EDITORIAL & OPINION — Innovation and culture — The Me Generation

The baby-boomers like to think they led the way, but it was really their parents — the Second World War generation — who entrenched innovation, entrepreneurship and individualism in North American culture.

Young men from across North America left home to fight in Europe or Asia, while women manned the factories and shipyards. It was a topsy-turvy time and the history books don’t really talk about the personal upheavals that went on as an entire generation uprooted itself from a traditional, hierarchical and somewhat repressive social regime.

But the young people who fought for freedom in the 1940s brought their hard-won independence to the workplace, and to their own lives, in the 1950s. The class structure dissolved and people who had been leaders on the battlefield became leaders in business, no matter how humble their backgrounds. The innovation of the post-war years was remarkable, though things began to stagnate somewhat in the 1960s, when another generation decided to carry on their parents’ tradition of questioning authority and thinking outside the box.

The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame contains numerous inductees of modest origin who achieved great things after they returned from wartime services. Exploration and mining both benefited from the technological breakthroughs of that era, as did the scientific and medical professions.

In the 1950s, North America was the economic engine of the world, until Japan and Germany began rebuilding and challenging its position. Great Britain was the surprising laggard, in part because of its war-time debts, but mostly because British society was beset by acrimonious class struggles.

A decade or two later, it appeared that North American was in decline and unable to compete with the incredible productivity of Asia. Its industrial belt became a rust belt. But then came the Asian crisis and weakness in the European economy, which, together with the dawn of the information age, pushed North America back into the sun.

Economists and futurists see a pattern here and are questioning whether cultural traits are linked to economic success and failure. Francis Fukuyama, an American of Japanese heritage, examines this question in his new book The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, scheduled for release this summer.

Fukuyama suggests that North America’s economic resurgence isn’t just the result of fiscal weakness among competitors, but rather is the constructive outcome of individualism as it is encouraged in the Western tradition. It’s a helpful source of innovation, he argues, especially in the 1990s, when information technology is of critical importance to production processes.

The Japanese made enormous gains in manufacturing by adopting a group-oriented, consensus-based system of management. It worked well from the 1950s through the 1980s, when there was an established technology and model to follow, but has proved less useful in the faster-paced, knowledge-driven economy of the 1990s. That’s where North America excels, and that is why Bill Gates is the richest man in the world.

Traditional economies and traditional societies are generally less welcoming of change, individualism and innovation. The new information-driven economy is based on rapid change and entrepreneurship. It has no time or use for cronyism, class barriers and rigid, hierarchical thinking.

The proof is in the number of patents taken out on a per capita basis by the nations of this world. North America leads the rest of the world by several country miles.

The way culture and business interact is not openly discussed in these politically correct times. Don’t rock the boat, some people say, lest you offend someone’s sensibilities. Yet there can be no denying that when the Me Generation and their adventure-loving parents rocked the boat to make their ride more exciting, they did the world, and the economy, some lasting good.