15 Apr
20 Nov
A new post-generational workforce known as “perennials” will make it possible to liberate scores of people from the constraints of the sequential model of life.
BMW is one of the world’s most recognizable brands, the maker of “the ultimate driving machine.” While Ford became famous for the moving assembly line and Toyota for its participatory work methods, the German firm usually made the headlines thanks to technical breakthroughs. Over the years, BMW’s legendary engineering prowess yielded innovations such as the hydraulic front fork to absorb the shock when riding a motorcycle over a bump, the eight-cylinder alloy engine, the electronically controlled antilock braking system, and the fully fledged thoroughbred electric car.
These days, however, BMW is turning heads by pioneering the workplace, where as many as five generations of people collaborate and bring to the table their unique skills and perspectives. They have redesigned factories and the various sections within them so that several generations of workers feel comfortable toiling together, leading to productivity increases and higher job satisfaction.
BMW’s parent plant is located north of Munich, the capital of Bavaria. “Approximately 8,000 employees from over 50 countries work at this site, 850 of whom are trainees,” reads the company’s website. “Every day, around 1,000 automobiles and about 2,000 engines are manufactured here, the plant being closely integrated into the Group’s global production network.”
The multigenerational workplace seems at first sight to be a recipe for cultural misunderstanding, friction, and conflict. Many people believe that generations are motivated by different aspects of the job like satisfaction, money, or employee benefits. They also differ in terms of their attitudes toward technology. For example, younger generations prefer to communicate via text messages and videos, while others use face-to-face modes more frequently. That’s why so many companies, including BMW, were once reluctant to mix different generations on the shop floor or the office. However, there are distinct advantages to having several generations collaborate with one another. BMW noticed that more mature workers may gradually lose mental agility and speed, but use other resources to fix problems, often based on experience.
The relationship between age and workplace performance, however, is not a straight line. Researchers at the Ohio State University were stunned to find that creativity peaks when people are in their twenties and again in their fifties. The reason, they discovered, is that early in working life, people rely on cognitive ability alone, but as their brains slow down, they figure out how to use their experience to compensate for the decline. The different abilities of people at different ages is what persuaded BMW to integrate generations into the same workplace. They found that age-diverse work groups offered both speed and fewer mistakes. “A multigenerational team offers a diversified way of looking at a project or problem,” argues Helen Dennis, a specialist on the topic. “The more thoughts you have, the greater the advantage you have to accomplish your objective.
The growing potential of the multigenerational workplace challenges the traditional way in which we think about people of different ages and what we can do and accomplish at various points in life. We frequently hear people say, “I’m too young for that job,” or “I’m too old to learn a new gig.” When universal schooling and “old-age” pensions were first introduced in the 1880s, life became organized into a simple sequence of stages. Infanthood was all about growing and playing. School, and perhaps college, would follow, and then work. Before we knew it, we would be in retirement, looking back at the linear pattern that a full and orderly life was supposed to be, hoping that our children and grandchildren would successfully replicate the very same trajectory in their own life spans. Our time in this world became compartmentalized into a rigid series of distinct stages ever since.
I call this way of organizing our lives the sequential model of life. Over the past 150 years or so, every generation has been told to follow the exact same rules all over the world, from Japan to the United States, and from Scandinavia to the southern tip of Africa. Meanwhile, wars were fought, empires came and went, women gained the right to vote, and we set foot on the moon and dispatched robotic rovers to Mars. But we continued to live our lives in the same old way, one generation after another, in endless reprise.
This state of affairs is becoming obsolete due to long-standing demographic transformations.
It’s no secret that we now live much longer lives than ever before. In 1900, average life expectancy at birth in the United States was 46 years; as of 2022, it’s 78, and it will reach 83 within two decades, after accounting for the effect of the coronavirus pandemic. Americans who have made it to age 60 can expect to live an average of another 23 years, dramatically up from just 10 years in 1900. That’s another lifetime within a lifetime.
Western Europeans are even better off, with a life expectancy at age 60 of 25 years. Asians can enjoy 20 additional years on average, and even in Africa, where much progress can be made, the number is already a stunning 16 years. In addition to greater longevity, we stay in much better physical and mental shape for much longer—the so-called health span. This simply means that a 70-year-old nowadays can pursue the active lifestyle of a 60-year-old from two generations ago.
Definitions of old and young have shifted over time because of the lengthening of both the life span and the health span. In 1875, the Friendly Societies Act of the United Kingdom defined “old age” as above 50 years. “Forty is the old age of youth. Fifty the youth of old age,” said the French writer Victor Hugo, who was an old man for 40 percent of his life, given that he died in 1885 at age 83. Since World War II, age 60 has generally been considered as the borderline between young and old. In its statistical reports, the World Health Organization moves back and forth between 60 and 65, a sign that not even the experts know where to draw the line. For its part, the World Economic Forum defines old in a dynamic way as the “prospective age” at which life expectancy is 15 years—or when the average person has a decade and a half of life left. In the case of the U.S., the boundary would be set at 69 today. That’s almost 20 years later than if we followed Hugo’s categories.
But not everything in this trend of ever-increasing longevity looks rosy. Frictions are proliferating between younger, taxpaying generations and those in retirement enjoying healthcare and pension benefits. In addition, way too many people struggle with transitioning from one stage to another, such as with adolescence, the midlife crisis, or loneliness during retirement, or they get derailed due to a teenage pregnancy, dropping out of school, a family tragedy, a divorce, or substance abuse. It’s no news that many mothers find it difficult to balance family and work, and most are far from being treated equitably in terms of career advancement and pay. And while we live and remain fit longer, we are subject to the corrosive effect of technological change, which renders our education obsolete much faster than in the past. As knowledge becomes antiquated at a dizzying rate, gone is the era in which we could go to school when young and use what we learned over the several decades we spend working.
What if we think about life differently?
There’s nothing naturally preordained about what we should do at different ages. In fact, the sequential model of life is a social and political construction, built on conceptions of patriarchy and bureaucracy that classify people into age groups and roles. The fundamental insight of this book is that the confluence of rising life expectancy, enhanced physical and mental fitness, and technology-driven knowledge obsolescence fundamentally alters the dynamics over the entire life course, redefining both what we can do at different ages and how generations live, learn, work, and consume together.
Let me call these massive transformations the postgenerational revolution, one that will fundamentally reshape individual lives, companies, economies, and the entire global society. As a result, we will witness the proliferation of perennials, “an ever-blooming group of people of all ages, stripes, and types who transcend stereotypes and make connections with each other and the world around them . . . they are not defined by their generation,” in the words of Gina Pell, a serial entrepreneur.
“Revolutions are not made; they come,” said the American abolitionist Wendell Phillips. “A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back,” he noted. And indeed, the revolutionary rise of the perennials is the result of long-standing trends. Whereas in the not-too-distant past at most four or five generations of people coexisted at any given moment in time, now we have eight inhabiting the planet simultaneously. In the United States, the eight generations include alpha (born 2013 onward), Z (1995–2012), millennials (1980–1994), xennials (1975–1985), the baby-bust (1965–1979) and baby-boom (1946–1964) generations, the Silent Generation (1925–1945), and the Greatest Generation (1910–1924). In Japan, China, and Europe, where population aging has proceeded faster than in the U.S., as many as nine generations share the stage. As longevity continues to soar, nine or ten generations may end up living together before midcentury. Can different generations get along together? Or are they condemned to enter into politically fraught distributional conflicts over who pays for which services and benefits? How will younger generations feel about paying taxes to fund healthcare and pension systems for their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents? Can we adopt a perennial mindset to overcome these difficulties? And what exactly should that frame of mind be?
One of the pleasant surprises in this book is that greater longevity has positive implications not just for retirees but for everyone at every stage of life. A longer life span creates more opportunities and wiggle room for their grandchildren to change course, take gap years, and reinvent themselves, no matter their age. But that’s only possible if governments, companies, and other organizations move away from the sequential model of life. If people could liberate themselves from the tyranny of “age-appropriate” activities, if they could become perennials, they might be able to pursue not just one career, occupation, or profession but several, finding different kinds of personal fulfillment in each. Most importantly, people in their teens and twenties will be able to plan and make decisions for multiple transitions in life, not just one from study to work, and another from work to retirement.
The counterintuitive message of the chapters that follow is that the more decades of life people have ahead of them, the more important it is to keep their options open, and the less useful making “big decisions” becomes. In a truly postgenerational society driven by the perennial mindset, for example, teenagers will no longer have to agonize over the best path for them to pursue in terms of their studies or future jobs, knowing that a longer life span will afford plenty of opportunities for course correcting, for learning new skills, and for switching careers, depending on how the circumstances evolve.
That’s potentially the world awaiting us—one in which we don’t have to make fateful decisions with irreversible, lifelong consequences but rather one in which we can engage in more multigenerational activities and experience a more diverse array of opportunities over time. For example, we might be able to go back to school without being pigeonholed into reified categories such as young/old, active/inactive, full-/part-time, and so on. Technology may render our knowledge and experience outdated, but it also enables more flexible and iterative modes of learning and working. Our experience of life will no longer follow the beaten path prescribed to us in the late nineteenth century, when large-scale industrialization and mass schooling took hold. In fact, we will live several different lives in one, always in interaction with people of different generations in a society that will no longer be constrained by age or by distance, given the widespread use of digital platforms for remote work and learning. Individuals, companies, and governments that understand this potential will enter a new era of unrestricted living, learning, working, and consuming, thus unleashing a new universe of opportunities for people at all stages of life—a truly postgenerational society.
Thinking about perennials from any generation makes all the sense in the world as we revisit the way we live, learn, work, and consume. The pandemic has opened our eyes to the immense possibilities—as well as to the hardships and limitations—of remote learning and remote work. It has exposed our vulnerabilities relative to robots and intelligent machines. It has exacerbated inequities by race and gender. And it has powerfully reminded us that nothing lasts forever.
I wish to encourage you to see learning, working, and consuming in a different light, one that makes it possible for people and organizations to explore new horizons and to push the limits of what they can do and accomplish throughout their lives. This book is meant for both parents and children, women and men, workers and talent managers, would-be retirees and retirees, families and wealth advisors, and consumers and marketers. All of us will be affected by the shifting dynamics of the post-generational society.
Mauro Guillen is the author of "The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society"