History

Last Updated: Jun. 17, 2014

The history of LifeCourse stretches back over twenty years. In the late 1980s, William Strauss and Neil Howe—two professionals with graduate degrees in history, economics, and law and with previous books on public policy—began research on a new book that would tell the collective biographies of American generations. The result, Generations, was published in 1991. Soon after, the authors began receiving inquiries from managers and leaders about how to solve strategic problems in their organizations.

In 1999, Strauss and Howe established LifeCourse Associates in Fairfax County, VA in the Washington, DC area. Right from the beginning, our research and consulting has attracted an unusually broad range of clients, from large corporate clients to K-12 schools and colleges to the U.S. military. In recent years our clients have been more concentrated in sectors such as media and entertainment, advertising, and financial services. After William Strauss passed away in 2007, Neil Howe assumed sole leadership as president of LifeCourse.

Our reputation as generational experts has grown in part due to a string of popular books authored by Strauss and Howe over the past twenty years, including 13th-Gen (1993), The Fourth Turning (1997), and Millennials Rising (2000). Among our more recent releases are a series of generational application books, such as Millennials and the Pop Culture (2005), Millennials Go To College (2007), Millennials and K-12 Schools (2008), and Millennials in the Workplace (2010).

When Strauss and Howe published Generations in 1991, almost no one in the marketplace was thinking in generational terms. Now, nearly everyone does. We welcome this, because knowing our collective “location in history” is useful not just for identifying our near-term priorities as individual persons and organizations, but also for fostering the best long-term outcome for our nation and world.