Stop the Fight

"These young people are smart, but in ways that can be dangerous. They're so sure they're right."

"I've had managers who had no idea what I did - and didn't even try to understand."

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"I was reprimanded a few times for working late. I was trying to change the world, and the company was talking about my hours!"

"Young people don't always know how to pace themselves."

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Skeptical programmer: "Do you have an email account?"

Irate Executive: "Since you were in diapers!"

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Young CEO: "Sometimes I wonder how much bigger this company would be if we didn't debate everything."

Older colleague: "We've argued over such basic things that I can't believe we're even having the conversation."

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You're listening to the sounds - real conversations inside real companies - of two generations colliding. Sounds that are echoing through more and more workplaces, as twentysomethings and fortysomethings claim their positions on center stage - at the same time. The images are so familiar, they're cliches. In this corner, the over-the-hill gang: senior executives who are utterly clueless about technology and dangerously out of touch with markets. In this corner, the kiddie corps: know-it-all Webheads who can't run their own lives, let alone a company.

It would be funny if it weren't so damn counterproductive. Are business executives really the equivalent of professional athletes - people who should throw in the towel before they're 40? Is gray hair really a legitimate credential for leadership in an economy where change gets measured in nanoseconds, not years?

Maybe it's time for peace between the generations. Time for both sides to stop fighting with each other and start learning from each other. Can twentysomething plus fortysomething add up to something new - and better?

The four leaders profiled in this article - all from the world of computing and the Web - run companies where people from different generations have stopped colliding and started collaborating. Together, they are devising answers to the tough questions that still cause divisions at most companies: What should people learn? How should they work? What do leaders do? They are reaching across the generation gap to create the best of both generations.

Is Older Wiser?

Candice Carpenter listened in shock as yet another of her ambitious young employees announced his resignation. Carpenter, 46, is chairwoman and CEO of iVillage, one of the Web's fastest-growing online communities. Seven months earlier, she'd promoted this 26-year-old to an important job at the company, vice president of strategic development and operations, with an understanding that he would stay for at least a year. "You made a commitment!" she said. He shrugged it off. ("We never had a contract," he explained later.)

His announcement was the last straw. For months, twentysomethings had been coming into Carpenter's office, waving job offers from startups, and demanding twice, sometimes triple, their current salaries. That show-me-the-money attitude wasn't what really bothered her. ("We're an industry where people can double their salaries just by moving across the street," she says.) What bothered her was how hard she'd been trying - apparently without success - to show young employees the virtues of growing up inside of a company that's growing fast - thanks to seasoned leadership from her and one of her cofounders, Nancy Evans.

Carpenter and Evans, 48, reached the pinnacle of their professions by paying their dues - learning from mentors who were older, wiser, and tougher than they were. It wasn't pleasant, but it was part of growing up. "Today you have the natural impatience of youth combined with infinite opportunities," Carpenter says. "These young people are smart, but in ways that can be dangerous. They're so sure they're right. So we kicked some of them out. We felt like we were being held hostage by these twentysomethings."

Experience counts: One reason iVillage has become such a fast-growing success is the track record of its founders. Carpenter has been a marketing vice president at American Express, president of Time-Life Video and Television, and president of Q2, the home-shopping channel started by Barry Diller. President Nancy Evans, a founding editor of Family Life, is a former president and publisher of Doubleday, and former editor-in-chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Their credentials have helped iVillage raise $67 million from investors and build an online community that generates more than 66 million page views per month.

Youth counts too: Back in September 1995, when Carpenter and Evans cofounded the company, they knew that recruiting great young people was a make-or-break challenge. "We had the peripheral vision and sense for the business that experience brings," says Carpenter. "But we needed a young staff, people with the medium in their blood." They got what they asked for. Almost half of the company's 210-person staff was born after 1968.