Ryan Vet on Sharpen the Spear: Why "Kids These Days" Is the Oldest Story in Leadership

Richard, thank you so much for having me. I'll go back all the way to the lemonade stand. Growing up in Chicago, entrepreneurial since day one, and one day I wanted to advertise my lemonade stand because there's a marketing bone somewhere in my body. So I called the Chicago Tribune, which was our local newspaper, and they answered the phone, 'Yes, ma'am,' because I was eight at the time. So first of all, devastated, strike one. And I found out that the full-color back page ad wasn't in my budget, so I started a marketing company and ended up growing that business. I had to take my dad down to the courthouse to sign papers because they wouldn't let a 14-year-old at the time open up a real business. And the rest is history. I've had the opportunity to grow and scale businesses, from Main Street businesses and local small businesses and even some time in some venture-backed startups ranging to $750 million in valuation. So a large span of working with different types of people over the years. But the one thing that I keep coming back to, and where I have the opportunity and privilege to spend my time now, is really looking at where we've been as culture and society, where we're headed into the future. And what does that mean for us as business owners and leaders every day in a world that's harder than ever to lead in? How can we lead across generations? How can we serve our clients well in a changing landscape? So in 2021 I kind of left the CEO spot, the business owner spot for the most part. I kept a couple little projects on the side, and have designated my time to writing and to speaking. So I've had the opportunity to speak to over a thousand audiences now live across the world, and have a couple books out and write a weekly newsletter called Collide that's completely free that just talks about where we are and how we can lead better.

Thank you.

Western suburbs, so Wheaton and St. Charles.

There you go.

No way. Small world.

How cool.

Okay. Same area, man.

Yeah, a couple years ago I was introduced as a futurist and I was like, what is that? And whenever you get introduced and you don't have the opportunity to introduce yourself, people put some interesting things. I've got degrees from schools I didn't know I had. I'm an expert in things. So you just go with it. But afterwards I really contemplated what that was. I've always liked looking towards the future. Not with a crystal ball. I can't tell you what we're having for dinner tonight, but really, what has humankind done in history and how does that influence where we're going? And I think that's really one of the core functions of a leader. And so what I get to speak on on stages, one of my most favorite topics, is when generations collide. Looking at all the generations in the workforce today, and that we're marketing to, we're selling to, and saying, okay, what's wrong with kids these days? Answering that question. And is there anything wrong with kids, or was it the way they were raised? Is it our perception of them? And really debunking myths, but also solidifying some truth, saying, hey, there are some things that are different, and how do we navigate a changing world so that our businesses don't go obsolete?

Yep.

Absolutely.

That's absolutely correct. I think you're spot on. It always feels like we label the next generation. That's one of the things that I've moved away from, and I was guilty of it. One of my first opportunities speaking on millennials in particular was in 2009, asking why they weren't buying houses. Well, millennials were still in elementary school in 2009. Not all, some were of house-buying age, but only a very select few, like less than 1% of them. And it was wrong. So when we label the next generation prematurely, there's a lot of risks. So yes, 'they don't want to work,' or 'oh, they're lazy.' So I always use this example, and we won't go through all five generations, we'll start with baby boomers. So baby boomers, if you ask them to get across the Grand Canyon, they're going to form a committee, give fancy titles, go to a restaurant, and spend weeks trying to figure it out before they even do anything. That's just how they were raised. That's their culture and their moment in history. And they might figure out how to get across the Grand Canyon. You do the same thing with Gen X. Gen X might pull a friend in, or they might just do it by themselves. They're used to being a self-starter, get it done, and they'll work till they've done what they're going to do, but they're going to make sure they're out. They might stay till 6:00 instead of 5:00, but they're not going to stay as long as possible. They're going to make sure that they're home with their family. Millennials, they're going to pull out their phone and go to Google and look at the fastest way to do it. They'll figure out that the shortest distance across the Grand Canyon is only a foot wide, so they're just going to walk across that part. Gen Z is going to go to ChatGPT or any other LLM, and they're going to outsource it using gig workers or their friends that are already there, and they're going to win. They're going to get it done first, and they're going to look lazy, even though they actually got someone across the Grand Canyon most quickly. So which one's right? I think it's just a perception on how we've been raised, and that naturally causes conflict. Different ways of getting to the same problem.

Thank you for your service.

You're exactly correct, and I often call this the generational prism. For those of you listening, I'm making a triangle with my fingers, a prism. When you put light through it, light shines and refracts a rainbow, or some beautiful refraction of what's being shown through this glass prism. And I think that reflection is the label. But it's so easy in any stereotype, whether it's generational or otherwise, to start with the label instead of thinking of that as the byproduct of the actual information. So the two sides, one side is age, and the other one is moment. So I'll give you a concrete example. We've always said that millennials, and now Gen Z, whatever the latest generation is, it'll be Gen Alpha in 10 more years, are job hoppers. And so if you zoom out and look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics actual data on that, going back to the 1950s, and you do a longitudinal study, you've got to figure out an age, so anchor it to an age, let's say by age 25. So, age 25, let's see how many times baby boomers hopped jobs, then the average Gen Xer, and the average millennial. Everyone's shocked to find out that baby boomers and Gen X both hopped jobs about 5.3 times by the time they were 25. Every baby boomer is like, 'No, I didn't. I was loyal to my company.' And I'll unpack why in a minute. Then you go to millennials and everyone's like, 'Oh, it's 25 times if a baby boomer was 5.3 times.' But if you look at it, it's only 5.6, so only 0.3 times more in that span. So how is that possible? Well, we've got age on one side of the triangle. Let's look at the other side, the moment. What was the moment in history that was happening? When you look at baby boomers' moment in history, there were almost no child labor laws, and most of them had their first job at 10 or 11, where they were making money. So yes, they hopped 5.3 jobs over 15 years. That included figuring out they didn't like flipping burgers at McDonald's, and that they didn't like pulling soft serve ice cream at Dairy Queen. You fast forward to Gen X, now you're to a point where almost half of the states in the United States have child labor laws. So their first jobs are no longer 10 or 11 or 12, they're 14, 15, 16. And they're still doing some of those other jobs that they have to find out they didn't like. They're mowing lawns, they're washing cars, whatever it might be, and sometimes they find a career out of it, sometimes they say, 'Nope, I'm glad I learned,' or that boss was terrible. And so they're hopping 5.3 in a shorter amount of time, in about a decade. Now you fast forward to millennials, average first job closer to age 19, which means a lot of them are going to college and not getting their first job till after. You condense that, they're hopping more jobs in less time, anywhere from three to six years. It does feel like they can't keep a job. But then if you zoom out one step further, to age 30, and look at the same statistics, it almost levels out. Which means all of us have to have experience with bad jobs, things we don't like, teams that we don't fit on. And part of that's just growing and learning. And so applying a label is really easy, but that's the last thing that we should do. We should look at the age and the moment that they lived in and see what actually sticks across generations and what's unique to a generation.

Right. Well, I think we've replaced wisdom and experience with insight and knowledge. And I think that's really, really dangerous, because wisdom and experience can only come from flipping a burger and getting the splatter from the grill back on your hand, and you're not going to do that again. And OSHA would have a heyday with that now, but that's a whole other situation. So part of that is experience. And I think what we're seeing with this younger generation, Gen Z, and I don't want to throw them completely under the bus, but Gen Z, who is 14 to 29 today, what we're seeing with them is that they're outsourcing their experience of working to someone else's experience on TikTok. And that's not the same as work. And I think that's where we have a lot of danger with new grads particularly coming into the workplace. They skip those whole first experiences, a manager getting mad at them and yelling at them, the middle manager that you talked about that just chews them out. That's a good experience to have. It's not comfortable. People shouldn't be treated that way, but having that experience allows you to build resilience. And there's a great term, anti-fragility. It's the idea that if your immune system is anti-fragile, if you get sick, theoretically your body will build immunity so when that same disease comes again, it'll fight it off. But if I take this glass and drop it on the ground, that's fragile. The water's out of that glass and the glass is everywhere. And I think the younger generation is using social media and just knowledge and access to information online to get information, but in that they're lacking the experience and wisdom that comes from those interactions, that feeling that you only get when your boss either praises you or yells at you, or your coworker does something they shouldn't do and you have to deal with those situations. Reading that or watching that doesn't give you the same experience.

That was a great game.

Yes. Well, I think part of that is the whole lived experience. What we forget and neglect, you know, social media was supposed to be this great connector. And it did in a lot of ways connect the world, shrunk the world, allowed us to communicate with anybody. But the Surgeon General in 2023 also issued a warning that loneliness is one of the leading causes of death in our country, because of deaths of despair that come as a result of loneliness. It often traces back, and you can get into the causation and correlation argument, to social media and access to people. But even the gun analogy that you used, there's something to be said about that recoil and the kick. And having, if it's a handgun, the shells flying out the side, making sure it doesn't fly back and get behind your protective goggles, or the smell of gunpowder. Those things are completely different than a lived experience. So you might be able to watch how to dismantle a Glock on YouTube, but if you get it in the hand and you don't know that that's a deadly weapon that if not handled properly could hurt someone... That is wildly different. And I think we have a generation that has all the information up here in their heads, but by the time they get something physical in their hands, it totally unravels. And those experiences are important.

I think there's a couple different things, and we can unpack this from a culture and society perspective, from a parenting perspective, from a leadership perspective. So I'll try to tackle all as quickly and concisely as possible. But I do think a lot of it does start with parenting and child rearing and all of that. And we can't solve that for the employee that's coming into your front door. And so the question is then, if we can't solve how they've been raised, what do we do as leaders? Well, first of all, I think one of the things that's been really hard to watch with leadership is leaders have stopped being leaders. They have become so afraid, and this is a generalization, but they've become so afraid of culture and society and this younger generation, and if you take this person off, they're going to go to Reddit and just light up your company, that they are apologizing for being a leader. I've seen great leaders that I've respected get up in front of a new initiative or something like that, whether it's a small business or a big organization, and apologize for what they're doing just so that they don't have to face the backlash. And you know this, and I never served, but I've had many family members that served. If you have a plan, you're going to execute against that plan, because that's the plan. And you hope that it was the right plan, and you did everything to prepare for that moment. And there's sometimes some game day decisions, but as soon as you execute that plan, you're executing. You can't deviate from that. And I think the opportunity that we have as leaders, and it's frustrating, every leader that I talk to, they're like, 'So now I have to be a parent to this younger generation?' No, you have to lead them. You have to bring them along inside expectations. And I think one of the things that we're seeing is, particularly with Gen Z and millennials, they've actually, in most surveys, said that they want a mentor. They want someone to bring them along. And yet these leaders are so afraid of them, and I'm generalizing, but so many leaders are afraid of what these younger generations are going to do that they won't even lead them or mentor them. And so I think establishing what your vision and values are, as simple and basic, leadership 101 as that is, saying, 'This is where we're going. We're not going to get into anything else. We're going this way, and I'm glad you're on the team. I want to bring you with,' instead of, you're just a commodity, you're just part of the labor force, or I'm afraid of you because of what you might do through your phone. No, I value you here, and that means sometimes we're going to have hard conversations. And that doesn't mean that I'm firing you or I don't like you. That means you're a human being, and you're not perfect, and nor am I. And I think we've lost some of that from a leadership perspective, kind of trickling that down.

What's so interesting is younger generations want that authority and a healthy authority. They want that authenticity. You said transparency, and I think if I could define millennials, most of what they wanted was transparency. They had access to information from day one, from the CD-ROM Encyclopedia Britannica to Ask Jeeves to Google. They've always had access to information, but they also always had filters, their Snapchat filters, their Instagram filters, and on social media they put the best aspects of their life. So their life was filtered. But you look at Gen Z now, the current generation, the one that we're describing all these problems to, and we have to realize it's just their first time in the workforce, so let's give them some grace and help lead them along. But their word, if I could give them a word, would be authenticity. So they took that transparency to a new level and said, 'I don't care about your filters. I still want all the information, but I want honesty. We've seen too much of this dishonesty, distrust, fake news, filters. I want the real thing.' Which is really actually a good thing for leaders.

If leaders aren't afraid to do it. Because the difference is Gen Z will push back. And a lot of leaders are not used to the newest person into the company being willing to put up a fight. But if you're confident in your leadership ability, you handle that with grace and leadership, and you lead them through that, and you can be an authentic leader. And that word is so overused, but you can be an authentic leader, and a lot of times people are going to follow and respect that. You just have to set the boundaries and parameters of what your organization stands for.

That is very true. I think accountability is huge. And I think you can see this change in society. You know, Gen X kids, latchkey kids as a whole, generalizing, but they could ride their bike out, and if they did something stupid, any parent on the block would call them out, and would probably talk to their mom and dad. Now, a kid can go right around the block, and you don't dare parent another child. And I think we've seen this evolution from what was called child-rearing. We didn't see the word parenting even surface until the 1970s. Not that there weren't parenting books or the word wasn't used, but as far as when it became mainstream. And right now, almost eight out of every 10 millennial parents, who have either Gen Z or Gen Alpha or Gen Beta kids, you're starting to see those parents, eight out of 10, ascribe to a parenting style, meaning that they have a one-size-fits-all book that they're following to raise their children. And you know what's lacking for most of those? Any sort of discipline or accountability. And so we're seeing parents of the last couple generations be kind of hands-off, and, you know, 'you do you, you be you, how does that make you feel?' There's some that we could have learned from. The Silent Generation was extremely authoritarian, maybe over the top. It's often said that Silent Generation fathers would never say 'I love you' to their children, and we have found that there are certain things like that that are beneficial. But there's also things that we've totally removed, such as discipline, instead of 'here, go watch your iPad, I don't want to talk to you anymore.' That's not discipline. And I think we have seen that, and when these individuals get up into a job, they can't take discipline because they've never had discipline, which makes it extremely challenging for leaders when they're just simply trying to put those rules in place that keep order.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. And I think leadership is a high calling. And I think at some point leadership became just a title that you could earn, and you do the things because the book said you do the things, and you go home at the end of the day and you collect a decent-size paycheck. And that was an era of leadership that was unique and isolated and not what leadership actually is. If you look at leadership throughout history, leaders have had to navigate through war and famine and everything else. And then even more recent history, in the early 1900s, there were some really challenging things that were going on. You mentioned many of the wars that we had to go through. Whether the right decision or wrong decision, we could fight that all day, but they had to lead through some very difficult and challenging things. And I would say modern leadership has become punch the clock. You got these people that report to you, you've got metrics and KPIs that they stack up to, and if not, they get bucketed and then fired. And that's it. That's not leadership.

That's right. And they knew how to lead. And we've lost that. And you said something really important. Not to keep bringing it back to parenting, but you have six kids, and you have six different kids. You said they're individuals. And I think that's so profound and something that's so lost on leadership books. And listen, my bookshelf right there is full of leadership books. I love them. There's great nuggets you can take from almost anything you read, even if it's someone's unique perspective that you're not going to follow. You can still take that. But I think at some point down the line, we have tried to lead generationally, saying, 'Oh, this is how I'm going to lead Gen X. This is how I'm going to lead boomers. This is how I'm going to lead millennials. This is how I'm going to lead Gen Z.' And that's wrong. You're leading a team of individuals, and there's not a one-size-fits-all. And so if you've got a Gen Z'er that's hyper-emotional and says, 'I'm going to take Monday,' meaning they need a mental health day or whatever that is, you've got to lead through that. You can't just get angry at that because that's how their generation was raised. You have to figure out, okay, I'm a leader, this is not acceptable in my workforce, but also this person has a real perceived need. They perceive that this is a real need that they need to take this day. How do we work through that instead of either writing it off or bending to it? And I think that's where leaders need to be strong and set up those boundaries and understand and set that corporate culture. And it's not just reciting a vision and mission that's on your website or posted on your wall or on the side of your truck. It's really, what does that mean practically? And the leader has to live it out. They've got to be on the front lines. They've got to be the one willing to take the first swipe of the sword from the enemy. And I think leaders aren't doing that anymore.

Yeah, I think it goes to the fragility and anti-fragility conversation. And we have a generation, and I will come to the defense of both millennials and Gen Z. Millennials were raised in fear. From the days that they were born, there was fear-mongering publications from things like Time magazine saying you could get AIDS from sitting on a public toilet seat, a mosquito bite, and so those kids were bubble-wrapped from day one. And they were set up for failure because Gen X parents... interesting about millennials, they're 50% boomer parents, 50% Gen X parents. Only generation in history that has almost a 50/50 split. But Gen X parents naturally want to helicopter anyway, so it's perfectly primed. And then you had major events like 9/11, Columbine shooting, in reverse order, and other things that millennials experienced. And these parents who were already close to their kids wanted to be their friends, not their parents. So that's where we saw the authority start to slip. And so they said, 'How does that make you feel?' But millennials still had a foot in kind of what I'd consider the pre-technology world. While they were raised in technology, they were still allowed to ride their bikes for the most part. They were still allowed to go some distance. There weren't the tracking apps for most of them. So they had a foot in each world. Then Gen Z comes, that one foot's gone already. The foot in grounded reality is gone. You still have the 'hey, we're going to care for you, we're going to love you, now we need to give you your 15-minute timeout, you need to just take a minute, go take a break' instead of addressing behavioral issues. In addition to it, we've labeled a lot of things that were previously never labeled. Disorders, emotional things. I'm not saying some of those aren't real, because we have learned some things that we didn't know before, but some of them are more easily prescribed or more freely prescribed. And that is now an excuse and a mechanism for behaviors that would have previously never been permitted before. And so I think as we see this evolution, when we now get those individuals into our workforce, they've already been programmed that if they have exceptions made in school or if they have other things, this is part of who they feel that they are because they've been told that's who they are. And that creates a new challenge for leaders that really hasn't existed in the workforce. And now, because some of them are protected classes, you have to be extra careful from a legal perspective. So it absolutely creates a unique opportunity, but all of that goes back to the bubble-wrapping and that protection. The other day, I've got a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, but I had the 4-year-old. We were at a fast food restaurant, and he went up by himself, maybe 40 feet from our table where we were sitting, and went to get a knife. It was a plastic knife, like really dangerous, right? And we had a parent come in and just get so irate that my 4-year-old was allowed to leave the table. That was what got them. They didn't even notice that it was a knife, thank goodness. And they just thought it was terrible. I'm like, I can see my child. The door's not even there. He can't even push open the door because he's a little guy. I'm like, what risk was that? But we have coddled and protected these younger generations so much that we're setting them up for failure by the time they leave.

Exactly. And that's what the younger generations want, too. One example I do have, even though I got out of most of the work I did... I did have a couple Main Street businesses, and I have a coffee shop in a very, very polarized city. It has made national news for just how much they lean certain directions. And I had a team member, and I'm not involved in the day-to-day, but the manager called me and said, 'Hey, they wanted to put a political sticker up.' In 2024, which is completely a politically peaceful time in our country.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that happened down the road, but you can figure out where it was. So we said no, because that was our policy. Our front door is for our hours and any awards that the company won. That's it. Or an upcoming event, but very, very specific. We don't take political stances, because that doesn't impact whether or not we serve every person that walks through our door well.

It does, it does.

Yeah, it's crazy. And the general manager lets me know the next day that this person had proceeded to put this political ideology and sticker on the window. He's like, 'Should I take it down?' I said, 'No.' He's like, 'That's against our policy.' I said, 'It is, but here's how we're going to play this. We go to the person and we give them the opportunity to take it down. Or if they want to leave it up, we can, with the caveat that they have to find every other leading candidate from every other party and other ideology and put it on the door. It is their choice.' So they took it down and quit.

Two weeks later, they came back asking for the job. I said, 'Where did you go to work in between?' They're like, 'The place that had all the banners and the signs that supported my candidate.' I said, 'So why did you come back?' 'Because I always knew where you stood, and you were fair to everybody.' And that's leadership. Now, it could have ended differently. Absolutely could have ended differently. That one I got off lucky, but I also wasn't compromising. It was like, this is our stance. So we either get everyone's stickers on the board and we can look like the polling place, sure, not my ideal choice, but it's equal and fair, or we don't put anyone's on. And that showed to that individual that, wow, they stand by what they say. And that's what the generation wants.

Yep.

Wow.

Yeah, I completely agree. Completely agree.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that we could touch on, but relevant to your listeners and relevant to our conversation, I'll touch on these things. First is the generational pendulum, and it's basically this idea that it swings back and forth over time. Think about it like a teenager. We experience something that our parents say, we're going to challenge it, like 'clean your room.' Then we're going to overcorrect. We're going to shove everything under the bed or in the closet. And then finally when we need it, we're going to recalibrate. And that's what every generation does. And so you've seen that with the Silent Generation being stingy because they came off the Great Depression. Boomers wanted everything, and so they went to school, racked up debt, racked up mortgage, kept titles, but weren't at home. Gen X, because their parents weren't at home, wanted to be more at home with their kids, became helicopter parents. So you're seeing that swing. I think the hopeful things that we're seeing for the future is these younger generations, Gen Z and now Gen Alpha, who turned 13 this year, and Gen Beta, who's being born in 2026 and beyond. I think we're seeing a trend more towards, as Gen Z says, IRL, in real life. They're wanting to get back. We're seeing Starbucks invest a ton of money. They shut down a ton of their stores so they could double down on certain experiences that are more like a traditional cafe where you can have intellectual conversations, no longer set up your laptop and work. We're seeing Chick-fil-A giving people free dessert if they put their phones in a box. We're seeing Barnes & Noble open 16 new locations, and they're citing Gen Z as the number one buyers of paperback and hardback physical books.

And so we're seeing this trend back. And now malls, who for a while... you remember, if you goofed off in a mall and your neighbor was there, they would have yelled at you. Then you had to get mall cops because we were no longer a collectivist society. We moved to individualism, and so kids could run wild, and then we put in restrictions and hours where basically you had to be 18, which at 18 you don't want to hang out at a mall anymore. And so now we're actually starting to see that swing back, and we're starting to see Gen Z and Gen Alpha want to return to malls where they're permitted. A lot of them still have restrictions where they're not. And we're starting to see a lot of this take place. We're seeing people put away phones. So I think the hopeful news is these younger generations are starting to say, hey, we want that physical, that human interaction again. We've seen how humans have been removed, we want to put some human back. So that's the positive. I think the scary part is their parents. So millennial and Gen Z parents of Gen Alpha and Gen Beta, they're still so addicted to social media. They're outsourcing their parenting to AI. They're saying, 'Hey, my kid got in trouble at school, what do I do?' That's not parenting. That's not having an emotional conversation figuring out how you navigate it. 'Hey, my daughter is the outcast in her friend group, let me write an email to her principal,' and they use ChatGPT to do it. That's not a parent having a conversation with her daughter on how to navigate those real-life things that happen, right? And that's my bigger fear. I think the younger generation is already seeing they need more real, but I think their parents aren't there yet. And while they're putting restrictions on phones, the parents themselves are still on their phone. So I think we're going to see some interesting things unfold over the coming decade or two.

Awesome. That's great.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't want your stupid cold email.

Yeah, that was the whole thing.

Exactly.

Right.

Yep.

So true.

Well, thank you, Richard. Appreciate the opportunity.