Re-Generation X
“There are no sacred cows. I used to think the most important part of any company was the employees. I was wrong. The most important people are the clients. You people mean nothing.”
Those are the words that author and former AIG data intelligence employee Jamil Hasan attributes to the company’s CEO, Peter Hancock, addressing AIG’s technology division in 2015. Whether verbatim or not, its message was indicative of the effects of financial disaster that Hasan recounts in his book Re-Generation X: How We Can Leverage Blockchain Technology to Save Ourselves and Rebuild America.
Hasan claims a financial crisis began in 2008 that had a direct impact on an entire generation (the author himself included), which has since had to scratch and claw to survive, find work again and re-establish an acceptable way of life.
“Over the past decade, we Gen X members have been disproportionately discriminated against, unfairly denied career opportunities, unreasonably laid off en masse, and unduly thrust onto the sidelines by our generational predecessors the Baby Boomers, then and still the corporate C-suite executives who have driven our former companies into the ground and been rewarded with multimillion-dollar severance packages.”
“But now, facing an additional economic crisis, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, our experience, skills and the knowledge we possess could be game changers in helping restore our entire Generation X to prominence.”
Hasan goes into tremendous detail and analysis to show the systematic problems that he believes caused the Gen X decline, from financial, societal, governmental and industrial standpoints. He offers definitions of generational differences and outlines all the legislation that impacted business decisions and his eventual exit from AIG. “We were the inadvertent victims,” he says, “of a system that enabled lesser talented generations to sideline our careers, freeze our pensions, and create wealth for themselves at our expense.”
