The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the baby boomer generation will redefine the concept of retirement, transforming it into a new phase of work and life.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter's quote highlights how the baby boomer generation is poised to change societal norms surrounding retirement. Instead of viewing retirement as a period of rest and withdrawal from the workforce, they are likely to redefine it as an opportunity for continued growth and engagement in new career paths, reflecting a shift in how we perceive aging and productivity in our later years.
In practice
During a retirement planning seminar, one could use this quote to emphasize the potential for continued career development.
Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.
Organizational structures that allow divisions and departments to own their turf and people with long tenure to take root creates the same hardened group distinctions as Congressional redistricting to produce homogeneous voting blocs - all of which makes it easier to resist compromise, let alone collaboration.
The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.
The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.
I've found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.
Leaders is the new organisation do not lack motivational tools, but the tools are different from those of traditional corporate bureaucrats. The new rewards are based not on status but on contribution, and they consist not of regular promotion and automatic pay rises, but of excitement about the mission and a share of the glory of success.
And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.
I would be excited if we could reimagine workplaces that start from a premise that women are going to be a central part: Women are going to bear children, people are going to raise those children, and it's not going to be a nuisance - it's actually going to be understood as part of the deal.
There's always new work to do. Adjusting to the rapid pace of technological change creates real challenges, seen most clearly in our polarized labor market and the threat that it poses to economic mobility. Rising to this challenge is not automatic. It's not costless. It's not easy. But it is feasible.
The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.
Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.
The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties. Count those gifts among your growing heap.
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