“Nick, we just finished 1963 all over again, but this time we’re headed in the opposite direction.”
“What do you mean, exactly?”
It was late November, 2003. I was talking to my friend Dr. Richard D. Grant, a psychologist and teacher of Consumer Behavior in the MBA program at the University of Texas in Austin. Like many people, I ponder the events of the year each autumn and try to make sense of it all. In the fall of 2003, I had a nagging sense of déjà vu.
In 1991, twelve years prior to my strange “1963 all over again” proclamation, I had read The Popcorn Report, in which Faith Popcorn suggested, “A trend is a fad that lasts at least ten years.” As those next ten years progressed, the accuracy of her predictions continued to amaze me.
Faith Popcorn’s forecasts evolved exactly as she said they would. When you read The Popcorn Report today, her predictions seem fairly obvious. This is due to what Harvard Business School calls “The Curse of Knowledge”—you can’t imagine not knowing what you know. But if you had read that book in 1991 as I did, those predictions were gutsy, audacious, and profoundly insightful.
In one of her closing chapters, Ms. Popcorn very presciently describes what we now know as e-mail and e-commerce, though she called them ScreenMail and InfoBuying, even though neither had yet been invented. When she coined those words, the average American was completely unaware of connectivity. World Wide Web and Internet were terms that were not yet in the common lexicon. It would be another two years before the average person would begin hearing rumblings about a soon-to-come “Information Superhighway.”1 Even the most forward-thinking technologists weren’t anticipating search engines. In the minds of most people, Faith’s claims of ScreenMail and InfoBuying made her sound like a raving nut.
iStockphoto / contrastaddict
But she was right. I saw these things come to pass. You did too.
Solomon’s writings in Ecclesiastes and the accuracy of Faith Popcorn’s predictions caused me to become sensitive to patterns of events over long periods of time, leading finally to my own November 2003 realization of society’s forty-year Pendulum.
When I explained my theory to Dr. Grant, he pointed me to Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe.2 That book gave me the data that showed me I was on solid ground.
Strauss and Howe described four “generations,” each of which lasts about twenty years. The pattern is:
1. Idealist, followed by
2. Reactive, followed by
3. Civic, followed by
4. Adaptive, then back to Idealist.
However, I was deeply frustrated as I read Generations because I didn’t see four generations of twenty years each, as Strauss and Howe did. I saw two generations of forty years each. Finally, a few hundred pages into the book, Strauss and Howe described the Idealist and the Civic generations as dominant and the Reactive and Adaptive generations as recessive.
iStockphoto / skynesher
That was the moment I began to stitch our two theories together: the “dominant” twenty-year periods mark the upswing of a pendulum and the “recessive” twenty-year periods mark its downswing, as the values that pushed the pendulum upward begin to run out of steam.
Society hungers for individuality and freedom during the upswing of a “Me”—nothing wrong with that. But we always take a good thing too far. What begins as a beautiful dream of self-discovery (1963) ends as hollow, phony posing (1983). And then from the heady heights of those glittering disco lights, our desires drift quietly back to earth, feather-like, toward what we left behind: working together for the common good.
Two weeks later, I sent the following “Monday Morning Memo” to fourteen thousand subscribers:
December 15, 2003: We’re about to finish 1963 for the second time.
Forty years is how long a true “generation” stays in power, during which time social change will be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. But in the waning years of each generation, “Alpha Voices” ring out as prophets in the wilderness, providing a glimpse of the new generation that will soon emerge like a baby chick struggling to break out of its shell.
Prior to 1963, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye were the Alpha Voices that gave us a glimpse of the emerging Baby Boomers. The musical Alphas that rang out five years later (1958) were Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Then, at the tipping point—1963—we encountered the Beatles, followed by the Rolling Stones, and the world began rapidly changing stripe and color. The passing of the torch from the duty-bound WWII generation into the hands of the “Do-Your-Own-Thing” Baby Boomers was officially underway.
AOL and Google are the Kerouac and Salinger of the new generation that will soon pry the torch from the hands of boomers reluctant to let it go. Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley have become Tupac Shakur and Eminem, and the Baby Boomers’ reaction to them is much like their own parents’ reaction to Chuck and Elvis. But instead of saying, “Take a bath, cut your hair, and get a job,” we’re saying, “Pull those pants up, spin that cap around, and wash your mouth out with soap.”
iStockphoto / Photogalia
At the peak of the baby boom, there were seventy-four million teenagers in America, and radio carried a generation on its shoulders. Today there are seventy-two million teenagers who are about to take over the world. Do you understand what fuels their passions? Can you see the technological bonds that bind them?
Baby-boomer heroes were always bigger than life, perfect icons, brash and beautiful: Muhammad Ali, Elvis, James Bond. But the emerging generation holds a different view of what makes a hero.
iStockphoto / Giorgio Magini
Boomers rejected conformity, and their attitude swept the land, changing even the mores of their fuddy-duddy parents. But today’s teens are rejecting pretense. Born into a world of hype, their internal BS meters are highly sensitive and blisteringly accurate. Words like amazing, astounding, and spectacular are translated as “blah,” “blah,” and “blah.” Consequently, tried-and-true selling methods that worked as recently as a year ago are working far less well today. Trust me, I know. The world is again changing stripe and color. We’re at another tipping point. Can you feel it?
No one on earth could read Egyptian hieroglyphics until Napoleon Bonaparte discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799. That stone—nearly four feet tall—told the same story in three different languages. Two of those languages we could read. The third language was hieroglyphics. Armed with insights gained from studying the Rosetta Stone, the wealth of a whole society, ancient Egypt, became available to those who took the time to learn the strange, new language.
iStockphoto / pearleye
If you are concerned about the changes that you see happening all around you, there are basically two things you can do:
1. Pretend that it won’t affect your business. (Let me know how this works out for you.)
2. Search for a Rosetta Stone that will give you a window into the minds of these barbarians at the gate so that in the future at least you’ll know how to do business with them.
Bigstock / Zmrlzna
If you choose option number two, I believe you’ll find the movie 8 Mile starring Eminem, playing himself, to be a pretty good place to start.
Should you choose to read Strauss and Howe’s Generations—and you should—you will notice that our books do not entirely agree. Having come at the same central idea from two different directions, it is reasonable that we should have two different perspectives. And because our book was written twenty years after theirs, Michael and I have had many more years to contemplate, speculate, and investigate this fascinating sociological phenomenon.
With regard to Solomon, Faith Popcorn, William Strauss, and Neil Howe, we can only echo the famous words of Isaac Newton, from a letter written to his friend Robert Hooke on February 5, 1675: If I have seen further than other men, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Thank you, Neil.
Thank you, Faith.
Thank you, Solomon.
You are our giants.
