What’s Next, Gen X?
Keeping Up, Moving Ahead, and Getting the Career You Want
by Tamara Erickson
 
 

“How you spend the next decade of your life will powerfully affect your long-term financial stability and achievement of other goals.”

.....taken from the introduction.

Members of Generation X, the 30-to-44 age cohort, have drawn the short straw when it comes to work. The economy has been stacked against them from the beginning. Worse, they’re sandwiched between Boomers (with their constant back-patting blather and refusal to retire) and Gen Ys (with their relentless confidence and demands for attention).
 
Gen Xs are stuck in the middle - of their lives and between two huge generations that dote on each other and that are taking up a little too much of Xs’ room.
 
But they can move forward in their career. In What’s Next, Gen X? (Harvard Business Press, January 5, 2010, HB, £12.99, 14.99 Euros) Tamara Erickson shows how. She explains the forces affecting attitudes and behaviors in other generations - Traditionalists (born 1928-1945), Boomers (born 1946-1964), Xs, and Ys (born 1980-1995) - so Xs can start relating more productively with bosses, peers, and employees.
 
Erickson then assesses Gen Xs’ progress in life so far and analyzes the implications of organizational and technological changes for their professional future. She lays out a powerful framework for shaping a satisfying, meaningful career, revealing how Xs can:
 
Use their unique capabilities to become effective leaders 
Identify work that matches what they care most about
Succeed in a corporate career or an entrepreneurial venture
Spot and seize newly emerging professional opportunities
 
For example, she explains how Xs can find a type of work and a place of work that suits them - by identifying work activities that engage them, that feel effortless and energizing, and that activate “life lures” such as the opportunity to create something of lasting value, to be part of a winning team, or to take on interesting challenges.
 
Provocative and engaging, What’s Next, Gen X? helps the 30-to-44 set break free from the middle, and chart a fulfilling course for the years ahead.
 
Tamara Erickson is President of The nGenera Innovation Network. She is both a respected McKinsey Award-winning author and popular and engaging storyteller. Her compelling views of the future are based on extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Her work discerns and describes interesting and important trends in our future and provides actionable counsel to help organizations and individuals prepare today. Tammy  has coauthored five Harvard Business Review articles (including McKinsey Award winner “It’s Time to Retire Retirement”), the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent, and an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Visit her blog, “Across the Ages” on hbr.org.