Too Young to Die, Too Old to Rock-and-Roll

Millennials are entitled. They want a trophy for showing up to work. They spend money on avocado toast but can’t save for a down payment on a house. Last month we hired a technician and, by 9:00 am on Monday, he was texting continuously. When not texting, he was using company computers to search for his next job. He was gone Tuesday.

We also have Ryan and Alex. Alex came to us with a mechanical engineering degree and zero experience in water. Today every new probe is the handiwork of Alex. Every technical call that requires an answer more involved than “Did you change the reference solution?” gets Alex on the phone. When a controller or probe isn’t working Alex can probably figure it out. Ryan came in as a shipper, moved up to inside sales and knows just about every distributor with whom we do business. Alex and Ryan are millennials.

Then there are baby boomers. They’re dinosaurs. They’re stuck in 1980 and they hold back progress. Several years ago, we hired a salesperson who had decades of sales experience. Any suggestion I made was met by “I’ve been doing this for thirty years. Don’t tell me what to do.” Why bother with Salesforce when you have a Rolodex? He lasted a few months.

In 2012 Mark Zuckerberg declared that “young people are just smarter.” VC billionaire Vinod Khosla opined that “people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”  The average age of a Google employee is 29. If you’re over 50 don’t bother sending in an application. But are these Silicon Valley super-bros justified? Do aging minds really belong in a pasture? A 2018 study by economists from MIT, the US Census Bureau and Northwestern University, examined 2.7 million businesses and concluded that a start-up founded by a 50-year old is twice as likely to survive and thrive than one started by a 30-year old. The message is lost on the Bay area tech megalopolis which, for all its success in apps, has a disappointing record for creating businesses in medicine and clean energy[1].

Here in Water Analytics we have a few boomers. I’m one of them. If you want to know the others, look at our holiday card picture. I’m sworn to secrecy. My knees have lost their spring and I recently graduated to reading glasses with the highest magnification allowed by law (2.5). But we show up on time and we can outlast any millennial in a marathon green light brainstorming session. When I bought AquaMetrix in 2010 I was not a good manager, I had no idea what a GANTT chart nor what BOM means (other than missing a “b” on the end). I have gathered more business skills in the last 10 years than the previous 40.

I have learned that close mindedness is not a consequence of age. It’s a consequence of attitude, which has a nasty habit of sometimes accompanying age. By the time we’ve been in our chosen career path for a couple of decades we know what works. We’re not looking to fix what ain’t broken. We don’t like change. We become the Blackberries of the workforce. We become obsolete.

I remind myself every day of two absolute truths:

1. I know what’s best.
2. Everything I know is, or will be, wrong.

As long as I can get past truth #1, I’ll be good for another 100,000 miles.

Water Analytics is a highly functioning company because we have millennials, Gen X’ers, Gen Y’ers and Baby Boomers. We get along, we have fun and we get things done. In truth, we do possess SOME traits ascribed to our generations. Some are good. Some not so much. But together we cover all the bases of running a successful company. Vive la difference!

I have more to say but I need to flip the record over on the record player.

[1] David Rodman, Don’t Fear the Gray Tsunami, MIT Technology Reviewer, 122(6), September/October 2019.