Just got off a conference call with about 40 people attending Don Beck's annual (or semi-?) "spiral dynamics" conference in DC.

I've done these conference calls for a while now, and I really love them, because I can totally riff off the top of my head, jazz-like, knowing I can keep the audience easily, this being such a smart, forward-leaning bunch and also a crew that knows my stuff intimately, thanks to Don.

So, it's a group I sort of trying out summing-up Grand Unifying Theory definitions.

Anyway, one question was about my critique of the aging Boomers' strategic leadership (14 years and counting now in the White House) and my hopes for a JFK-like jump to the next generation (that sliver I and so many others occupy between the tail end of the boom and the beginning of the X-gen demographic bust), and it amounted to challenging my assumption that all the long-term trends (huge pulse coming in Asia for global economy, accessing that infrastructural build-out gives us the knowledge to sell to the bottom of the Gap pyramid, my usual arguments on demographics in the Middle East and the various Islamic reformations already in the works) favor us on globalization's continued advance. And this guy's question was a bit defensive because I went on and on previously about the conformity imprinting the Boomers got in the 1950s and how ultimately it limits their strategic imagination terribly--despite all the bullshit about free speech and free thinking from their coming-of-age Sixties experience), and he said--in effect-- that I was assuming the whole world wanted to get globalization and become Americans.

Of course, that's the old bugaboo that Thomas Friedman's brilliantly portrayed in "Lexus": the Egyptian who asks him, Does globalization mean we all have to become Americans?

And so I responded, as I always do on this point, that the future of globalization's cultural face is increasingly Asia, not the West, so I wasn't assuming any uniformity whatsoever, but one helluva diversity by our narrow standards (recalling my old joke on Rhode Island: "Diverse, hell yes! We've got both kinds of Catholics here: Irish and Portugese!).

Anyway, after the talk, I realized that if the Boomers' strategic imaginative moment was historically limited, that's no different from any generation, including mine and Obama's.

I got this first from Karl Marx himself, who said that any theoretician/visionary/whatever is always limited by his generational experience (actually, Marx's argument was about stages of history relating to capitalism's emergence), the simple concept being: we all eventually lose it.

I will lose it, probably in my early sixties. I know this, and my sense of a timeline forced by events beyond my control is no better or worse than Osama bin Laden's. I know the clock is running on me, and that soon enough, I'll lose the ability to think beyond the conventional wisdom, so infused will I be in it myself.

So another good reason to get Vol. III ("release the inner grand strategist in you!") down in print at the height of my powers, before the strategic Alzheimer's kicks in.