My wife and I have belatedly discovered the fantastic new series Mad Men, currently re-running its first season on AMC or available on iTunes. Created by Matthew (“The Sopranos”) Weiner, it’s a dark comedy/drama set in a Madison Avenue ad agency in 1960. It’s not only a terrific character-based story; the period detail is incredible. We had fun watching many episodes over the weekend with my parents, who graduated from college in 1959 and have vivid recollections of those days from their early working life. But the most fascinating thing about Mad Men is that it’s not about the past at all: it’s about the future.

Mad Men gives us a glimpse of a very particular generational constellation in the workplace:

• In 1960, members of the Lost Generation (b. 1885-1905), a reactive generation similar to today’s GenX, were the senior executives. In fact, the last of their two 20th century Presidents (Truman and Eisenhower) was just about to leave office, to be succeeded by the rising young Veteran JFK.
• The World War II Veterans – our civic-minded “Greatest Generation,” were middle managers, represented in the series at the older end by the agency’s junior partner, WW II Vet Roger Sterling, and at the younger end by protagonist and Creative Director Donald Draper, who fought in Korea. 1960 catches them just at the peak of their Rat Pack-inspired mid-life crises, and it ain’t pretty.
• The young turks in the office are the Depression-baby Silent Generation (today at the tail end of their careers), still too young to have discovered their historical mission as seekers of social justice and forgers of compromise. At this point, the young men are wise-guy skirt chasers with a nagging, thinly-veiled jealousy of their glorious Veteran next-elders, and the women are experiencing a keen dissatisfaction with the stultifying set of “Feminine Mystique” expectations that Veteran women (and men, of course) passed down as their social ideal.
• Missing from the workplace are the Idealists. The post-Civil War generation that produced FDR had mostly died out, and had certainly retired from the workplace. We glimpse young Boomers in the series, mostly playing Cowboys and Indians or plopped down on the living room floor eating TV dinners while watching “The Shirley Temple Story Hour” on the black and white television set. Thoughts of 80-hour work weeks, Gucci briefcases and Six Sigma Management seminars were probably pretty far from their minds.

The grand pooh-bah of the Mad Men agency Sterling Cooper is the dapper, slightly eccentric Bert Cooper, apparently in his 60s and squarely a member of the Lost Generation. The goateed, bow-tie wearing Cooper sits in his large, Japanese-appointed office (and requires his minions to remove their shoes before entering), reading Ayn Rand and preaching his staunchly Republican politics. It is obvious that he had a colorful youth and now uses his position of power to express, even flaunt, the idiosyncratic pursuits that his disapproving elders probably castigated him for when he was an alienated and rebellious young adult in the Roaring 20s. As a leader, he settles disputes among his staff with good-natured autocracy, and his executive decisions are invariably based on a kind of bottom-line practicality that his younger employees find alarming.

[spoiler warning] In one episode that we recently watched, the scheming junior account manager Peter Campbell discovered damaging information about his boss, Draper, and attempts to blackmail his way into a better position in the agency. Draper, with Veteran stoicism, chooses to call Campbell’s bluff and face the music rather than knuckle under to intimidation. The two of them race up to Cooper’s office to have it out in front of the boss. Cooper listens to Campbell’s damning testimony, narrows his eyes, and responds, “Mr. Cooper, who cares?” The scene plays out as follows.

Campbell: Mr. Cooper, he's a fraud and a liar, a criminal even!

Cooper: Even if this were true, who cares? This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here.

Campbell: I'm not imagining anything!

Cooper: The Japanese have a saying, “A man is whatever room he is in,” and right now Donald Draper is in this room. I assure you. There's no profit in forgetting this. I'd put your energy into bringing in accounts.

Then, after the stunned Campbell leaves – his Adaptive sense of fairness and justice utterly confounded – Cooper turns to Draper and says, “Don, fire him if you want. But I'd keep an eye on him. One never knows how loyalty is born.”

It would be hard to imagine a more elegant articulation of Reactive values, delivered here from the position of mature leadership. From this encounter, it is clear how the controlled and sober-minded Cooper, usually seen only in cameo, actually sets the tone for the agency, which often seems so steeped in aberrant behavior that it is hard to imagine anyone getting anything done. In fact, this culture is the direct result of a senior management that is motivated exclusively by transactional results, and cares not in the least for arbitrary processes or standards of behavior if they are not related to business outcomes. With a few small modifications to account for evolved attitudes toward race and gender, the 1960 workplace is nothing if not the GenX utopia on earth. And note how it drives the young  Silents crazy, just as Silent-led, process-driven, politically-correct corporate workplace of the late 1980s and 90s seemed so stultifying and unsatisfactory to rising Xers.

Why does this historical snapshot matter? If the theory of generational succession holds, the next time we will see this alignment of generational types in the workplace is around 2030. There will likely be an Xer President and a GenX majority on the Supreme Court. Boomers and their ideological agendas will have finally washed out of the system, and their young successors will still be bouncing on the knees of their Millennial and Future Adaptive parents.

At that time, senior Xers who manage to hold off the challenges of ambitious mid-career Millennials will be ensconced in the upper levels of large organizations, and mediating disputes between members of generations whose conventional beliefs they find perplexing, if not contemptible. Curious how such a workplace – and such a society – might look? Tune in to Mad Men and find out!