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"This case, noted EEOC district director Joan Ehrlich, illustrates a phenomenon of today's workplace: It spans four generations -- Millennials, Gen Xers, Baby Boomers and the last of the Silent Generation born before the end of World War II -- and their members don't always speak the same language or work quite the same way."

80 posts and four and one-half hours and not one poster has addressed the author's central theme; which is that while the demands of the workplace are still focused on the common target of days past, attitudes, styles, values and practices have changed without a directed, linear path to that common target.

Meanwhile, oversight has evolved to encompass every grievance or complaint that can be made to fit within the confines of convolution so inimical to enterprise and creativity to bring us to a point of contentious confusion rather than a common conclusion.

Soon, we'll revisit the era of the unconcerned outsider who simply passes the masses by and blazes a trail unimagined while the rest of the world, caught unawares, scrambles to keep pace.

Over the years I've had thousands of employees. We shifted standards down to the point where we could not accomodate the ineptitude anymore. We have cut back to barebones run with the people we can find who do meet our standards. They are out there but there are fewer and fewer of them.

I'm sure Cogadh is an excellent employee and compared to many of the boomers an outstanding employee. The top 20% has always been, well, the top 20%. In my businesses we don't fish in those waters. We pull from the general population and it is there that there has been a seachange. I refuse to do the equivalent of pictures on register keys.

The new class of employees are undereducated and under-motivated. I am continually searching for the dynamic that they posess that can be exploited. It must be there, intelligence hasn't died, and they seem to have an easy facility with communication but how do you bring it out and use it. So far I can't see it.

One thing that does give me encouragement is the image that I get from the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. When there is a newscast from there I watch the background, the guys doing the job. They are confident, competant and decisive. These guys aren't coming back to be assistant manager at Burger King. I see a whole new leadership class developing and it looks good.