A New Year - Looking Back and Looking Forward

I've seen a couple of other bloggers post their stats at the start of each new year and I thought that might be a good idea for The Hourglass Blog. Jamie and I started this experiment back in February 2009, so we have almost a year under our belts, and I think we're both pretty pleased with our activity and the response we've received so far. Here are the stats for 2009:

Blog posts = 61
Comments = 81
Peak Subscribers through Feedburner = 83
Peak Followers on Blogger =15
Absolute Unique Visitors = 547
Total Page Views = 1,430

I hope you've enjoyed reading the blog and plan to continue reading, because I certainly plan to continue writing. If you know of someone who might also enjoy it, please spread the word. It would be great to see those numbers double by next year!

When Jamie and I were brainstorming a few weeks ago about generations and leadership, he mentioned that he had been getting some feedback from colleagues that the whole issue of generations has kind of "jumped the shark" in our community. And I'll admit, the last year of reading up and digging into the subject has revealed a lot of hype and mischaracterizations that seem to plague the topic. Indeed, after an early comment that, according to census data, GenX is in fact a larger generation than either the Boomers or the Millennials (and thereby destroying the blog's whole concept of GenX as an "hourglass" generation), I spent a tedious afternoon Googling and squinting my eyes at actuarial tables to see if I could validate that claim.

But whatever it is that the birth year charts tell us about the size of the generations, I'm interested in the subject of how new generations embrace leadership, and I'd like to think that your response to this blog demonstrates that you have a real interest in that subject, too.

One of the questions I think we're all chasing is this--Do generations really matter to leadership? In other words, is leadership a set of universal skills that are learned by each new generation as they rise to take the mantle from their predecessors, or does leadership mean something different to each generation, and therefore our leadership systems will constantly change as each new generational perspective comes into power?

I very much think the latter. And when I read things like this from Seth Godin, I get intrigued by what kind of leadership changes we're going to see over the next ten years.

Thanks for joining us on the journey so far.