Michael Skapinker is an FT contributing editor and author of ‘Inside the Leaders’ Club: How Top Companies Manage Pressing Business Issues’FT Weekend has a feature called Fantasy Dinner Parties in which writers select guests for their dream meal. Imagine a fantasy dinner party with Bill Gates, Emma Thompson, George Galloway, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. This strange gathering would not make for peaceful eating. The guests have little in common — except that they are all Baby Boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964.
That was a time when the US and Europe moved from postwar reconstruction to growing prosperity and witnessed the stirrings of feminism, the arrival of the contraceptive pill and the start of the Vietnam war. Yet each of our dinner guests drew their own conclusions and went their radically different ways.
This is something we need to remember when we generalise about generations — Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z — and their attitudes to life and work. It is fun to talk about their differences: their ease or haplessness with technology and their attitudes to gender fluidity.