The new captains of industry aren’t like the old captains of industry. Whereas Chicago’s lakefront was shaped by Marshall Field and Millennium Park was championed by Sara Lee’s John Bryan, the tech millionaires aren’t stepping into those roles.

Institutions and non-profits are freaking out; they say business leaders of today have no social conscience. Well, that isn’t true. Business leaders of today and tomorrow have more social conscience than any generation before them. It is just expressed differently.

Insight Labs partnered with the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Foundation to further examine the question: if our new captains of industry don’t want to be on the school board, what do we do? It’s a question author and consultant Sarah Sladek has been considering for years. Sladek has built a career out of helping companies and associations recruit young talent, with a focus on bridging the gap between the Baby Boomers and Generations X and Y. Her books include The New Recruit, Rock Stars Incorporated, and, most recently, The End of Membership As We Know It. After the members of the Lab came up with a few ideas about how to do this in the interest of the public good, we decided that Sladek would be a good person to try them out on. Her conversation with Labs Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson follows.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: There’s a concern among a number of civic organizations that up-and-coming business leaders, and particularly the leaders of tech startups, just aren’t interested in embracing civic leadership roles the way that they used to. Given your background and expertise, what do you make of that problem?

Sarah Sladek: There’s been a lot of research out there on what makes younger generations tick and why they are so different from the generations that have come before them. There are some key differentiators, and you’re tapping on one of them right now: why are younger generations not as compelled to join civic organizations or advocate for certain causes as their Baby Boomer predecessors?

What we find is that there are a number of reasons for this, but it comes down to an ongoing debate over whether it is age or generation. People will say, well, these leaders are still too young, they are not yet in their prime earning years, and these civic responsibilities will come in their later years.

I tend to disagree with that point of view. As we look back in history, we can see some clear indicators — for example, most of today’s government leaders are Baby Boomers. If you look back, you can see that most of them were in public service of some sort before they were 30. That is not true of Generation X. We’re not seeing a lot of those same trends where they want to be in public service or charitable givers.

But there was a study done a couple of years ago that I think was right on. It said that members of Generation X actually are joiners, and they actually do support certain organizations, but there has to be a return on investment. They are more apt to get involved in organizations like professional and trade associations where they can say,  “I am going to pay dues or volunteer, but I know I am getting something of value in return.” Some of those returns are career development, access to education, and mentoring. They are actually far more focused on career, in large part because these generations have never known job security.

So professional and trade groups fulfill a need. But for some of these other groups and causes, they do not see the same return on their investment. So it may be that they’ll invest somewhat more as they get older, but for the most part we are seeing that these are enduring characteristics of the younger generations.

ABN: I see the framework you’re laying out, and as I understand it, it’s similar to the argument you made in your book The New Recuit. I was wondering how you might apply the ideas from another one of your books, Rock Stars Incorporated, which concerned how companies can hire and retain the most talented young people. In the Lab, we talked a great deal about the character of the tech startup CEO, the Mark Zuckerberg type, and the kind of civic leader that person will or won’t become. How do you think these talented leaders can be “recruited” for such roles?

SS: If you’re going to recruit exceptional talent and exceptional leaders, you have to give something exceptional in return. The old standbys and benefits don’t fly. To attract someone like Mark Zuckerberg with exceptional talent, you really have to think outside the box. You find a way to get on his level, to bring exceptional leaders and exceptional benefits so he is with like-minded peers in a like-minded environment.

There’s been studies done that show that these younger generations — and Generation X in particular — trust their peers and want to network with their peers more than anybody else. Meanwhile, Generation Y is more open to being mentored. They want to network with and access people of all ages. I think Mark Zuckerberg falls into that Gen Y category. So how do you pair him up with other people who have been extremely successful and talented, and then get them some sort of return on their investment of time and money? Therein lies the challenge, because a lot of organizations are stuck with one-size-fits-all models. We find this in the workforce too. It’s not just a job anymore — it’s a community. People want to be part of something bigger than the job. They want to be part of a company  that appreciates innovation, that gives them freedom, that gives them access to technology, that fosters relationships between like-minded people.

So it really goes back to the fact that younger generations are driven by return on investment. And I just want to say that older generations may look at that and say, “Man, these young people are so self-centered and entitled. They think that everything should be delivered to them on a silver platter.” But between the Baby Boomer generation and Generation X there was a clear-cut difference. Baby Boomers and the generations that came before were raised to appreciate conformity. But in the late 60s and early 70s, there was a shift to appreciating individuality. So for those who were raised before 1964, they were raised to follow certain rules, blend in with the crowd, and just do what society expects. That was usually get married, have kids, get a job, stay in that job forever, aspire for the corner office and the title of CEO or president, serve your community, sit on boards of directors, and do great things.

But in the late 1960s, when Generation X started being born, there was a complete shift. Some people call it “Mr. Rogers Syndrome.” People started raising kids to think they were special and unique. Then there’s things like national leaders failing to deliver on their promises, skyrocketing divorce rates, etc. What you end up with is a generation that says, “I value my personal happiness more than anything.” They are not going to do something just because it is the “right thing” to do or because society expects them to do it.

Non-profits and other types of organizations get hung up on this. They do not understand that young people have to have a return on their investment. They will not invest their time in any job, company, organization, faith-based group, nothing, without that return on investment. That means feeling like they belong, feeling appreciated, having access to something that makes them a better person, whether that’s community service projects, leadership opportunities, career development, mentoring, something that helps them make their lives better.

ABN: I’m really interested by what you say about offering “outside the box” benefits. I think of the “flex time” that Google offers their programmers — that has not only attracted some really bright people and led to some of their most successful products. It also says something about the values of the company. But it’s a lot easier for a private company or even a publicly-held corporation to offer that sort of thing than it is for the school board or a civic association, I would think. How might those groups also offer something unique when they work in a somewhat more restrained environment?

SS: Yes, unfortunately, those restraints are there, and we don’t want them to be there. This is why we see very few young people going into certain industries, and government is one of them. Others are things like construction and accounting. There’s certain fields that have this negative stereotype, where people think they will be worked like a dog, that they won’t be rewarded, that they will be miserable and neglected. I’ve done a little research on young people going into teaching, and there’s extremely high turnover within the first one to three years. They’re actually leaving the industry, because they get into these teaching roles and they’re just completely inhibited by the teachers who have been there forever, by the principals, by people who say, “No, you can’t do it that way.” They don’t make any concessions – and I think the same is probably true for school boards as well.

I don’t exactly have the answer. Really what it comes down to is that organizations have to educate their current leaders and workforce to be open to new ideas and think about succession planning. If they want to be relevant, they have to start engaging the voices and participation of younger people. It’s really just that simple. But unfortunately, a lot of organizations are stuck in this idea that it’s always been done a certain way and they’re not going to do anything different. As a result, we’re going to see a lot of organizations and civic groups fade away in the next five to ten years.

ABN: Well, here’s a scary thought — companies go out of business. Non-profits disband in other ways. But what happens when it’s government that can’t get the talent and keep it together?

SS: That is a scary question. It actually terrifies me. We have the oldest Congress right now in American history — holy cow. Most of those leaders started in their 20s and 30s, but you don’t see Gen X coming up to the plate, and the oldest Gen X-ers are now in their 40s. So we are way behind, and government leaders aren’t doing anything to bring young people into their industry. There’s no mentoring going on, no succession planning. It terrifies me. Sixty percent of government workers are eligible to retire in the next five years. The average age of governors is in their 50s. There was so much publicity about how young Obama was. Well, he’s not that young — he just turned 50. We’ve just got to shift that paradigm.

But the vast majority of young people believe that government is tainted and corrupt. It’s one of those industries that has a very negative stereotype, and people don’t want to be associated with it. I pay close attention to it because I’m very worried about it, quite frankly.

ABN: So let’s say that President Obama comes to you tomorrow and says, “I’d like to create a cabinet-level position of Secretary of Generational Succession, and I’d like it to be you.” What are the first few things you would do in that position?

SS: I can dare to dream here. The first thing is that it has to go beyond a single person. It has to be a movement within the community. You have to bring more than one voice to the table. So I would want there to be a task force or some sort of community development. I think that’s important for any organization looking at succession: once you get a group, even if it’s a small group, of young people on board, and they are actively participating, it tends to spread like wildfire. We actually saw that in Obama’s campaign, which was very successful at doing campaign camps and getting young people engaged in the message. So I would empower a group and get them behind a particular initiative.

I would also say that they need a marketing campaign to really educate people about the benefits of running for government, trying to dispel those myths that government is an evil, awful thing, and advocating for that in a variety of media. It would have to be as grassroots as possible, because younger people respond to honest, trustworthy, peer-driven initiatives. They don’t respond well to huge advertising campaigns — they don’t want to be sold anything or taken for a ride. They want a message that makes promises and delivers on those promises.

ABN: I think that you’re right that the Obama campaign did a great job of engaging young people in the way you describe, and many of them are disillusioned by what has happened since. Whether it’s his responsibility or not, it feels like that spirit hasn’t translated into the government itself. Do you agree with that, and if so, why do you think that happened?

SS: Yes, I would agree. Do you remember when he took office, and there was all this press around how he didn’t want to give us his BlackBerry? He was saying, “This is a part of me. This is my generation. I use technology,” but he was surrounded by people who were saying, “No, this is not what the President of the United States does.” Obama had great ideas and visions about how he wanted to change things, but the White House isn’t run by just one person. When you’re butting up against the oldest Congress in history and other people who have been around entirely far too long, all of a sudden your ideas start to get squelched. I think that’s what happened. And I think you’re right that young people are disappointed. To not see change come to fruition makes them disengage even more.

ABN: So if you would, I’d like you to react to some of the ideas that came out of our Lab with the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. One idea was that the model that very successful new CEOs and entrepreneurs will want to use to change the world will be similar to the model that helped them succeed in business. Well, if that’s the case, then we have a real problem, because these businesspeople succeeded by completing demolishing old markets and creating new platforms that became very popular very rapidly. That’s in contrast to an older model of gradually creating value, building a reputation, making connections, and building coalitions. So one conclusion you can draw from that is the idea that if we want to engage them as civic leaders, we’ll need to provide the opportunity to create new platforms that are similar to the businesses these folks built. What do you make of that?

SS: I would agree wholeheartedly. Young people are looking for new ideas and new concepts. Anything that reeks of traditional, old, historic is out. That’s one of the first pieces of advice I give organizations I work with: nine times out of ten I go to their website and it begins, “Since 1800 we have been doing blah blah blah.” I always say, “As impressive as that is, this generation doesn’t care about your history. What they care about is what you’re doing in the future.” Anything that says that they’re continuing to do what they’ve always done won’t really fly.

ABN: You know, we were considering this problem in the context of leadership for cities. One approach to solving that problem would be to fix these organizations in a way that enables them to recruit these young leaders. But another way would be to just say, “Who needs these old organizations?” Maybe we should just let young people start new groups and get out of the way.

SS: Well, I think that’s a question that every organization has to ask themselves. They have to ask themselves if they are willing to die out in the next ten years if they do not change. Quite frankly, I have already seen some organizations do that. The ones who aren’t are asking themselves how they can adapt their models to engage young people and diversify and live on for generations to come. I would like to see a lot of our established organizations make the choice to change and embrace new ideas. That being said, I know there is going to be a certain percentage who choose not to change.

I should point out Boston Young Professionals Association. They were founded a few years ago, and within six months they had more than 10,000 members. I am sure that the Boston Chamber of Commerce kicks themselves every day for not coming up with an initiative like that themselves. Now the young professionals’ group has no desire to partner up with anybody — and why should they? Young professionals are extremely powerful, and they tend to be overlooked — that’s the mistake organizations are making.

So I think it will be a different answer for everybody. I would love to see older organizations adapt and embrace young people and not say silly things like, “They’re just not joiners” or “Sooner or later, they’ll see the error of their ways.” I often use the metaphor of a buffet. For a long time, organizations have been serving pizza, and it’s really good pizza. Then all of a sudden you have people coming to the table and saying, “I don’t want pizza. What else do you offer?” Do you have to stop serving pizza all together? No, but you need to find a way to engage these other audiences that want something else.

There may be organizations who are already seeing declining membership who just say, “That’s the way it’s going to be.” But that’s really sad, because we’re going to lose some of our most historic institutions and groups. I would rather see them survive and embrace new opportunities.

ABN: What do you think the success of a group like Boston Young Professionals means for the civic leadership of a city like Boston?

SS: I think it means amazing things. They do a mix of social and networking activities. But they also do a great deal of community service. The fact that they have such a high level of engagement is incredible. They can actually track and measure the effects initiatives by their organization will have in their communities. Younger people crave that sense of community and common purpose. It’s why cities like Detroit are struggling, because there is such a brain drain. In Boston, they’ve created a community where young people can meet other young people and serve together. As a result, Boston (I’m sure) has a very high retention rate of young professionals in their community, whereas so many cities out there are fearful about the future of their workforce.

ABN: This butts up against another problem we were talking about in the Lab. Young people, and especially the educated, entrepreneurial class, are very mobile.  They’re happy to move to a new place for their job or their lifestyle or whatever. So even if they have perfectly good will, if people are likely to move in a few years, they have less incentive to invest in the particular city or region or country that they happen to be in. How do you think we solve for that problem?

SS: I think that is true that we are more mobile now, but I still think that ties to community rank very high, even with young people. I think it’s the same as with workplaces. There has been research done that counters the old misperception that companies have that if they invest in their employees’ careers, they’ll just get really savvy and leave for another company. The irony is that they found that more than 70 percent of young professionals said that if you invest in their career, they’re more likely to stay, and lack of investment in career is one of the top reasons they’ll leave.

So it also plays out in communities. If people feel that they have a sense that they belong, that their community invests in them and appreciates them, then they are more likely to stay in that community. Or if they do leave for a short period of time, they’re very likely to come back. My own city, Minneapolis, has a lot of that. A very high percentage of people leave for a short period of time for college and career, but then come back, because Minneapolis is renowned as a great place to raise kids with great values. It’s a great environment, and we actively market that to young people. There are a lot of cities that are missing that magnetism.

So I think that even in this mobile environment, young people will be influenced by where they work, by where they do business, and how they feel about the communities where they live.

ABN: What are some of the actions that you think cities or civic organizations can take to encourage that?

SS: I’ll use another example, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce. They started an initiative a few years ago of young professionals — like Boston, but within the context of the Chamber. It’s now called Fuel Milwaukee. The Chamber had identified that Milwaukee had issues with brain drain because companies there had issues with retaining young workers. The Chamber was concerned about retaining members, but they were also worried about how Milwaukee would stay competitive in a global economy.

So they empowered a group of young people and said, “What can you do to help us recruit young people to come to Milwaukee or stay in Milwaukee?” It grew like wildfire — not quite as big as Boston, but a really impressive number for Milwaukee. These young people are doing community service projects. They are meeting with companies that are interested in moving to Milwaukee. They’ll talk from their point of view about all the benefits that the city has to offer to young people.

ABN: So I think your career is really interesting. I think you’ve achieved this kind of marriage between sociology and business, and I think there are a lot of people out there who would like to do something like what you do — maybe not with a focus on different generations, but with other social phenomena. What would be your advice to someone who hopes to make a career similar to yours?

SS: Well, I didn’t necessarily set out to do this. I identified a trend and was fascinated by the trend and how it affects organizations. For me personally, it’s required a lot of diligence in regards to this topic, doing constant research. It’s been really trying to build my credibility. When I started down this path, I was in my mid-20s, and people probably thought I didn’t know what I was talking about because I was too young. And when you’re going to organizations and you say, “You need to change everything,” and you’re only in your mid-20s, they say, “Yeah right.” So there was a lot of focus on building credibility. I also provided lots and lots of forums for people to access my ideas and add to that credibility, so people would eventually decide that what I had to say was worth listening. I think you have to be really passionate about what you’re talking about, and really persistent as you face a lot of opposition from people who say you don’t know what you’re doing.

ABN: Okay, last question. You’ve done some work with  Jeff Leitner, the Dean of Insight Labs. I’m pretty sure he qualifies as Generation X. And I’m 27, so I guess I’m Generation Y.

SS: You are a cusper.

ABN: A cusper? Shoot. I knew there was something wrong with me.

SS: Ha, no, it just means you were born with a year or two of the generational shift. I may be wrong, but I think Jeff is a cusper too, between Generation X and the Baby Boom. Xers were born between 1965 to 1981 and Y’s were born between 1982 and 1995.

ABN: Well, I’m 1984.

SS: So you’re Y, but you’re close.

ABN: For what it’s worth, I feel closer to Generation X than, say, my younger sisters in Generation Y. Anyway, so here’s the question. One of the reasons I love what we do is that I’m definitely not a “joiner.” I have a strong preference for what we do, for constantly meeting with new groups of people, over going to a committee meeting every month. I like that people say to me in interviews, “Wow, we knew we only had three hours for this Lab, we sure weren’t going to waste any time.” So I’m wondering, given all this information about how we’re cuspers and all — what’s your analysis of us and this organization?

SS: This is a weird question.

ABN: I felt like I couldn’t not ask it. I feel like I’m the object you’re studying.

SS: I think Jeff and I have had great dialogues about organizations and the work they do. But I think the fact that you do not readily drink the Kool-Aid, that you are constantly questioning, is exactly what I’m talking about when I say how important return on investment is. What’s great is that you are responding to that by creating something that is of value and holds water. Groups like Boston Young Professionals were not satisfied with the existing model either, so they went off and created their own thing. I think that’s exactly what you and Jeff are doing. Especially for generations that are coming up, you’re creating something that is of value. I think you have a great opportunity to grow into something bigger. You’re creating what you wanted from other organizations. That’s good. That’s really good. You are creating the solutions that people are so desperately seeking right now.