Growing up in the 1950s in a small middle-class Pennsylvania town with fewer than 500 residents was a blast for my buddies and me. Our lives were filled with Little League baseball, Cub Scouts (later Boy Scouts), camping, fishing trips, swimming lessons, summer vacations to the shore and so forth. Post-WWII consumer products such as sporting goods, automobiles, toasters, washing machines, televisions and transistor radios were everywhere as wartime manufacturing was re-engineered to fill the demand of the burgeoning middle class.
In contrast, our parents grew up during the Roaring Twenties, survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and saved the world from Hitler and the Nazis during the 1940s. Our generation had amazing new technological wonders to experience while our parents had virtually nothing. Our life experiences couldn’t have been more different.
The experiences of the ’60s and ’70s tended to drive us further apart. The Cold War, the Vietnam war, Elvis, the Beatles, Woodstock and the transformation that took place in pop culture all added fuel to this divide. In spite of these differences, these two generations had much in common, but the commonality wasn’t something we talked about.
A gathering of aspirations.
They came from all over the country. Fifty-five individuals from 30 companies and 16 states gathered for two and a half days in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Their intent was to share common experiences and best practices at our annual winter brainstorming meeting. The ages of attendees ranged from the mid-20s to the mid-60s. Seven (almost one quarter) of the owners were Millennials in their 20s or 30s.