Introduction: Brave new fluid, transient and mobile world

The Big Picture follows an earlier book I wrote in which I fused the Australian penchant for the beach with the imminent retirement of the baby boomer generation - to create a single concept that I called The Big Shift (2001). Here was a third Australian culture: from the 19th century focus on the bush, to the 20th century rise of suburbia, to our 21st century predilection for the beach. My fundamental proposition being that this ‘big shift’ was as much a cultural feature of the Australian nation as it was a demographic move to the coast. I argued that if our embrace of the beach is indeed ‘cultural’ then most surely this signals the beginning of a re-settlement of the Australian continent. Viewed within this context, then, the rise of, say, the Gold Coast is seen differently: this is not a cheap and shallow city for transients and holidaymakers; this is a bold city bravely forging a new cultural frontier on the Australian coast.

The Big Shift and its attendant popular phrasing (seachange and treechange) and its heroes and villains (the baby boomers and the baby boomers) entered the Australian lexicon. And didn’t the baby boomers (born 1946-1961) love it. Nothing appeals to this oh-so-confident generation more than a protracted discussion about their lives, their loves and their lifestyles. They even welcome criticism, just so long as the focus remains on them. After all, baby boomer logic seems to be: “I’ve talked about me for long enough, now it’s time for you to talk about me.” And even if the focus should ever shift to subsequent generations then the discussion will invariably revolve around the baby-boomer perspective.

The trials and tribulations of Generation Y, today’s teenagers and 20-somethings, right now strike a respondent chord in the wider community because they are the children of baby boomers. Despite Y’s pure boomer breeding they are shaping up to be the antithesis of their parents; they hold different values to the baby boomers at the equivalent stage of the life cycle. Unlike their boomers parents, Ys are happy to remain in the family home until well into their 20s. Also unlike the boomers, Ys flit from job to job … to job, and from partner to partner … to partner. Young adult Ys live at home and then they up and off to London and then they come home and then they fall in love and live with someone and when that all falls apart then they come home. Life’s just dandy for Generation Y kids living within the warm orbit of rich and indulgent baby boomer parents. And oh, yes, boomers, aren’t you just wonderful providers.

Generation X, of course, had it much tougher. This generation fits between the boomers and the Ys. This Xer ‘generation of the damned’ has been condemned by dint of their birth year to forever eke out a meagre existence on the less fertile leeward side of the baby boomer mountain. Xers wandered aimlessly in a cultural desert registering no impact on the social Richter scale until they were discovered, quite dishevelled and disorientated, by Canadian author Douglas Coupland who rounded them up and named them in 1991. This ‘lost tribe of the Xers’ tried really hard to make an impact but at every turn they were thwarted by what they see as the evil and dastardly baby boomers. You see it was youthful baby boomers who so easily snared middle-management jobs in the late 1970s, and then simply ‘propped’ creating blockages in organisations which stifled the natural ascension of talented and righteous young Xers through corporate ranks.

Generation X is well named. ‘X’ is the generic symbol for the signature of the illiterate and for those whose identity is known only to them. The boomers on the other hand loudly, proudly and repeatedly promote their youthful achievements and their much-vaunted daredevil radicalness. But it is the unsung Xers who were the true radicals; they achieved as much if not more impact on the national mood and values as did the hairy hippie boomers.

The Xers achieved this not through a seminal cause such as Vietnam, or via the invention of a movement such as ‘hippiedom’, but through a none-too-subtle shift in values. During the 1990s Xers decided to postpone the age of commitment to marriage from early 20s to the late 20s. Xers grabbed with both hands the notion of sequential monogamous relationships designed to road-test partners before final selection and commitment. This simple shift in social ideology delivered a different use of time to a generation of 20-somethings. A new set of social behaviours suddenly emerged. Women chose to remain in work, longer; some chose not marry or to have children. Both men and women began the process of forming, dismantling and reforming relationships. Men, no longer tied to marriage, mortgage and children by the age of 25 invented new past-times such as extreme sports. The notion of extreme sports did not occur to baby boomer men because the time and funds required for these self-indulgent idylls were always going to be better invested in the development of a home and/or family.

By the early years of the 21st century the Australian mass market was marked by three generations: the seachanging and treechanging baby boomers; the brooding, cynical and sometimes resentful Xers ever scanning the horizon for corporate gaps left by the boomers; and the flighty Generation Ys flitting here and flitting there ever pontificating about how easily they get bored if their work, their life, their relationship doesn’t, like, entertain them 24/7. Overseeing the lot is a tiny band of pre-boomers born during the Great Depression and WWII whose brief rise to fame and corporate power ended in the disaster of the late 1980’s crash. An even earlier and now tiny generation born in the 1920s, the so-called frugals, sit even higher, doubtlessly reflecting upon the mad bad consumerist scramble that has marked and marred the generations born in the second-half of the 20th century.

And within this stage it is the boomers who, by then end of this, decade will have dominated corporate Australia for 20 years. And it is their final years at the top, perhaps with the confidence that comes with business success and real property wealth, that they have been at their most socially creative. Seachange and treechange are the same fad merely expressed in different geographies; both acknowledge the shifting focus of the boomers. But what of boomers who do nothing and who go nowhere? Can a boomer do a virtual seachange? This is the change you have when you can’t afford to buy a place down the coast. Boomers can do, and do do, whatever they please. Hence the most recent arrival of the “me-change” where boomers simply reinvent themselves: toss in the job, switch partners (this is an old concept given a boomer makeover), have a makeover, perhaps embrace Buddhism (orange goes so well with a Byron-Bay tan), and change within yourself. The final word on boomer ‘changes’ must surely go a client of mine who claims to have done an “e-change”: this involved the electronic transfer of his business to a lifestyle property in the treechange community of Bellbrae immediately outside the seachange community of Torquay one hour west of Melbourne.

And so we come to the final act, to The Big Picture. Here is a world dominated by boomers at the end of their reign of corporate power. At the close of this decade a baby boomer born one-third of the way into the generation (that is, 1950) will turn 60. Here is a world where the boomer relinquishes corporate power. Here is a world riven with and wracked by issues associated with succession: Are those flaky Xers up to the job or should boomers nepotistically hand over the reins to the hip and fast-talking Ys? Here is a world in which Xers rise to the fore. Here is a world where boomer values are unceremoniously dumped in favour of the new values of the new century in work, relationships and in life. A good example of how boomers are being usurped by Xer and Y preferences is the switch in funky bars from chairs with over-40 friendly backs, to squat backless cubes that can only be straddled by lithe hamstrings. These cubes should be renamed boomer-be-gone seats.

In this world the boomers either wholly slink off into retirement or they oscillate between workplace and lifestyle locale - in a new and ethereal netherworld of part-work/part-retirement. And this is most surely what the broad middle-band of boomers will do because they will not be able to fund a retirement lifestyle built wholly around leisure. Other boomers will happily skip off into a littoral zone of work-leisure supported by the sinecure of a series of non-executive directorships set-up over the preceding decade. Battler boomers, on the other hand, will begin to pile high into the age pension bucket from 1 July 2011 onwards when the first of this lot turns 65.

The transition of cultural and corporate power from the boomers to the Xers at the end of this decade mirrors a similar transition from the past. The boomers wrested corporate power from the pre-boomers amid the ruins of the economic collapse of the early 1990s. Many of pre-boomers at the peak of their game at this time had been born in the 1930s. The in-coming boomers were nimbler and better suited to the post-crash world: where a pre-boomer saw nothing but public debt, the boomer saw opportunities for the sale of government assets. Where the pre-boomer saw the need for public borrowings, boomers saw a social responsibility to maintain balanced budgets at the state and federal level. Other boomer ideas quickly gained currency within corporate and government circles such as the notion of accountability, transparency and sustainability. These ideas were unknown to the mass market prior to the 1990s.

But it will not ever be thus. I think Generation X, and especially Generation Y, will have a far greater appetite for public debt than boomers who, incidentally, still remember the month in 1989 when general interest rates topped 17 per cent. The argument that is likely to be launched by Xers and Ys next decade goes like this: the responsibility for public investment in, say, infrastructure should be leveraged across several generations through public debt rather than be shouldered entirely by today’s taxpayers. And as Generations X and Y have no collective memory of events prior to 1990, they will happily agree to the sharing of the burden with future generations. In this regard the public sector’s balanced budgets, which marked the reign of the baby boomer, could well shift to deficit budgets in the new decade. In fact, why not fund politician’s largesse in buying baby-boomer votes next decade by increasing public borrowings?

The passage of the boomers beyond the peak of their corporate lives creates opportunities for the advancement of Xers and Ys. The boomers are the last link with the values of ‘old Australia’ that were forged prior to World War II. The boomers may well be rampant consumerists but through the efforts of their parents, the frugals, they remain connected with conservative values. The boomers believe in long-term personal and professional commitment, in balanced public budgets, and in a positive private balance sheet even if they did live from hand-to-mouth day-to-day for most of their lives. The boomers understand the notion of investing early (and especially in property) and then patiently, diligently, judiciously, waiting for an accrued reward. The boomers see value in single long-term property, financial and personal relationships. The boomers see their years worked for a single firm or institution as a badge of honour. The boomers saw their future within Australia.

I think the Xers will see and administer the world differently next decade. (Ys not only see the world differently to boomers, they are believed to be a different life-form from a distant planet.) And it is this difference in thinking between the boomers and the Xers that will, that must, play out in a shift in the social, business and public policy landscape next decade as the boomers just f-f-fade away. This is no less a social and cultural shift than that which played out between the end of the 1980s and the mid 1990s. Not only were new words and concepts ushered-in in the 1990s but so too was a new way of living: out with the old-world’s suburbia; in with the new-world’s apartmentia. The boomers may not have initiated the shift into apartments in the early 1990s but it was they who approved, planned, financed, and built these new suburbs in the heart of the city.

The same will apply, must apply, next decade as boomers give way to the Xers. Out with boomer notions of long-term commitment; in with Xer and Y notions of short-term, fluid, transient and mobile relationships. In this world the workplace shifts from a place of work to ‘any place’ where workers can dial up and log in. The office quickly invades the home and the home reciprocates by invading the office: the home study becomes a communications centre and the open-plan office incorporates a fully equipped kitchen as well as break-out pads comprised of a copse of lounge chairs. Are you at work or are you at home? When does work start and when does it finish? Log on to do your personal banking at work; do the same at home after dinner and respond to work emails while you’re online. Senior management check emails every day, including weekends. Workers take and make personal phone calls every day. Work and home are meshing; it is only a matter of time before work invades the beach house. (I’m not sure whether the beach house will ever invade the open-plan office. Perhaps that’s a trend for the 2020s.)

The link between workplace and home is being severed by new technology and by new workplace arrangements: key performance indicators are shifting to concepts like ‘deliverables’ and ‘outcomes’ rather than to the observation of procedures and entrenched behaviours. No-one cares when you start work; all that matters in this world is the result. Some workplaces based on business processes atomise; they explode outwards from the city centre to lifestyle locales. Others remain tightly bound into the relationships, the facilities and the kudos that can only be offered by the central business district. The nexus between office and home is weakened; the glue that holds suburbs to cities is diluted. The residential function of the metropolis flattens and oozes into lifestyle nooks and crannies within striking distance of capital-city CBDs

Personal relationships also shift ground. The boomer-esque notion of marriage from an early age quickly morphs from the slightly unusual (this decade) to the downright weird (late next decade). In this future world anyone who has had just one significant personal relationship is considered something of a loser; 40 years earlier this was the social model that was espoused by middle Australia. To have only had one ‘significant other’ in this new world of older Xers and Ys is, frankly, suspicious. There is nothing so un-nerving to a 30-year old woman as to find a single male her age who has never had a significant previous relationship: it begs the question “what’s wrong with him?”.

The same logic applies to the concept of employee loyalty. To have worked for a single employer for 20 years was until recently viewed as a positive attribute. In the new world such an employee would be viewed as someone with ‘limited vision’, as someone deemed incapable of ‘thinking outside the square’. What business now values is someone who can cross-fertilise ideas from one business to another. The formation, development, dismantling and reformation of relationships at work, with friends and at the personal level, is expected in all aspects of life in the post-boomer world.

Here is the world of The Big Picture. This book looks at the social and cultural changes that can be expected as the focus of power shifts from the baby boomers to the Xers. This baton change must occur around the end of this decade and I think it will involve a big shift in values from the conservative and largely 20th century world of the baby boomers, to the fluid, transient and mobile 21st century world of the Xers and Ys.