Generations
Generations
Meet Your Host, Alan Weiss
Alan Weiss is one of those rare people who can say he is a consultant, speaker, and author and mean it.
His consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients such as Merck, Hewlett-Packard, GE, Mercedes-Benz, State Street Corporation, Times Mirror Group, The Federal Reserve, The New York Times Corporation, Toyota, and over 500 other leading organizations. He has served on several boards of directors in various capacities.
His prolific publishing includes over 500 articles and 60 books, including his best-seller, Million Dollar Consulting (from McGraw-Hill) now in its 30th year and sixth edition. His newest is Your Legacy is Now: Life is not about a search for meaning but the creation of meaning (Routledge, 2021). His books have been on the curricula at Villanova, Temple University, and the Wharton School of Business, and have been translated into 15 languages.
Get to know AlanShow Notes
50s: Constancy, GI Bill, Levittown, Sputnik, Korean War, Univac, DNA discovered, Joe McCarthy, Hungarian uprising, Montgomery bus boycott
60s: Kennedys shot, King shot, Woodstock, the Beatles, Watts riot and cities burn, Cuban missile crisis, Viet Nam, Bay of Pigs, first televised presidential debate, USSR had hydrogen bomb
70s: Kent State shootings, Watergate, Nixon and Agnew resign, Mars landing, Viet Nam ends, gay liberation movement
80s: CNN begins, Iranian hostages released, Falklands war, Sandra Day O’Connor first female on Supreme Court, Sally Ride first woman astronaut, Challenger explodes, Macintosh computer, Cold War ends with Reagan/Gorbachev, Berlin Wall falls, intense materialism and consumerism, MTV emerges
90s: LA riots, Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine shootings, Persian Gulf War, TWA flight 800 is blown up, relative peace and prosperity, end of USSR, rise of the Internet, Dow Jones clears 2,900 for first time
00s: Al-Qaeda attacks world trade center and Pentagon 9/11, Department of Homeland Security established, invasion of Iraq, Nancy Pelosi first woman Speaker, Michael Jackson dies, economic collapse, Y2K a flop, Barack Obama first black president immediately receives Nobel Peace Prize, Great Recession, Tesla launched
10s: Black Lives Matter, Brexit, occupy Wall Street, launch of the iPhone 4, Trump elected, natural disasters, Boston Marathon bombing, LGBTQ, Ebola, Prince dies
We’ve come from a period of constancy to a period of continuing turmoil; from privacy to omnipresent publishing and exposure; from civility to rudeness and aggression; from support for the law to defund the police; and from respect for institutions to near-anarchy.
This is not merely the changing of generations or progress or evolution of thought. It is a decline and declivity into amazing self-absorption, disdain for differing opinions, and really a wallowing in ignorance. Our primary institutions of the conveyance of values have all decayed: the schools, organized religion, the intact household, statesmanship.
Is this a natural sign of the times, or more like the old trope that the first generation founds a business, the second modernizes and expands it, and the third, having no such hunger, runs it into the ground?
The US is about 240 years old, which is one-thousandth of one present of the tenure of the dinosaurs on earth. They were erased by space junk, or they’d still be here.
Will we be erased by junking our values?
Alan Weiss’s The Uncomfortable Truth® is a weekly broadcast from “The Rock Star of Consulting,” Alan Weiss, who holds forth with his best (and often most contrarian) ideas about society, culture, business, and personal growth. His 60+ books in 12 languages, and his travels to, and work in, 50 countries contribute to a fascinating and often belief-challenging 20 minutes that might just change your next 20 years.
Introduction to the show recorded by Connie Dieken
