Stanford MBA: From Baby Boomer to Gen Z | Class of ‘95 Meets Class of ‘25

🎬 Podcast Ep. 1 | Stanford MBA – From Baby Boomer to Gen Z | Katharine McLennan '95

• Katharine McLennan (Stanford MBA '95) • Season 1 • Episode 1

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This is Episode 1—a 20-minute episode. 

I introduce myself, Katharine McLennan, a Stanford MBA Class of 1995 member, an organisational culture and leadership consultant, and an avid explorer of the intersections between leadership, culture, strategy, and human potential. 

In this inaugural episode, I share the inspiration and vision for this podcast series, which bridges the wisdom and experiences of two generations—my classmates, now in our 60s, give or take, and the Class of 2025, just entering their 30s, give or take.

I also set the scene for our dialogue by reflecting on each class's unique transitions. My classmates, born at the cusp of the Baby Boomer and Generation X eras, navigated the dawn of the Internet in 1995, a moment I define as the start of the Information Age. 

In contrast, the Class of 2025, born at the intersection of the Millennial and Generation Z waves, faces the dawn of artificial intelligence in 2025, where information is no longer scarce but abundant and commoditised.

I end the episode by contrasting possibilities for a future shaped by AI: the Inspiration  Age, a time of revived human imagination, integrity, inclusiveness, and intuition, and the Isolation Age, where technology risks deepening disconnection, fueling loneliness and anxiety. 

This series is a space to explore these themes, foster meaningful connections across generations, and ignite conversations that matter.

Join the Podcast Series
Stanford MBA: From Baby Boomer to Gen Z | Class of ‘95 Meets Class of ‘25

Each of these episodes will feature a different pair of Stanford MBA people -- one from the class of 1995, and one from the class of 2025.

Remember to rate, review, and subscribe to stay connected with future episodes!

📺 Also available on YouTube:
Entire series playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSaVisoF0D_GKxVmHmakNxdpAJCb5_VTP

More info: https://www.katharinemclennan.com/

Contact: kath@katharinemclennan.com


Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katharinemclennan/

Katharine McLennan:

00:00  Introduction to the Wisdom Exchange Podcast

Welcome to the Wisdom Exchange, where two Stanford MBAers, one from the class of 1995 and one from the class of 2025, participate in a dialogue bridging 30 years of leadership. This is the introductory episode, where I'll explain a little bit about this podcast and give some context. My name is Katharine Keough McLennan.

I am a member of the Stanford MBA class of 1995. As a leadership and culture strategist, I've spent the last 35 years coaching leaders and organisations to respond boldly to political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal changes shaping our world. The average age of my classmates today hovers around 60, give or take a few years.

01:04 Generational Perspectives: Class of 1995 vs. Class of 2025

We are Generation Xers who shifted from analog to digital technology. In 2025, many of us are moving into a new stage of leadership that is by no means retirement. 

On the other hand, the average age of the 2025 class hovers around 30, give or take. They're known as Generation Y, also known as the Millennials.

They are the first digital natives to inherit remarkable contributions and the unintended, often harmful consequences of our generation's actions as we pass the baton to the next wave of these global change makers.

01:53 2025: Auspicious year to do this podcast: Three Reasons

2025 is an auspicious time to launch this podcast for three reasons. 

One, the MBA class of 2025 will graduate on June 14th with 431 graduates. 

Secondly, our MBA class has a 30th reunion on the weekend of 10 to 12 October 2025. A few hundred of our MBA class of 1995 will gather then to reconnect, celebrate some of our cherished friendships, and reflect on the last 30 years since we graduated.

Thirdly, on that same weekend, 10 to 12th October, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, also known as the Stanford GSB, will celebrate its 100th anniversary.

In October 1925, the business school opened its doors with, quote, a vision to cultivate business leaders, transform industries, and counter the trend of talented students migrating to the East Coast for other business schools, so retaining the bright minds in the region unquote.

In 1925, the region was not called Silicon Valley. It was known as the Valley of Hearts Delight for its fruit orchards. However, this would soon change, starting in 1939 when Stanford University graduates Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded Hewlett Packard in a Palo Alto garage. Their garage is often considered the symbolic birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Since 1925, Stanford has awarded 25,376 MBA degrees. 

One of the reasons I took on this podcast was my fascination with the fact that both of our classes, 1995 and 2025, each graduated at the start of a defining era. Our 1995 class graduated at the dawn of the information age, or you could say the dawn of the internet. The class of 2025 will graduate at the dawn of an age yet to be officially named.

04:19  The Dawn of the Information Age

Let's talk about the dawn of the information age. Our MBA class entered the business school in 1993, having worked for organisations run as industrial age companies, an age which is a 235-year-long era that began in 1760 with the invention of the steam engine.

I still remember my second year in investment management in 1994 when I was taught by my favourite professor, Jim Van Horne. For one of our sessions, we had the honour of hosting Warren Buffett, who told us that the internet was not the kind of steel, hard-capped boots investment he would make. Most of our class at Stanford had only a vague idea of the internet.

Only a handful of our classmates met in the Arbuckle cafeteria as the technology club. The members of this club saw the opportunity emerging and would go on to become the true pioneers of the internet.

I even took a debate at Stanford. We debated whether the World Wide Web would die quickly as an intermittent fad. At least I chose to be on the side that the internet would be soon adopted for all kinds of uses. Alas, my money was not to follow where my mouth was at the time. 

In fact, in early 1995, an article in Newsweek titled Internet Bah! This elegantly dismissed the idea that the internet could become a transformative force in society. But remember, during our two years at Stanford, we did not have mobile phones. We had hefty personal computers in our living rooms that could not be transported. So, we often worked in the computer lab on campus with its dot matrix printer.

Although we used an internal email-ish system for some messages, we still relied heavily on paper for communication. We each had a pigeonhole, a term that my guests from the class of 2025 have never heard of. A pigeonhole is a wall of boxes, each labelled with a student's name for paper-based announcements from the university.

With no mobile phones or internet, we use pigeonholes to message our friends to meet somewhere.

Where did we meet? Perhaps at the Birds, the courtyard home of the bronze sculpture The Flame Birds. Perhaps at the Tuesday night pub function known as Foam, Friends of R.J. Miller, a Dean of the Business School in the 1970s. Perhaps at the LPF, which stands for Liquidity Preference Functions. Leave it to a Business School student to name a TGIF event.

Speaking to my guests from the class of 2025 … they have reassured me that their class still meets for the same three functions; at least, something has remained. Little did most of us appreciate that these events and more would initiate friendships that have only grown stronger. Just after we graduated in August 1995, Netscape, the pioneer of commercial web browsers, was listed on the stock exchange.

This event is considered a watershed moment in the history of the internet. E-commerce would soon emerge, and the dot-com era world would begin. As soon as we graduated, our class witnessed the beginning of search engines, social media, mobile phones, laptops, and online businesses, all of which transformed how we shared information.

Digital communication through email and instant messaging refined how we connected. At the same time, global networks powered by fiber optics and routers interconnected the world. One of the companies that made those routers was a small little company in 1994 called Cisco. In our organisational behaviour course, I worked with Cisco on a project about incentivising their 400 employees with more than money.

08:59 Zoom ahead to 2025

Zoom forward to 2025, and Cisco now employs 90,1 people across 80 countries. Remember that Zoom Ahead had nothing to do with any video conference in 1995.

In 2025, my greatest life gifts. One will turn 27, my daughter, Kate, and one will turn 24, my son Geoffrey. They're at the age of the class of 2025. Kate will marry in September, and I will go to our Stanford MBA reunion, having just been the mother of the bride.

My son will have completed a year and a half of being in the world as a corporate banker. They continue asking me how I survived without email, mobile phone, or the internet. I'm not sure if I know how I survived anymore. During our conversations with the class of 2025, who are 30 years younger than we are,

We have been struck by how much more worldly, savvy, and sophisticated they seem than we might have been in 1995. My classmates from 1995 agreed that we could easily spend hours speaking to the class of 2025 and learning about so many things, not just business but politics, the environment, technology, social systems, and economic theories.

And of course, the current Netflix episodes they are watching, what they are reading, and the music they are listening to. They, in turn, say that they really enjoy hearing about our hard-won lessons learned in business, particularly all aspects of life, as we reflect on the ups and downs and lessons learned through successes and failures.

through the ages of our 30s, our 40s, and our 50s. Our 1995 classmates look at the younger faces and fool our minds into thinking we are talking to someone around our age. The class of 2025, in turn, look at our faces and see a 60-something-year-old give or take.  

Now I finally understand my 93-year-old neighbour, Edith telling me that she always feels 17 inside and cannot recognise the face staring back at her from the mirror. Anyway, the class of 2025 will not be graduating to join the information era. They will become leaders in a new era where information has become a commodity, and artificial intelligence redefines our work. We are

stunned by the entrance of large language models of Chat GPT driverless cars, space exploration, cyberbots, neural interfaces, quantum computing, nanomedicine, gene therapy, and so many more inventions that we would have never imagined in 1995 that were possible by 2025. Our MBA class, 1995, grew up in the late 1960s and 70s watching cartoons such as The Flintstones and the Jetsons. The Flintstones took place in the caveman ages when the invention of the wheel or the fire and pictograms were extraordinary events. In contrast, the cartoon The Jetsons took place in 2062 when flying cars, robot maids and video conferencing were part of everyday life.

In 1995, most of us believed these things would not be possible in 2025, 30 years before. But then in one of our podcast episodes, we reflected on what a conversation in 1995 might be like with an MBA graduate from the class of 1965. In 1995, these 1965 MBAs would tell us that 1965 was when touch-tone phones rolled out, compact cassette tapes gained popularity, and soft contact lenses were introduced.

 

13:31 The Future: Integration Age vs. Isolation Age

One of the questions I asked my guests, the members of the class of 1995 and the class of 2025, is how they conceptualise the world 30 years from now in 2055. What do we think about the political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal advances possible by 2055? And will they improve the earth or destroy it?

We have had some pretty fascinating conversations about our thoughts on this. But back to today, 2025. So what should we call the emerging age if it is no longer the information age? Many call it the artificial intelligence age. But I propose a different name, the integration age, a time to bring humans back into the equation.

This consciously naive optimist in me hopes that the rise of artificial intelligence may spark a sustainable burst of human creativity in all walks of life through a renewed lease on imagination, intuition, inspiration, inclusivity, insight, integrity, ingenuity, and perhaps illumination.

However, as the pessimists would argue, there is undoubtedly a looming possibility of another path. And we see evidence of this path everywhere we look today. I call this path the isolation age when technology may deepen our disconnection. We may continue to see the exponential rise of loneliness, anxiety, and addiction.

And we may witness a sense of purpose dissolving in so many of our fellow citizens of this earth. So I see us at yet another historic fork in humanity's long history in how we lead our society. We need to define this choice and then determine how to take the path of integration rather than isolation. I've begun to consider the components of this choice using an acronym I'm assembling called VISTA.

A VISTA is an expansive, comprehensive and integrative outlook on a subject, time or situation. We have the opportunity to choose this VISTA we are all creating now based on our actions today. 

 

Acronym: 

V vague or visionary. Will we stumble unthinkingly? Or will we see clearly where we're headed? 

I indifference or intuition. Will we ignore the signs or sense the new paths with wisdom? 

S siloing or synergy. Will we remain isolated or will we learn to collaborate creatively? 

T is for tyranny or trust. Will power divide us? or will truth unite us? and

A is for artificiality or authenticity. Will we lose ourselves or ground our actions in truth and being who we really are?

Integration means we can move away from “the or,” meaning a choice and towards “the and”, meaning inclusion. 

·       Right and left wings of government might meet in parliaments and Congress to foster meaningful debate and craft better, more balanced solutions. 

·       Humans and the Earth's fauna and flora may protect one another, ensuring ecosystems and humanity thrive together.

·       Country A and its neighbour, Country B, might see themselves as common citizens of the Earth, uniting for a shared stewardship of our planet rather than their own country. 

·       Profit and purpose may coexist in business as organisations succeed financially while advancing the greater good

·       Technology and human values may evolve side by side, serving humanity ethically and responsibly. 

·       Science and spirituality may help us find harmony as we explore questions of existence through the microscope, the telescope, the periscope, and even more importantly, through the stillness, we may go within and discover who we really are.

 

18:18 Bridging Generations: Wisdom Exchange and Future Visions

I hope this Wisdom Exchange podcast series inspires more of us to host dialogues between the older and the younger generations. We have so much wisdom to exchange between our generations. I hope this series also reflects the importance of laughter and adventure. I hope you, the audience, relate to the stories we share about growing older into our 60s.

…and what we have learned and forgotten as Generation Xers. I hope you, the audience, relate to the inspirations of the 30-something-year-olds and how much they have to teach us what they are concerned about and passionate about. I invite you as the audience to imagine what the world may be like for the Stanford MBA class of 2055 as they graduate.

Many of these future MBA classmates will not have even been born today. So, bring on these episodes of The And, where we might ensure that history's lessons are learned and mistakes are not repeated. The new generations carry forward its successes as we 60-plus generation Xers and baby boomers continue to play a vital role in this emerging world. 

This is Katharine Keough McLennan. Please join me now in each episode to follow, which features a wisdom exchange bridging 30 years between the Stanford MBA class of 1995 and

the class of 2025.

20:04 For more insights and information 

For more insights and information, visit my website at katharinemclennan.com. That's K-A-T-H-A-R-I-N-E-M-C-L-E-N-N-A-N.com.

Don't forget to subscribe to the series so you know when the next episode will be as we continue exchanging wisdom, connecting past, present, and future through the perspectives of Stanford MBA graduates of 1995 and 2025.