I rarely take the time to read the “Business Life” section of the Financial Times.  It’s the one section that I consider “soft” fluff journalism in a newspaper that usually prints high-quality “hard” news.   (I see little value in reading about water cooler etiquette, new standards of office political correctness, and the “next new thing” MBA buzzwords that sound remarkably similar to the previous batch of “next new thing” MBA buzzwords…I got more than enough of this drivel in grad school, thank you very much.)

At any rate, in scanning the section, I did come across an interesting and worthwhile article on the interaction in the workplace between the Baby Boomers and their children, the Echo Boomers (or Gen Y).   In “A to Z of Generation Y Attitudes,” Alison Maitland analyzes reports by the US Center for Work-Life Policy and London Business School titled “Bookend Generations” and “The Reflexive Generation,” respectively, and finds that the Echo Boomers, despite all of their supposed tech sophistication, are not too unlike the Baby Boomers.  Both generations tend to be rather unorthodox and free thinking relative to Generation X, the much smaller generation sandwiched between them.   The attitudes of Generation X tend to be more conventional, as their smaller numbers naturally make them more conformist.

In this sense, the coming years will be defined by “bookend” dynamics in which the both the older Boomers and the younger Echo Boomers will set the social and career standards with Gen X being lost in the middle.

Charles Sizemore, CFA

Co-author of the recently-published Boom or Bust: Understanding and Profiting from a Changing Consumer Economy