20-year-olds.People of a given age may vary quitedramatically from era to era. Recall, forexample, Sproul Hall at UC Berkeleyin 1964 and the students wearing com-puter punch cards that proclaimed“I Am a Student! Do Not Fold, Spindle,or Mutilate!” They were mocking theautomated treatment the universitywas supposedly giving them. In the years after World War II, Americans hadgrown used to the Silent Generation’sconformist college students. Now a newgeneration was arriving: the baby boomraised in the aftermath of the war. Bythe end of the 1960s these confronta-tional, megaphone-toting students hadlaunched a “consciousness revolution”to demand that their war-hero elderslive up to higher moral standards.Twenty years later U.S. campusesexperienced another surprising shift.The
Wall Street Journal
noted in 1990,“It is college presidents, deans, andfaculties – not students – who are thezealots and chief enforcers of PoliticalCorrectness.” This batch of students,Generation X, was born during the con-sciousness revolution. The children of divorce, latchkeys, and ad hoc day care,they showed much less ideological pas-sion than their elders and brought a newpragmatism to the nation’s campuses.Today graying college leaders on the verge of retirement continue to carrythe ideological torch, crusading for vari-ous causes in ways that often irritatetheir younger Gen X colleagues. Mean-while, undergraduates are showing yet another generational personality:The members of this rising MillennialGeneration tend to be upbeat, team-oriented, close to their parents, andconfident about their future. UnlikeBoomers, they do not want to “teachthe world to sing.” Unlike Gen Xers, theydon’t “just do it” – they plan ahead.Rather than puzzling over why 20- year-olds were self-absorbed moralizersin the 1960s but are busy and risk-averseachievers today, one must recognizethem as members of distinct genera-tions. To learn why they (or any twogenerations) are different, one can lookat how they were raised as children,what public events they witnessed inadolescence, and what social missionthey took on as they came of age.Our focus as scholars has been onunderstanding generational personaeand how they come together in soci-ety to create a national character thatcontinually evolves as new generationsemerge and old ones pass away. Thiswould be a fascinating studyeven if it were solely for thepurposes of historical un-derstanding. But its value isfar greater than that. Whatwe have found is that gen-erations shaped by similarearly-life experiences oftendevelop similar collective personaeand follow similar life trajectories. Thepatterns are strong enough to supporta measure of predictability. Historicalprecedent makes it possible to foreseehow the generations alive today willthink and act in decades to come.In this article we will share somehighlights of our ongoing effort to do just that. For businesspeople who man-age operations or sell products in theUnited States, the analysis offered herehas enormous implications for strate-gic planning, brand positioning, andmanagement of the workplace. (More broadly, of course, it informs discus-sions of war and peace and America’scapacity to face its most difficult chal-lenges.) For executives in other coun-tries, the analysis suggests insightsthat might also be gained in their partsof the world: the insights that comefrom seeing change through the lensof generations.
The Generational Constellation
Any society is the sum of its parts – thegenerations that coexist at that mo-ment in time. America today combinessix. (Nineteen generations have come of age since the time of the
 Mayflower,
inthe 1620s. See the exhibit “America as aSequence of Generations” for details.)
The GI Generation
(born 1901–1924,now age 83–106) arrived after the GreatAwakening of the late nineteenth cen-
Neil Howe
(howe@lifecourse.com) and
William Strauss
(strauss@lifecourse.com) arethe authors of
Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 
(1991),
The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy 
(1997), and
Millennials Rising: The Next Great Gen- eration
(2000), among other books, and are the founding partners of LifeCourse Associates,a publishing, speaking, and consulting company in Great Falls, Virginia. Visit hbr.org for addi-tional analysis by the authors regarding how current generations will rise to a national crisis.
Rather than puzzling over why 20-year-olds were self-absorbedmoralizers in the 1960s but are busy and risk-averse achievers today,one must recognize them as members of distinct generations.
 
hbr.org
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July–August 2007
 
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Harvard Business Review
43
tury. Zealously protected by Progressive-era parents, its members enjoyed a“good kid” reputation and accountedfor the sharpest rise in school achieve-ment ever recorded. As young adults,they were the first Miss Americas andall-American athletes. In midlife they built up the postwar “affluent society,”erecting suburbs, inventing miracle vaccines, plugging missile gaps, andlaunching moon rockets. Though theydefended stable families and conven-tional mores, no generation in the his-tory of polling got along worse withits own children. They were greatly in- vested in civic life, and focused moreon actions and behavior than on valuesand beliefs. Their unprecedented gripon the presidency (1961 through 1992) began with the New Frontier, the GreatSociety, and Model Cities, but encom-passed Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra,and budget deficits. As “senior citizens”(a term popularized to describe them),the GIs safeguarded their “entitlements” but had little influence over culture and values. Early in this century they werehonored with memorials, films, and books. Roughly half of those still aliveare in dependent care.
The Silent Generation
(born 1925–1942, now age 65–82) grew up as theseen-but-not-heard Little Rascals andShirley Temples of the Great Depres-sion and World War II. Its memberscame of age just too late to be war he-roes and just too early to be youthfulfree spirits. Instead they became, like James Dean, “rebels without a cause,”part of a “lonely crowd” of risk-aversetechnicians in an era in which earlymarriage, the invisible handshake, andclimbing the career ladder seemed toguarantee success. As gray-flannel con-formists, they accepted the institutionalcivic life and conventional culture of the GIs until the mid-1960s, when theystopped taking their cues from thosehigher up on the age ladder and startedlooking down – following Bob Dylan’slead (“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”). They becameAmerica’s leading civil-rights activists,rock and rollers, antiwar leaders, femi-nists, public-interest lawyers, and men-tors for young firebrands. They wereAmerica’s moms and dads during thedivorce epidemic. They rose to politicalpower after Watergate, their congres-sional behavior characterized by a pushtoward institutional complexity and a vast expansion of the legal process. Todate they are the first generation neverto elect a U.S. president or to appoint achief justice of the Supreme Court. Aselders, they have focused on discussion,inclusion, and process (as with the IraqStudy Group’s list of 79 recommenda-tions) but not on decisive action. Ben-efiting more than other generationshave or will from ample late-in-life pay-outs (defined-benefit pensions, retireehealth care, golden parachutes), theyhave entered retirement with a hip life-style and unprecedented affluence.
The Boom Generation
(born 1943–1960, now age 47–64) began as feed-on-demand Dr. Spock babies. Theywere the indulged products of postwaroptimism, Tomorrowland rationalism,and a
 Father Knows Best 
family order.Though community spirit was strongduring their youth, the older genera-tions were determined to raise youngpeople who would never follow a Hitler,a Stalin, or a Big Brother. Coming of age, Boomers loudly proclaimed theirscorn for the secular blueprints of theirparents – institutions, civic participa-tion, and team playing – while seekinginner life, self-perfection, and deepermeaning. The notion of a melting pot,the full-time mom, the suburbs and bigauto at home, and the troops and dom-ino theory abroad all came under theirwithering criticism. During the Boom-ers’ youth, crime rates, substance abuse,and sexual risk taking all surged whileacademic achievement and SAT scoresfell. The consciousness revolution cli-maxed with Vietnam War protests,the Summer of Love (1967), the Demo-cratic convention in Chicago (1968),
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