Introduction: Why This Book Needed to Be Written

Greetings and congratulations! By choosing to buy or steal this book, you have made an incredible decision, one that is going to help you address some of the most fundamental issues currently affecting your professional life. In a few short chapters, we discuss all of the following:

• How to more effectively motivate your youngest employees to avoid high turnover

• How to prevent your oldest employees from coasting their way into retirement

• Why your career might not be advancing as fast as you think it should and what you can do about it

• How to frame changes to your business in language that everyone can understand and get on board with

• Why many of your colleagues think differently than you and what you can learn from them

• How to build and maintain a corporate culture that will inspire enthusiasm, loyalty, and a higher level of productivity from everyone

This is a book for professionals at every level: managers, employees, young workers, older workers, C-suite executives, students of business management and human resources, and even jobseekers. It might even help parents understand their children better—and vice versa. If you’ve ever had problems with people who were either significantly older or younger than you, this book is going to make your life happier and easier.

But maybe you haven’t bought or stolen this book yet. Maybe you’re standing just outside an airport bookstore, suitcase in one hand and a bagel sandwich in your mouth while you search for something to help you kill time until you can finally board your next flight. If that’s the case, then at this point you might be wondering, “Why should I buy this book? Why should I even bother stealing it? I’ve already read a few books about generational issues at work. How is this one going to be any different?”

Those are great questions, and I’m glad you hypothetically asked. There are indeed thousands of books on generational issues. So how is this book different? Because the current prevailing conversation about generational issues in the workplace is a needlessly complicated and profoundly un helpful way to look at the subject. The goal of this book is twofold: first, to undo several decades of bad practice regarding generational differences in the workplace; second, to put the generational issues you’re currently facing into a simple framework that will remain eminently sensible, immediately actionable, and relentlessly relevant for the rest of your life. We don’t talk about how to “manage Millennials” or “get along with your Boomer bosses.” We discuss strategies that will help you resolve every generational issue you will ever face. That’s what this book is going to do.

But first, let me take a step back. I’ve been using the word book to describe what you’re reading, but I realize that might not be the right word. It’s possible that you’re holding an actual book, and if you are, it’s most likely because you like the feel of a real book or because nobody has ever bought you an e-reader.

It’s also possible, however, that you’re reading this on your tablet, or on your phone, or on the computer monitor that has recently been implanted in your eyeball. If that’s the case, I’m sorry for using the word book so often. In case you don’t know, they were kind of like papyrus scrolls that didn’t need to be rolled up when you finished. You might have accidentally seen one in the mall on your way to the Apple store. Indeed, it’s largely because I don’t know how you’re looking at these words that these words needed to be written.

Now ordinarily this would be the part of a book about generational issues where I should say something like, “The world of today is a lot different than it used to be.” I’m fairly certain you’ve heard this sentence a hundred thousand times. And on the surface, it almost sounds like a useful thing to say. After all, when I grew up, there were approximately 12 channels of television,¹ and if you wanted to call someone on the phone you had to actually know his or her phone number. How anyone ever got hold of anybody is a total mystery. Now the entire corpus of human knowledge is in your pocket wherever you go, and you can become a millionaire by making weird movies alone in your basement.

¹ Along with a U channel that never seemed to do anything. Why were you there, U? What was your dark and mysterious purpose?

So obviously things are different now, and that’s what I’m supposed to tell you right here. Then I’m supposed to point out that those differences are causing you to ask questions you never thought you would have to ask yourself—questions such as

• How do I inspire loyalty in my employees when the very idea of employee loyalty seems to no longer exist?

• How long can my current business model survive when things seem to be changing literally every second?

• Are young people today really less motivated than they were in my time, or am I being unfair?

• Why do some people insist on sticking with outdated practices when there are new and better things coming out every day?

There are just three problems with that approach. First, the “things are different now” argument is implicitly speaking to older workers about younger workers. In fact, that’s what most books about generational issues do, which is why most books about generational issues are really, really annoying.

Summary of Far Too Many Generational Books, Keynotes, and Articles

“Today’s young people are different. Deal with it.”

Predictably, this “message” only serves to make every older person even more resistant to the idea of looking at the world from another point of view because there is absolutely no hint of a compromise. I’ve sat in on those talks before and listened to multiple audience members say some version of the following: “Why should I have to be the only one making any changes? I’m employing them; why don’t they have to deal with the way I like to do things?” Which, by the way, is exactly how you should feel when the message you’re receiving is “Deal with it.”

Resolving generational differences will never, never work if any one group of people feel like they’re the only ones who have to make any concessions.²

² And just in case you doubt the truth of this statement, go tell your spouse that from now on you’re done listening to his or her thoughts and ideas. You are no longer going to make any concessions to his or her feelings and aspirations because from now on your word is law. Give it a shot! I’ll buy you a drink when you get kicked out.

The second problem with this approach is that the “things are different now” argument is wildly misleading, albeit unintentionally so. By saying things are different now, there is the implication that what we’re experiencing today is somehow unique in human history, that this is the first time things have truly been different from one generation to the next. But that simply isn’t true. The rise of computers and the Internet is the defining difference of our time. They have presented us with a massive shift in the way the world operates, and we talk throughout this book about the different effects that the Internet in particular, and our technological revolution in general, have had on the people who established themselves before their advent and those who were born and raised entirely under their influence. But the fact of something new coming along and creating a schism between people of different ages is a fairly common occurrence. You could say the same for the British Invasion and its effect on generational attitudes in the 1960s, the automobile and its effect on people during the Gilded Age, or the printing press and how it polarized Europeans in the late 1400s. Simply saying “things are different now” doesn’t help resolve anything because the differences we’re facing now aren’t affecting generational tensions in a fundamentally distinct way from what has happened multiple times in the past.

And the third problem, which is related to the second, is that the questions you’re probably asking yourself today—Why do your younger colleagues seem to be so capricious and disloyal? Why do some of your older colleagues seem so stuck in their ways? and so on—are the same questions people have always asked. In almost every way, the generational issues you’re facing today are the same issues that have plagued the professional world for centuries. The vast majority of today’s conversation about generational issues encourages the attitude that the problems you’re dealing with are novel and therefore require novel solutions. For years you’ve been told that there are four teams competing against each other, that we have somehow evolved into a multi generational workplace. But that simply isn’t true. It isn’t true now, and it’s never been that way. Since the dawn of civilization, there have only ever been two generations. It’s always been Us vs. Them.

Fundamentally, our world is a world of human beings and the interactions between us. Throughout all of recorded human history, technology has always changed things, and so have political decisions and local economics and global trade and cultural attitudes. It’s important to understand what today’s issues are so that we can address them with the right tools instead of trying to solve today’s problems with strategies and attitudes that are designed for the world of 50 or 100 or 3,000 years ago. For that reason, a portion of our discussion will focus on computers and the Internet and 24/7 media and the various effects those institutions have had.

But those discussions will be a minority of what this book is. If you want to successfully navigate the world today, tomorrow, or at any other time in your life, the most important thing to do is not to understand what the issues are but rather why the people around you are acting and reacting the way they are. Fortunately, those answers are rooted in basic human psychology, which has done us the favor of staying more or less constant since our cave-dwelling days. So by the end of this book, I guarantee that you will know everything you need to know in order to understand the different motivations of everyone you work with, whether they’re 18 or 88. That might sound like a bold statement, and it is. But as you’ll see, there aren’t many differences that separate us from one another. So if you want to have happier, healthier, more productive relationships with everyone you work with—and if you want to have a happier, healthier, and more productive career as a result—then this book will give you exactly what you need.

To put this another way: Most generational books make the issue more complicated than it needs to be, and Us vs. Them will make it simple again.

However, I realize that parts of this book come dangerously close to reading like a treatise, and I certainly don’t want to bore you. Those of you who have seen my keynote presentations, read my other books, or participated in our various training programs know that I always make a particular effort to be as entertaining as possible, and so I promise I’ll be doing the same in this book. You’ll end up getting a lot of answers, but you’ll also get to laugh while you read this. I know it’s not supposed to be that way; you’re supposed to read this book because somebody gave it to you or because you want to impress your boss or because every so often you have trouble getting to sleep and business books are often better than Valium or cyanide or whatever pill you usually take at night. But I figured you might forgive me if I decided to do everything possible to make this discussion as entertaining as possible. I’m doing this in part because of a recent groundbreaking survey, which discovered that people enjoy fun things more than boring things.

So let’s first prove that you actually do have some issues with people from a different generation than your own because you might be reading this and thinking, “I admit that there are generational tensions where I work, but I don’t personally harbor any negative stereotypes about people from different generations than my own. I am a paragon of objectivity.”

If this describes you, then let me just say two things: First, I doubt you thought the word paragon. And second, you’re a big fat liar. And I will prove it to you with a pair of thought experiments.

So, which one did you pick? Oh, wait, that was a trick question!!!! Because I know you chose C. It’s the only choice that makes any sense. And although I’ll admit you probably don’t treat your younger colleagues and employees in quite this fashion, I’m also confident you have occasionally viewed them and their ideas with varying levels of dismissal and disbelief.

But wait—there’s more!

And the winner is C again! You know what you would do in that situation probably because you’ve almost certainly been in that position already. And again, I’ve hyperbolized because it’s entertaining to do so, but I’m certain you’ve experienced some amount of frustration with the speed, style, and sheer stubbornness of your older colleagues and employees.

Here, in a nutshell, is what you’re going to find in Us vs. Them:

• We begin by destroying once and for all the four-generation model and replace it with an easier and more intuitive two-generation model.

• You learn to which generation you belong, as well as the common stereotypes each generation harbors about the other.

• We then discuss each of those stereotypes in turn, focusing specifically on why each generation thinks and behaves the way it does and how that knowledge will help you construct a true compromise between both generations that everyone will not only understand but also agree is a workable strategy.

I want to thank you for choosing to read this book. It’s becoming something of an obsession of mine to simplify the current confusion revolving around generational issues in the workplace. We sometimes like to make things more difficult than they need to be, and doing so is rarely in our best interests. So I’m hopeful you’ll walk away from Us vs. Them with an approach to your own generational tensions at work that will be profoundly and permanently successful.

So what are you waiting for? Turn the page or swipe left or do a downscroll eyeblink, and let’s get going!