Foreign.

Welcome to Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about life in consulting.

You're with Ian and with Mike, and together in each episode, we're going to be shining a light on a new topic that that gets to the heart of what makes us consultants happy and successful.

On the Consulting for Humans podcast, it's our mission to add just a little bit more humanity to the life of consultants.

We'd also like to bring some of the skills and perspectives of consulting to human lives, too.

And that means if you're a consultant who's trying to be more of a human, or even a human who's trying to be a little bit more of a consultant, then welcome along because you're our kind of person.

Mike, what are we going to be talking about today?

Today we're going to continue the conversation we started last week about consultants and the generations they come from.

We talked about and amazingly, I can still remember baby boomers last week.

And now it's time to explore the attitudes and perceptions of Gen X of which we have an example on the show today.

Exhibit A, or shall we say Exhibit X.

Arguably the generation that has profited the most from the growth in the consulting industry since the 1990s.

Absolutely.

And my kids and my mortgage.

Thank you all very much.

Well, we're going to explore their attitudes to work and technology, what makes them tick and what bothers them too.

We're also going to look at the ideas and thinkers that Gen X have paid the most attention to and raise a couple of specific examples that we'll pursue in more detail in the Luminary Show.

Fans of Tom Peters, James Collins, Jeffrey Moore, Peter Senge.

This one's going to be for you.

So who are these Generation X people?

Well, oh, indeed, yeah.

So Gen X, Just definitions.

Born between 1965 and 1980, graduated college 1982 to 1997, got hired in a post 80s recession world.

Ah, don't I recall that now in their 50s, Ian.

Sound like anybody we know?

I've got to confess, I'll put my hand up.

Mike.

Check.

Born in 69.

Check.

Graduated in 1991.

Check.

Started my first consulting job for Brits on day one of the Tony Blair government in 1996.

Started my own independent firm of consultants in 2007.

And this will come in later on.

Did not have a personal email address until about 1999.

And that is going to blow the doors off anybody here who's a millennial or a Gen Z.

I did not have a personal email address until I was 30.

There you go.

Well, it kind of blows my mind, Ian, thinking about how used to that I am and then thinking about I didn't have any personal email address until well after I had kids.

I love that as somebody who has perhaps benefited the most, you know, in the generation that benefited the most, I'd love to know that happened in the 90s.

Yeah.

Thinking about consulting as a career, what was appealing to you about consulting and what, what kinds of alternatives were you considering?

Well, I was part of a generation that had, it seems to me anyway, with my perspective now, it seems to me like I had a very narrow, albeit safe range of choices.

As somebody in the graduate into early 20s recruitment market, I and friends of mine were looking at jobs in big blue chip companies, in accounting firms, in the government.

And among those we got attracted into consultancy because we thought that we might be able to be specialists, but also that we'd get big and interesting and consequential problems to solve.

And I got into consulting having seen a recruitment ad for pa, the firm where I worked in, I think the New Scientist.

And we'll get into the intersection of science and business a little bit later on as well.

And I thought, gee, I didn't know that kind of job existed.

I didn't even know you could get paid to do stuff like that.

It sounds like fun.

And I was probably one of many that found their way into consulting in that way.

There were certainly a whole bunch of people of my generation who were super high achieving, looking to get into McKinsey and BCG, et cetera from university.

I don't think I would have quite had the academic jobs to get up there with them, but it was certainly still comfortably a what you might call academic top 5% kind of a career choice.

And the firms that I was trying to get hired on with were looking for people who had in UK speak, Russell Group university credentials, that's kind of Ivy League plus, and had very conventional academic looking, problem solving kind of qualifications, mostly engineering, science, economics, statistics, that kind of stuff.

Now what got us into that career were those very rather conventional looking qualifications was that we saw something like a career path, but a little more varied than with a blue chip organization.

We liked the idea that we could join a big firm and move around.

And that played a lot, I think, into our attitudes to employers and jobs and stuff and still does.

And we were interested in skill building.

We were an ambitious group.

There's a British popular novelist called Julie Cooper who wrote about the kind of different classes of people in British society and she has a class of people that she calls spiralists, people who are ambitious and always move in house and always grading up.

And that was us and that was me for sure.

We were looking to build our skills.

We were looking to grow.

It was a time when it seemed like lots of things were possible.

There were some things that we were blind to, but I think that was what got lots of us into a business like consulting.

It looked like a meritocracy and it looked like it would play to our strengths.

Nice.

It sounds like I heard a couple of values and ideas coming through there and I'm wondering a little bit what values or ideas are important to you, were important to you as part of consulting and maybe which thinkers or authors that you've paid attention to going through this career?

It's a great question, Mike.

For sure there's more to be said about the materialism and ambition of the Gen X generation.

We're going to come back to that later.

But it was a time when it seemed like, you know, careful thought and taking a bigger perspective could always generate another round of revolution in business thinking.

And with a remarkable amount of hubris.

We all thought that we were potential business gurus ourselves.

We thought that we were leading this great big series of revolutions in management thinking.

Hence we liked books like authors like Hammer and Champi.

We like books like the Fifth Discipline by Peter Sanju, which we're going to talk about in Luminaries Crossing the Chasm by Moore.

All of them prompting us encouraging us to think big thoughts and think of big new paradigms and new models which made us probably pompous and boring and self regarding at dinner party conversations.

But it also gave us some confidence like we wanted.

We knew that there were these big jobs to be done.

Big changes, especially technology enabled change was a big part of my generation of consulting.

We needed to get into that with some confidence and feel like we knew which levers we could pull.

And you mentioned technology.

So what role has technology played in your life and how do you perhaps see that differing from other generations?

Well, mate, I've already confessed to not having a personal email address until I was 30 and I think I was pretty ahead of the game.

We had wi fi in our home pretty early.

We all had personal emails pretty early.

I got into smartphones pretty early.

But ours is a generation that by and large might have experienced technology first or most as a work tool.

As a teenager I never had a cell phone.

As a teenager I was not on the Internet.

I kind of dabbled with the idea of dial up bulletin Boards and stuff, but as a strictly nerdy experiment, not as a way of actually driving a big part of my life.

So I'm one of a generation of people who will still seriously probably try to claim that this year's iPhone 15 Pro Max, or whatever it is, is really a professional productivity tool and not an entertainment portal for watching cat videos.

However many cat videos I do actually watch, I still, if you asked me, I would say that my.

My phone is for my work.

And I think we're all like that.

The technology came along as part of our professional lives and it filtered into our personal lives.

And I think for younger generations, technology has always been there, and that has shaped a little bit our attitude to it.

We tend to take it a little bit more seriously than it deserves.

We've probably also been willing to tolerate some of the ridiculousness of what technology has started humans doing, because we think that the personal uses of technology are a distraction, that really it's all about IT systems and banking and finance and information processing and calculations.

It's not anymore.

Well, it's funny, you're making me think back on my use of technology professionally in the early days and when you mentioned dial up, and I remember Dial up, and I remember my Internet provider was a service called Prodigy, and they had these.

They were essentially just a bulletin board service.

And it was of tremendous value for me professionally in consulting because I really didn't care a lot about sports and I didn't know much about sports.

And that was the subject of probably 90% of my small talk with clients was back then.

This is.

I'm talking boomers now.

And Prodigy was great.

I knew all those questions to ask.

I knew the replies to give.

I had the little brief on what the key sports in this area, what the latest events were.

A silly, interesting, fun kind of way that it helped me fill a gap for me professionally right now.

I was actually.

I don't know, the camaraderie of sports was a great thing.

We used all these sports metaphors in delivering consulting reports and stuff like that.

But it was something that I was a little bit.

Kind of, okay, people do this, so it works.

But I was a little skeptical of some of that, although the teaming.

Anyways, I want to ask you, you know, so what or who do you tend to trust and what or who are you skeptical of?

A little bit.

As I leave that topic behind.

It's funny, I think shifts in who do you trust and who you're skeptical of?

I think they've played a big part in the Change in the gener.

And of course none of this is static.

We talked about how the boomers were really loyal to kind of society and to hierarchy in a way.

But you were all pushing back against that right from 1967.

I think that our generation, generation X had a tendency to default to the kind of loyalty that boomers engendered.

But we would be loyal to firms, at least while we were inside them.

I think we appreciated the sense of security that you get from being in a big firm.

And we tended to feel really betrayed whenever firms reorganized or shifted people around or even moved people out because we cared a lot about our economic success.

Because of our spiralist tendencies.

We were highly motivated by targets.

And there's a hangover in that.

Most of my generation solving business problems will look for a way to solve a problem by fiddling with incentives because we think people are driven by incentives, by and large.

So I think we are loyal to firms or we had been.

And we've been having to kind of come to terms with what the identity of yourself as a professional and what firms actually mean.

That's changed.

I think we've been skeptical about the world, encouraged by the people that told us that in business terms we could think big.

We're not yet completely skeptical about the firm.

We're not at all skeptical about ourselves.

We've had to be really self reliant.

And our big weakness is that we think we can change the world.

Oh, it's interesting that think we can change the world.

I wonder.

I know for many generations that's been a constant.

So I look forward as we talk to some other folks to say did that ever change yet?

Although I'm thinking back now about my experience with different generations and I remember when IBM was moving from software hardware to services, including a huge push into consulting, which is part of.

I met IBM in that, in that intersection there.

And we were taking folks from a firm, IBM, who at that point really had not laid people off.

I mean there was this social contract between people and firms that as long as you did well, you had a job for life.

And that was changing.

And interestingly in the mothership there was for a while still that social contract in place.

And in the new services things, particularly in consulting, that was not the case.

You were told specifically it was employment at will.

And a lot of people who could, could not, were not, were not going to be fired in the mothership found themselves transferred to consulting.

And it was fascinating to me, coming from a rah rah consulting background, to watch the Personal reaction to this, people from boomers, from Gen X that they were assumed they were put there to be shot.

And there was this huge pushback against a lot of stuff.

And it took, I remember doing a day of training some folks who were being brought over to say, okay, let's take your phenomenal expertise and your contacts and the relationships and the skills and knowledge and experience you have and talk about how to apply them here.

Boy, people were ugly.

And I finally had a sit down at lunch with some of these folks and I did not realize this dynamic was going on.

I come to IBM as a outside consultant.

I'd been basically acquired and hired in and I never thought about tenure or anything like that there.

That was part of the academic world, not the business world in my mind.

But you know, for them it was so.

Gosh, the thing about the difference in generations and values and skepticism and watching that play out, Amazing, absolutely amazing.

And I think that sort of vulnerability that we had, like we're willing to be loyal, but we perceive that the corporation is likely to want to move us around or get rid of us.

We armored ourselves with all this kind of self reliant stuff.

We were really competitive I think as a generation.

And in well organized meritocracies that meant we could do all kinds, we could move mountains.

But in organizations that let that competitive streak grow, it could be really toxic.

Yeah, and there was a tendency to believe.

I think it's a post Thatcher, post Reagan thing.

I got where I am by the sweat of my brow and by my capabilities, which made us a little bit blind.

And I think that leads me on to another thing that I should probably confess to on behalf of our generation.

I think we were a bit blind about a lack of diversity.

First of all, by the way, we were mostly male.

Yeah, we thought that globalization was a good thing, but we thought global approximately equated to international and international approximately equated to some Americans, some British, Europeans and a few Japanese.

And that was all that our firm and our clients and our outlook needed to represent.

This was before the days of large scale offshoring, the growth of the tiger economies of South Asia and Far East Asia in terms of their contribution to tech and to consulting and to professional services and everything else.

And that that was a sea change that was happening, kind of shifting under our feet.

And I think of meeting rooms that I sat in, the late 90s and early noughties and how pale and male we all were.

And I think of the meeting rooms, mostly virtual meeting rooms that I sit in now and how diverse they are.

That's been a big change and I welcome it.

But I bet that we have all sometimes had to realize for ourselves that, hey, I've.

I thought I was here by the virtue of my own character, but actually, I'm a bit out on a limb here.

I'm here by the virtue of some selections that were made for me earlier on.

So that's another shift that I think has been going on.

And it'll be interesting to hear what our millennial and Gen Z correspondents can tell us about their attitudes to that.

Well, I know for me personally, it gave me a great competitive advantage, some of those changes, because I was hiring to fill out a new global practice that was growing incredibly quickly.

Yeah.

And I found a real shortcut to getting great talent.

I would be confronted with a choice between perhaps a man and a woman, both of whom had really impressive backgrounds.

And I started defaulting to the women because they had impressive backgrounds.

They had reached the same level.

But I thought, wow, what it took to get here.

I said woman.

But I could apply the same thinking to hiring around the world, because we were building practices around the world and looking at the fact that there were a lot of overlooked people of great skill.

And it was like, oh, my gosh, you got some phenomenal, phenomenal folks, because you could.

There was a chance to essentially work that arbitrage, if you will, for a while that disappeared over time.

But for a while, that was almost a bet that I think paid off 90% of the time.

It was great.

It was great.

I'm thinking back now, too, and about that around the world and thinking how many nights that I spent on overnight flights and not in hotels going from one of these to another.

And consulting's traditionally been associated with kind of this long or unpredictable working hours.

What role does work life balance play in how you think about work?

And how important are manageable working hours in that balance?

Well, it's true, we were certainly a generation that was beginning to be aware of the importance of work life balance.

But for lots of us, I think it was honoured in the breach rather than the observance.

We still were dominated, I think, by this idea that we're in a meritocracy, but it's very competitive and we have to keep kind of swimming along like a shark.

So we tended to work long hours and we were pretty sure that the person next to us or the person in the next room might have been working longer hours than we were.

I remember at various points, semi proudly telling people that there was not an hour on the clock face when I had not at some point lately been awake and doing something for work.

I think we were all as a generation and we are still now asking ourselves questions about work, life, balance.

And as we got families, as we got other commitments, we started to look at that differently.

I'm not going to say successfully, but differently.

We'd lived through recession like we all remembered the Thatcher Reagan era, the 80s recession and the early 90s, the big economic collapse in Southeast Asia.

We all remembered the big economic changes behind that.

And we were trying to be self reliant and we were trying hard to think about transferable skills and how to give ourselves some security.

And we knew as well that we were competing a bit like the boomers were with people educated in the same places and with the same social background and probably with similar qualifications.

And we were looking for differentiation.

And sometimes that was a great thing for us in terms of what it caused us to think and do and to grow.

But I think sometimes it made us a bit defensive and a bit over competitive as well.

How does that shake out, Ian, in terms of like professional goals and your personal goals, if you will?

All of this is generalization, right?

I'm partly telling my life story, but I'm also partly trying to reflect what I've seen of the life stories of the people that I've worked with.

And I'll give myself a pass personally from this next one, but it's certainly what I saw, especially among males.

I think we saw as a virtue that we were able to pursue professional goals in the earlier middle parts of our career and postpone or sublimate personal goals until the later parts, until some perhaps real or perhaps fictional moment when we could say that we'd made it.

Hence you've got the cliche of the idea of a partner in a service firm being someone who's made it, suddenly switching on the taps of all their personal desires and accomplishments.

And the cliche of a partner in a professional services firm being a middle aged man with a Harley Davidson and a windsurfer and a Winnebago and an expensive guitar.

So I suspect that millennials prefer, and I suspect that Gen Z more or less insist that it's their right to keep pursuing their personal goals early and all the way through their careers.

And I applaud them for it and I'm right with them, but I think it is a difference between the generations.

And we probably all think that we've made our choices right and fairly for what we were trying to achieve and we were doing it in the name of something, but I think we were all also kidding ourselves a little bit.

Well, at least you guys were thinking about personal goals.

Yeah, exactly.

I shudder to think how many boomers were like, yeah, you actually had to check that box.

You had to have a, a personal life because there was something wrong with you if you didn't.

But you know what, let's just keep that out of the workplace unless there's a, like a Christmas party or something, because 24 hours a day you're ours.

And you know, if you're not, then you could be at home as well.

So at least you guys were struggling a little.

You guys, listen to me.

At least your generation was struggling a little bit more with that.

Yes.

So if there was one thing that you wish you could change about the attitude of another generation that you encounter at work, and it can be any of them, you know, boomers to Gen X's to millennials to Gen Zs, what would it be?

That's a really good question.

Part of me says, I don't want to change anybody else's attitude.

I'll indulge in a prejudice for just a second.

And I'm aware that it sounds like another old guy going, oh, kids these days.

But actually, Mike, seriously, kids these days, honestly, here's the thing that I sometimes wish, and it relates a little bit to not just to hours, but to ethic of work.

Sometimes I'm kidding myself, but sometimes I am sincerely trying to do something that I think is going to make me or the team successful so that we'll all be here next quarter.

And sometimes if I work a little longer, not ridiculously unproductive, but if I work a little longer, I'd like the folks around me to see that and go, okay, we're all trying to do a thing together here.

And that there is a collective success that we can all be affiliated with.

And the professional services, like my generation can really see the clear line between getting the thing done, getting it done well enough, and on time, getting it turned over to the client, the client being happy, the client paying the bill, and us being around to do another one in a couple of months time.

And we were probably too willing to work late into the night to make sure all those bits of that straight line happened.

But I would love just to be sure that I could see the light, the same light in the eyes of my millennial and Gen Z colleagues as well.

And that goes with love and apologies to all my hard working Gen Z and millennial friends out there, including my family members.

But you asked me what would I most like to change?

That's the thing that I think it might be nice to change.

Nice.

Yeah.

It's funny.

And I wish that.

I don't know if I spoke to this last time or not, but that I wish that we could have changed on behalf of boomers, and probably boomers with boomers and boomers with Gen Xs, really defining when that was required.

The whole idea of what was an emergency, I mean, it was always, every day, every night.

It was a badge of honor, and that was ridiculous.

And if we could somehow have earlier differentiated between when we really needed to do that and when we didn't and when good was good enough, that it would have made a difference for all of us.

Final question, Ian.

What are you most enjoying or appreciating about your consulting career?

That could be, looking back.

Could be now.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I'm.

I feel very lucky that having gone out of the corporate world of consulting and into being an independent, I get to be.

I could pretend to be a little bit of a millennial and a little bit even of a Gen Z in the way that I'm balancing professional and personal things in the way that all the different kinds of fulfillment that brings.

So I feel super, super privileged and super lucky to be able to do all of that.

What am I looking forward to?

Oh, by the way, what do I appreciate that has changed in my career?

Unquestionably, the higher quality of digital devices available to me that I can write off for tax purposes.

That has been a big pro, I'm not going to lie.

Okay.

Meanwhile, what am I looking forward to?

I'm looking forward to keep doing the same, and I'm looking forward to finding a way.

Here I am in my mid-50s, to be able to very gently slow down the rate of activity and overstimulation and keep the level of fulfillment.

And as long as the days and the weeks go by that I can still enjoy turning my mind to something new and turning my skills to something new and developing.

Like, I'm looking forward to keeping doing that.

And I hope I can keep my body and my brain healthy enough to keep doing that for a long, long time, because I'm pretty sure the world is going to realize at some point that we Gen X's, we still know a thing or two, and we don't mind staying an extra hour to make sure the PowerPoint slides are looking good.

Well, I certainly join in that wish.

I hope that wish gets fulfilled.

Speaking as a boomer, I hope that same thing that one day people will think back to there is still something that they have to offer and if you listen to them ramble long enough, they might get around to it if they can remember it at least from the boomer side.

Actually, the other thing about Gen X's is if you go poke around in the garage, you'll find all kinds of expensive stuff that they've put to one side.

So.

Isn'T it always so?

Well, everybody, first of all, thank you for being our Exhibit X today.

Yeah.

And we're looking forward to some Exhibit Millennials Y's and Exhibit Z's coming up on future shows of the Consulting for Humans podcast.

But don't forget our Luminaries episode this week is going to be looking back at influential Gen X thinking.

We're going to actually step back to boomers for a minute and look back at In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman.

We're going to call that now rather than last week, because we're going to be looking ahead at Gen X.

Like Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, which was a an overcoming or moving on from In Search of Excellence.

And Ian's kind of favorite from the Gen X era, the Fifth Discipline by Peter Sange.

Yeah, excellent.

Can't wait for that.

Thank you, Mike, for the chance to chat about myself and my generation.

Thank you everybody for listening.

We're looking forward to being with you again.

Next time on the Consulting for Humans podcast.