Karl Moore: It is delightful to be here as part of the Mini-Biz and I appreciate your time.
I have done over one hundred interviews with CEOs in North America, Europe and Asia and some of them you would recognize: Here, from Montreal there is Pierre Beaudoin at Bombardier, and Robert Brown from CAE. I interviewed Mr. Clark on Saturday and it was very exciting to spend an hour with one of our former Prime Ministers. It was interesting to hear his perspective on life and what is going forward. I also interviewed Michael Sabia at Bell and Robert Milton of Air Canada, Montie Brewer of Air Canada. Some others are Sheila Fraser who is the Auditor General and a McGill B.Comm. graduate. These are a lot of interesting people who are primarily from Canada but also from the United States and Europe as well as Japan.
Then I have also done over four hundred interviews with what we call C- Suite executives. The C-Suite is the people that have a C in their titles, so not only CEOs but CFOs, but Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Operating Officer and this type of people. These are executives that would report directly to the CEO. Those are the kind of people that we are looking at there and then I have about two hundred interviews with the millennial generation. The millennial generation is what you might call Generation Y, except that they often do not like to be called Y because they are defined then based on Generation X. They feel that they are unique to themselves and they do not want to be defined by their older brothers and sisters or mom and dad. So we call them millenials because that fits around the time that they became of age, that is why they are called that and that is who they are. That is the research base.
What I want to talk about is some generational differences. When we look at generations, what is more important than just merely age is, the World experience or the world view that you have. What I would like to do here is divide the world into two parts effectively: the first part is that of the moderns, versus the post modern. So when I talk about post modern leadership this is what I am talking about and I will define post modern in some depth in a few minutes. The idea here is that if you are roughly over 35 and certainly if you are over 40 years of age, you are probably modern in your outlook.
Now, postmodernism is something that began arising to some degree in the late sixties by French intellectuals and it spread over time here. This is why I have a triangle here that spreads. The ideas came out in the late 1960s, so you may have read about them back in the '60s into the '70s but they took time to spread. Whether you are Generation X or whether you are Millennial depends really. We can not say that it falls on a certain year only and that if you are a year older than that than sorry about that, because it depends on where you grew up.
I grew up in Toronto but then I moved to Los Angeles for university and L.A was always a couple of years ahead of Toronto; these are social trends, and thankfully some of them die out. I remember one social trend, I was at a university doing a class down there and a couple of the executives said that they were in the funeral industry. They had a fancier name for it but it was the funeral industry. They said that in L.A about ten or fifteen years ago that funerals were becoming a celebration of life. So you would have a funeral and if the guy loved banjos you could have banjos on the wall of the funeral hall, you could have somebody playing the banjo. What was to be done was to say that everybody is sad that the man is gone but it was to be a celebration of his well-lived life. I guess I was living in England at the time and I thought that it was sort of an odd L.A. idea but over time that idea spread to other parts of North America, the idea of celebrating life at a funeral as a modern phenomenon. The Irish have had wakes and I have an Irish half to me, so we have had wakes for a long time so the idea is not an entirely new idea. The thought though is that if it is spreading throughout society, having started in L.A. then ideas start out there and spread over time.
