The Sand Has Run Out of the Hourglass

2011 has drawn to a close, and that means it's time to close up shop here at The Hourglass Blog. Despite my September 2011 announcement that I was moving to a new blog, traffic here at Hourglass has remained strong, allowing 2011 to post some of the best numbers in the blog's history.

Thanks to everyone for following and participating in the discussions over the past three years. I started this adventure with the intention of exploring the impact of generational shift on the leadership of our organizations and, while we have certainly done that, we have explored a number of other topics as well. All these topics have been of great interest to me, and I plan to continue exploring them at my new blog, www.ericlanke.blogspot.com. If you've enjoyed what you've read here, I would encourage you to read, subscribe or otherwise follow my activities there.

I also want to extend my deepest thanks and appreciation to my Hourglass co-blogger, Jamie Notter. His own approach to blogging was an essential piece of the original inspiration for Hourglass. Although he did not post here as often as he would have liked, his unfailing support and generous advice helped make this blog what it was. If I made any mistakes, I'm sure it was because I wasn't listening to Jamie at the time. His own blog, Get Me Jamie Notter, is, of course, worth your attention and participation.

Best wishes to everyone for a happy and prosperous 2012!

Are You Looking Forward to 2011?

I was at a New Year's Eve party last night with a group of friends I don't see as often as I would like. We spent a lot of time catching each other up on each other's lives, and I was struck by how much some of them were looking forward to 2010 being over. Why? Because their 2010s have been really bad. One lost his job. Another's business is still down and is going through a divorce. It reminded me how bad things still are for a lot of people and how much my own optimism about the future can sometimes seem out of place.

So looking back on the last year of The Hourglass Blog, I find myself asking if it's been able to make a positive difference for our community. The numbers certainly show more people and more pageviews than 2009:



But I'm a little distressed at the smaller number of comments that we've received this year over last. We launched Hourglass in February 2009 with the hope that it would be a conversation--a platform on which in leaders in Generation X and in the other generations could discuss the challenges of leadership itself. In part, we wanted to try and answer the question: Do generations really matter to leadership? 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?

Since our launch we've posted on a variety of related issues, with my own focus more and more on efforts to define and promote innovative practices for the association environment based on successful models in the for-profit world. Through these explorations and others, Hourglass has allowed me to meet and interact with a number of amazing people and learn from the wisdom many of them have freely offered. On a personal level, this interaction and learning is one of my primary motivations to keep Hourglass growing and expanding.

But if there is one community I want Hourglass to reach and provide value to, it is the GenX association executive. In response to the question we posed earlier, I am convinced that leadership does mean something different to this generation, and that their unique perspective and approach to leadership is something that should be more widely shared and developed.

This is one of the reasons I changed Hourglass' tagline earlier this year. Rather than the originial "exploring generations and leadership in associations and in society," I felt "exploring a new generation of leadership issues in associations and in society" was more descriptive of this sense of mission. I would like to see Hourglass become a community where GenX leaders share their ideas and refine their practice to better themselves and their organizations.

And to that end, I have a challenge for you in 2011. If you are one of the executives I'm speaking of--a member of Generation X currently in charge of a professional or trade association--let's hear what you have to say on Hourglass this year. Commenting on something Jamie or I post is fine, but what would be even better is a post or two of your own. You know there's something about the way you run your organization--or the way you would like to run your organization--that is different from the generation before. Tell us about it. Use the community that is building here as a sounding board for those ideas, and help us build a new set of best leadership practices for the next generation and beyond.

Are you interested? Contact me at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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.

Join the Conversation

My favorite authors on generational issues are Strauss and Howe, and part of their theory about generations is that they flow in four-generation cycles. Within each cycle there are two "dominant" generations and two "recessive." Of the four generations in today's workforce (Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials), it is the Boomers and the Millennials who are the "dominant" ones. They also happen to be the two largest generations in American history, hence the "hourglass" metaphor in this blog. 

That's also why as two Gen Xers, we wanted to write this blog. I have learned that being part of a "recessive" generation you don't always get the attention. The "silent" generation  learned early on growing up during the depression and World War Two not to complain or buck the system. Generation X wasn't too quiet, per se, but we are quite small (which limits our voice) and as Jeff Gordinier said in a video I saw, "They have in impact, without needing to have a parade about it."

Quiet or not, however, we do have a voice. And we are interested in how leadership is evolving along with the major generational shift that is happening. As Eric pointed out, we want to start a dialogue about this topic, and we don't want to be the only ones talking. Like any blog, we welcome comments on what we talk about here, and if you want to do a guest post, let us know. Please join the conversation and help us shape the dialogue. 

Why Another Blog?

We've seen a lot of information about generational change in the workplace. Much of it has been focused on the management and cultural issues surrounding the arrival of the Millennials, and another large segment on the career-ending or career-extending choices confronting the aging Baby Boomers.

The purpose of this blog is to explore issues related to a different aspect of these generational and demographic shifts—namely the impact they will have on leadership in our organizations. The focus will be primarily on leadership in professional and trade associations—at both the staff and Board levels—but we'll also touch on leadership in other organizations as relevant.

We invite you to join our conversations through regular reading and commenting on this blog, and hope you will find this interaction interesting. With your help, we hope to increase our community's understanding of these issues and better define the changes we're likely to see as new generational perspectives are incorporated into organizational leadership.