Items related to Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder
Experience is making a comeback. Learn how to repurpose your wisdom.
At age 52, after selling the company he founded and ran as CEO for 24 years, rebel boutique hotelier Chip Conley was looking at an open horizon in midlife. Then he received a call from the young founders of Airbnb, asking him to help grow their disruptive start-up into a global hospitality giant. He had the industry experience, but Conley was lacking in the digital fluency of his 20-something colleagues. He didn't write code, or have an Uber or Lyft app on his phone, was twice the age of the average Airbnb employee, and would be reporting to a CEO young enough to be his son. Conley quickly discovered that while he'd been hired as a teacher and mentor, he was also in many ways a student and intern. What emerged is the secret to thriving as a mid-life worker: learning to marry wisdom and experience with curiosity, a beginner's mind, and a willingness to evolve, all hallmarks of the "Modern Elder."
In a world that venerates the new, bright, and shiny, many of us are left feeling invisible, undervalued, and threatened by the "digital natives" nipping at our heels. But Conley argues that experience is on the brink of a comeback. Because at a time when power is shifting younger, companies are finally waking up to the value of the humility, emotional intelligence, and wisdom that come with age. And while digital skills might have only the shelf life of the latest fad or gadget, the human skills that mid-career workers possess--like good judgment, specialized knowledge, and the ability to collaborate and coach - never expire.
Part manifesto and part playbook, Wisdom@Work ignites an urgent conversation about ageism in the workplace, calling on us to treat age as we would other type of diversity. In the process, Conley liberates the term "elder" from the stigma of "elderly," and inspires us to embrace wisdom as a path to growing whole, not old. Whether you've been forced to make a mid-career change, are choosing to work past retirement age, or are struggling to keep up with the millennials rising up the ranks, Wisdom@Work will help you write your next chapter.
At age 52, after selling the company he founded and ran as CEO for 24 years, rebel boutique hotelier Chip Conley was looking at an open horizon in midlife. Then he received a call from the young founders of Airbnb, asking him to help grow their disruptive start-up into a global hospitality giant. He had the industry experience, but Conley was lacking in the digital fluency of his 20-something colleagues. He didn't write code, or have an Uber or Lyft app on his phone, was twice the age of the average Airbnb employee, and would be reporting to a CEO young enough to be his son. Conley quickly discovered that while he'd been hired as a teacher and mentor, he was also in many ways a student and intern. What emerged is the secret to thriving as a mid-life worker: learning to marry wisdom and experience with curiosity, a beginner's mind, and a willingness to evolve, all hallmarks of the "Modern Elder."
In a world that venerates the new, bright, and shiny, many of us are left feeling invisible, undervalued, and threatened by the "digital natives" nipping at our heels. But Conley argues that experience is on the brink of a comeback. Because at a time when power is shifting younger, companies are finally waking up to the value of the humility, emotional intelligence, and wisdom that come with age. And while digital skills might have only the shelf life of the latest fad or gadget, the human skills that mid-career workers possess--like good judgment, specialized knowledge, and the ability to collaborate and coach - never expire.
Part manifesto and part playbook, Wisdom@Work ignites an urgent conversation about ageism in the workplace, calling on us to treat age as we would other type of diversity. In the process, Conley liberates the term "elder" from the stigma of "elderly," and inspires us to embrace wisdom as a path to growing whole, not old. Whether you've been forced to make a mid-career change, are choosing to work past retirement age, or are struggling to keep up with the millennials rising up the ranks, Wisdom@Work will help you write your next chapter.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Bestselling author and hospitality entrepreneur Chip Conley is Strategic Advisor at Airbnb. At age 26, he founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality and turned it into the second largest boutique hotel brand in the world. After selling his company in 2010, he joined Airbnb, and as head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, helped turn it into the world's largest hospitality brand. Conley has received hospitality's highest honor, the Pioneer Award. He serves on the boards of the Burning Man Project and the Esalen Institute and is the author of Peak and the New York Times bestseller Emotional Equations. He holds a BA and MBA from Stanford University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
[ 1 ]
Your Vintage Is Growing in Value
“It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but it is even richer.”
—Cicero (106–43 BC)
“What the hell are you doing?!”
Bert Jacobs, all six feet five inches of him, barked at me as I was about to take the stage in Tulum, Mexico, in May 2016. My friend Bert, whom I often ran into at entrepreneurial speaking gigs, cofounded the clothing lifestyle company Life is Good. We were two of the older speakers at the idealistic, entrepreneurial global tribe event called Summit. At fifty-five, I was probably two dozen years older than the average attendee, and Bert was just four years behind me. After more than three years in the trenches with the millennial founders of Airbnb, helping them guide their rocket ship, this was my first “coming out” speech about what it means to be a “Modern Elder” in today’s youth-obsessed world.
Bert’s blunt question—part offended, part perplexed—serves as a litmus test for our grand ambivalence with age. At a time when Botox is becoming as popular in Silicon Valley as it is in Hollywood, why was I willingly prancing onstage calling attention to myself as the oldster in the crowd? And I got the sense that beneath the surface of Bert’s semirhetorical question lurked another, more pressing one: What the hell is going on with our relationship with age?
Just before my fiftieth birthday, I sold my baby. Not exactly. But that’s sort of what it felt like to part ways with the boutique hotel company that I founded and ran for two dozen years. The Great Recession had taken its toll on my financial and emotional well-being, and it was clear I was ready for a change. In my early fifties and nowhere near ready to retire, I found myself temporarily adrift. That is, until Brian Chesky, the young CEO of Airbnb, came calling and thus began my odyssey into a new world, which reacquainted me with the wisdom I’d accumulated in my years on this planet. But it also reminded me how raw and curious I could be as well.
I’ll tell you more about that story later, along with stories of many inspiring people who are not only surviving, but thriving, in the later years of their working life. Like a schoolteacher who reinvented herself as an entrepreneur and started a booming travel agency in her late forties. Or a software engineer in his early fifties who went from writing computer code to counseling colleagues as he became a Silicon Valley leadership coach. Or a former Merrill Lynch exec who found inspiration for the memoir he was struggling to write at age seventy by becoming a summer intern surrounded by college students at a pharmaceutical giant.
You don’t have to be on the other side of fifty to find this book relevant. The age at which we’re feeling self-consciously “old” is creeping into some people’s thirties, with power cascading to the young in so many companies. At a time when “software is eating the world,” tech is disrupting not just taxis and hotels, but virtually all industries, the result being that more and more companies are relentlessly pursuing young hires and putting high DQ (digital intelligence) above all other skills. The problem is that many of these young digital leaders are being thrust into positions of power—often running companies or departments that are scaling quickly—with little experience or guidance.
Yet, at exactly the same time, there exists a generation of older workers with invaluable skills—high EQ (emotional intelligence), good judgment born out of decades of experience, specialized knowledge, and a vast network of contacts—who could pair with these ambitious millennials to create businesses that are built to endure. Ironically, the more technology becomes ubiquitous, the less DQ is actually a differentiator. While coding skills may become commoditized, the one thing that can never be automated or left to artificial intelligence is the human element of business. You may not be a software developer, but you are a soft skills developer—and soft skills are the ones that will matter most in the organization of the future.
Whether this is the second, third, or fourth act of your working life, the principles and practices in this book will show you how to leverage your skills and experience to stay not just relevant, but indispensable in the modern workplace. The world needs your wisdom now more than ever.
WHAT’S YOUR VINTAGE?
Yesterday I woke up with a fifty-seven-year-old man in my bed and, more painfully, he showed up looking back at me in my bathroom mirror (à la Gloria Steinem). I may feel seventeen, but catching a glimpse of my badly lit fifty-seven-year-old image, whether in the mirror or in some friend’s photo on Facebook, is awful-tasting truth serum. Yet, oddly, my fifties have been my favorite decade. I’m enjoying the “Indian summer” of my life: young enough to take up surfing, old enough to know what’s important in life.
Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, has shown that people prioritize the present when time horizons are constrained. Accordingly, she’s surprisingly found that people in their seventies are often happier and more content with life than those in their fifties, forties, or even thirties. By midlife, we may have slayed some of our internal dragons and healed many of our youthful wounds. All kinds of happiness surveys demonstrate a U-curve of adult satisfaction with younger adults starting out pretty excited by life. Then happiness starts to dip in one’s late twenties and thirties when the mash-up of responsibilities associated with friends, family, infants, finances, and finding time for oneself, takes its toll. It can hit its low point in our forties when midlife disappointment may lead, for some, to new sports cars and wrecked marriages.
And, then, you’re in your fifties and miraculously, the grand reset of expectations you experienced during the prior decade, a reprioritization of what’s important, leads you to feeling a little better about life. You’re finally getting to enjoy all the confidence, courage, and crazy sense of humor you’ve accumulated along the way. An inner calm has started to emerge after decades of frenzied juggling. You feel an increasing capacity to be true to yourself. So it’s great to be this age! But, just as this U-curve points us back in the right direction, we’re faced with a tiny voice in our heads (echoing financier Bernard Baruch) saying, “Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.” Hence, Bert’s reaction. We’ve never been so young and so old.
We can distract ourselves from the mirror and “untag” ourselves in Facebook photos, but society has an uncanny way of reminding us of our age. A growing number of people fear being increasingly invisible. Others feel like an old carton of milk, with an expiration date mistakenly stamped on their wrinkled foreheads. One paradox of our time is that baby boomers enjoy better health than ever, remain vibrant and stay in the workplace longer, but feel less and less relevant. They worry, justifiably, that bosses or potential employers may see their experience (and the clocked years that come with it) as more of a liability than an asset. Especially in the tech industry, where I somewhat accidentally found myself launching a second act in my own career.
But we workers “of a certain age” are in fact less like a carton of spoiled milk and more like a bottle of fine wine of an especially valuable vintage. Especially in the digital era. And especially in the tech sector, which has become as famous for youth as for innovation, and as notorious for toxic company cultures and human resource headaches as for reckless twentysomething CEOs—and where companies and investors are finally waking up and realizing they could use a little of the humility, emotional intelligence, and wisdom that comes with age. In this book, I will argue that those of us with a little aging patina do have something to offer. Especially now.
We may live ten years longer than our parents and may even work twenty years longer, yet power is moving to those ten years younger. That can lead to a decades-long “irrelevancy gap” for those in my age range if we don’t rethink our role. To avoid the fate of “boomer angst,” we’d be wise to learn how to store the wine so it doesn’t go bad. What makes a wine good is not only its age, but also the way you store it, the way you serve it, and the reason for raising a glass.
ARE OLDER PEOPLE NEEDED IN THE DIGITAL ERA?
Recently, my iPhone went haywire. It lost an hour, so for a couple days my phone was an hour younger than the time on my MacBook Air. This technical snafu didn’t just affect me—thousands of iPhone users were missing flights and appointments as a result of this software glitch. I chalked this up to further evidence that the digital gods at Apple, with a median employee age of thirty-one, are orchestrating our lives in more and more ways. I searched for an answer in the place I always go, Google (median employee age of thirty), to see how I could hack a solution and age my phone by an hour, but turning the damn thing on and off didn’t solve things. So I retreated to another familiar spot, Facebook (median employee age of twenty-eight), to ask for help from my posse.
While the median age of employees in the United States is forty-two, that number is more than a decade younger among our tech titans. And a Harvard Business Review study showed that the average age of founders of unicorns (young, private companies with more than $1 billion in valuation) is thirty-one, and the average age of their CEOs is forty-one, as compared to the average age of an S&P 500 company CEO, which is fifty-two. So power in business hasn’t just lost an hour, it’s lost a decade or two. Sixty may be the new forty physically, but when it comes to power, thirty is the new fifty!
In many cultures, passing wisdom was once a prized tribal tradition, but today many of us fear it might be as popular as passing gas. In a pre-Gutenberg world, elders were keepers of their culture and agents of its survival and communication through myths, stories, and songs passed from one generation to the next. In an economy that was slow to change, the practical experience and institutional knowledge of the old remained continuously relevant to the young.
The acceleration of innovation made the elder less relevant. Literacy meant society was no longer solely dependent upon the memory and oral traditions of elders to share wisdom. Moving from an agricultural to an industrial economy meant age-old traditions of farming were replaced by the technological efficiencies of the machine age. Plus, young people started moving away from their parents to the city, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, a flood of young Europeans immigrated to the United States, forging a life on their own without the wisdom of their parents to guide their path.
The brisk march of progress from the industrial to the tech era has created a strong bias toward digital natives who understand gadgets and gigabytes better than those of us who didn’t grow up “byting” from the Apple in childhood. And there’s a growing anxiety in the boardroom about keeping up, as change in the digital world is happening so fast that most companies report that their DQ is actually declining. CEOs are kept awake at night by the worry that their competitors are younger and digitally smarter. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the grass is greener on the other side as the percentage of companies that feel they are doing a great job of harnessing and profiting from technology dropped from 67 percent to 52 percent between 2016 and 2017, creating even more of a frenzy to hire young talent favoring the generation that seemed to have emerged from the womb with an iPad in hand and a Snapchat account.
And yet, so many of us feel like we’re growing whole rather than growing old. Is there a way for us to be integrated into cultivating young brains like farmer elders of the past were able to cultivate young grains? What if there was a new, modern archetype of elderhood, one that was worn as a badge of honor, not cloaked in shame? What if we could tap into our know-how and know-who to be an asset in the workplace rather than a liability? With more generations in the workplace than ever before, elders have so much to offer those younger than them, including introductions to those who can cultivate and harvest their skills.
Maybe eldership offers a higher form of leadership. Gray heads are generally wiser than green ones. What if Modern Elders were the secret ingredient for the visionary businesses of tomorrow?
MODERN AGE WISDOM
Not every aged wine is a spectacular vintage. Similarly, just because you’re older, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wiser. Paul Baltes and Ursula Staudinger of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development did a comprehensive study and found the average correlation between age and wisdom is roughly zero from ages twenty-five to seventy-five. While this may be disappointing on the surface, the researchers did find that many people cultivate something even more valuable: a skill for gathering wisdom as they age.
Dr. Darrell Worthy, who led a group of University of Texas psychologists in a series of experiments on wisdom, found older people were far better at making choices that led to long-term gains. Younger adults made faster choices that led to more immediate rewards, while older adults were more adept at making strategic choices that took the future into account. Gandhi once wrote, “There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.” Maybe the Modern Elder can be the designated driver in a world where the accelerator pedal is pushed to its limit.
Professor Robert Sutton suggests that the hallmark of wisdom is an alchemy of confidence and doubt, and knowing when to up the ante of one versus the other. Scholar Copthorne Macdonald has listed forty-eight characteristics of wisdom that can help create a framework for making the best choices. Wise people tend to acknowledge their fallibility, are reflective and empathetic, and have sound judgment, but these characteristics alone don’t define wisdom.
If there’s one quality I believe defines wisdom in the workplace more than any other, it is the capacity for holistic or systems thinking that allows one to get the “gist” of something by synthesizing a wide variety of information quickly. Part of this is aided by the skill of pattern recognition that helps you come to hunches faster that account for the bigger picture. And this is where age gives us the indisputable upper hand: the longer you’ve been on this planet, the more patterns you’ve seen and can recognize.
And this capacity for seeing the big picture can foster novel thinking. In his book, The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain, psychiatrist Gene D. Cohen explains that older people, with the advantage of years of experience, have a vast storehouse of solutions embedded in their maturing brains that allows them to synthesize more information and poten...
Your Vintage Is Growing in Value
“It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but it is even richer.”
—Cicero (106–43 BC)
“What the hell are you doing?!”
Bert Jacobs, all six feet five inches of him, barked at me as I was about to take the stage in Tulum, Mexico, in May 2016. My friend Bert, whom I often ran into at entrepreneurial speaking gigs, cofounded the clothing lifestyle company Life is Good. We were two of the older speakers at the idealistic, entrepreneurial global tribe event called Summit. At fifty-five, I was probably two dozen years older than the average attendee, and Bert was just four years behind me. After more than three years in the trenches with the millennial founders of Airbnb, helping them guide their rocket ship, this was my first “coming out” speech about what it means to be a “Modern Elder” in today’s youth-obsessed world.
Bert’s blunt question—part offended, part perplexed—serves as a litmus test for our grand ambivalence with age. At a time when Botox is becoming as popular in Silicon Valley as it is in Hollywood, why was I willingly prancing onstage calling attention to myself as the oldster in the crowd? And I got the sense that beneath the surface of Bert’s semirhetorical question lurked another, more pressing one: What the hell is going on with our relationship with age?
Just before my fiftieth birthday, I sold my baby. Not exactly. But that’s sort of what it felt like to part ways with the boutique hotel company that I founded and ran for two dozen years. The Great Recession had taken its toll on my financial and emotional well-being, and it was clear I was ready for a change. In my early fifties and nowhere near ready to retire, I found myself temporarily adrift. That is, until Brian Chesky, the young CEO of Airbnb, came calling and thus began my odyssey into a new world, which reacquainted me with the wisdom I’d accumulated in my years on this planet. But it also reminded me how raw and curious I could be as well.
I’ll tell you more about that story later, along with stories of many inspiring people who are not only surviving, but thriving, in the later years of their working life. Like a schoolteacher who reinvented herself as an entrepreneur and started a booming travel agency in her late forties. Or a software engineer in his early fifties who went from writing computer code to counseling colleagues as he became a Silicon Valley leadership coach. Or a former Merrill Lynch exec who found inspiration for the memoir he was struggling to write at age seventy by becoming a summer intern surrounded by college students at a pharmaceutical giant.
You don’t have to be on the other side of fifty to find this book relevant. The age at which we’re feeling self-consciously “old” is creeping into some people’s thirties, with power cascading to the young in so many companies. At a time when “software is eating the world,” tech is disrupting not just taxis and hotels, but virtually all industries, the result being that more and more companies are relentlessly pursuing young hires and putting high DQ (digital intelligence) above all other skills. The problem is that many of these young digital leaders are being thrust into positions of power—often running companies or departments that are scaling quickly—with little experience or guidance.
Yet, at exactly the same time, there exists a generation of older workers with invaluable skills—high EQ (emotional intelligence), good judgment born out of decades of experience, specialized knowledge, and a vast network of contacts—who could pair with these ambitious millennials to create businesses that are built to endure. Ironically, the more technology becomes ubiquitous, the less DQ is actually a differentiator. While coding skills may become commoditized, the one thing that can never be automated or left to artificial intelligence is the human element of business. You may not be a software developer, but you are a soft skills developer—and soft skills are the ones that will matter most in the organization of the future.
Whether this is the second, third, or fourth act of your working life, the principles and practices in this book will show you how to leverage your skills and experience to stay not just relevant, but indispensable in the modern workplace. The world needs your wisdom now more than ever.
WHAT’S YOUR VINTAGE?
Yesterday I woke up with a fifty-seven-year-old man in my bed and, more painfully, he showed up looking back at me in my bathroom mirror (à la Gloria Steinem). I may feel seventeen, but catching a glimpse of my badly lit fifty-seven-year-old image, whether in the mirror or in some friend’s photo on Facebook, is awful-tasting truth serum. Yet, oddly, my fifties have been my favorite decade. I’m enjoying the “Indian summer” of my life: young enough to take up surfing, old enough to know what’s important in life.
Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, has shown that people prioritize the present when time horizons are constrained. Accordingly, she’s surprisingly found that people in their seventies are often happier and more content with life than those in their fifties, forties, or even thirties. By midlife, we may have slayed some of our internal dragons and healed many of our youthful wounds. All kinds of happiness surveys demonstrate a U-curve of adult satisfaction with younger adults starting out pretty excited by life. Then happiness starts to dip in one’s late twenties and thirties when the mash-up of responsibilities associated with friends, family, infants, finances, and finding time for oneself, takes its toll. It can hit its low point in our forties when midlife disappointment may lead, for some, to new sports cars and wrecked marriages.
And, then, you’re in your fifties and miraculously, the grand reset of expectations you experienced during the prior decade, a reprioritization of what’s important, leads you to feeling a little better about life. You’re finally getting to enjoy all the confidence, courage, and crazy sense of humor you’ve accumulated along the way. An inner calm has started to emerge after decades of frenzied juggling. You feel an increasing capacity to be true to yourself. So it’s great to be this age! But, just as this U-curve points us back in the right direction, we’re faced with a tiny voice in our heads (echoing financier Bernard Baruch) saying, “Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.” Hence, Bert’s reaction. We’ve never been so young and so old.
We can distract ourselves from the mirror and “untag” ourselves in Facebook photos, but society has an uncanny way of reminding us of our age. A growing number of people fear being increasingly invisible. Others feel like an old carton of milk, with an expiration date mistakenly stamped on their wrinkled foreheads. One paradox of our time is that baby boomers enjoy better health than ever, remain vibrant and stay in the workplace longer, but feel less and less relevant. They worry, justifiably, that bosses or potential employers may see their experience (and the clocked years that come with it) as more of a liability than an asset. Especially in the tech industry, where I somewhat accidentally found myself launching a second act in my own career.
But we workers “of a certain age” are in fact less like a carton of spoiled milk and more like a bottle of fine wine of an especially valuable vintage. Especially in the digital era. And especially in the tech sector, which has become as famous for youth as for innovation, and as notorious for toxic company cultures and human resource headaches as for reckless twentysomething CEOs—and where companies and investors are finally waking up and realizing they could use a little of the humility, emotional intelligence, and wisdom that comes with age. In this book, I will argue that those of us with a little aging patina do have something to offer. Especially now.
We may live ten years longer than our parents and may even work twenty years longer, yet power is moving to those ten years younger. That can lead to a decades-long “irrelevancy gap” for those in my age range if we don’t rethink our role. To avoid the fate of “boomer angst,” we’d be wise to learn how to store the wine so it doesn’t go bad. What makes a wine good is not only its age, but also the way you store it, the way you serve it, and the reason for raising a glass.
ARE OLDER PEOPLE NEEDED IN THE DIGITAL ERA?
Recently, my iPhone went haywire. It lost an hour, so for a couple days my phone was an hour younger than the time on my MacBook Air. This technical snafu didn’t just affect me—thousands of iPhone users were missing flights and appointments as a result of this software glitch. I chalked this up to further evidence that the digital gods at Apple, with a median employee age of thirty-one, are orchestrating our lives in more and more ways. I searched for an answer in the place I always go, Google (median employee age of thirty), to see how I could hack a solution and age my phone by an hour, but turning the damn thing on and off didn’t solve things. So I retreated to another familiar spot, Facebook (median employee age of twenty-eight), to ask for help from my posse.
While the median age of employees in the United States is forty-two, that number is more than a decade younger among our tech titans. And a Harvard Business Review study showed that the average age of founders of unicorns (young, private companies with more than $1 billion in valuation) is thirty-one, and the average age of their CEOs is forty-one, as compared to the average age of an S&P 500 company CEO, which is fifty-two. So power in business hasn’t just lost an hour, it’s lost a decade or two. Sixty may be the new forty physically, but when it comes to power, thirty is the new fifty!
In many cultures, passing wisdom was once a prized tribal tradition, but today many of us fear it might be as popular as passing gas. In a pre-Gutenberg world, elders were keepers of their culture and agents of its survival and communication through myths, stories, and songs passed from one generation to the next. In an economy that was slow to change, the practical experience and institutional knowledge of the old remained continuously relevant to the young.
The acceleration of innovation made the elder less relevant. Literacy meant society was no longer solely dependent upon the memory and oral traditions of elders to share wisdom. Moving from an agricultural to an industrial economy meant age-old traditions of farming were replaced by the technological efficiencies of the machine age. Plus, young people started moving away from their parents to the city, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, a flood of young Europeans immigrated to the United States, forging a life on their own without the wisdom of their parents to guide their path.
The brisk march of progress from the industrial to the tech era has created a strong bias toward digital natives who understand gadgets and gigabytes better than those of us who didn’t grow up “byting” from the Apple in childhood. And there’s a growing anxiety in the boardroom about keeping up, as change in the digital world is happening so fast that most companies report that their DQ is actually declining. CEOs are kept awake at night by the worry that their competitors are younger and digitally smarter. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the grass is greener on the other side as the percentage of companies that feel they are doing a great job of harnessing and profiting from technology dropped from 67 percent to 52 percent between 2016 and 2017, creating even more of a frenzy to hire young talent favoring the generation that seemed to have emerged from the womb with an iPad in hand and a Snapchat account.
And yet, so many of us feel like we’re growing whole rather than growing old. Is there a way for us to be integrated into cultivating young brains like farmer elders of the past were able to cultivate young grains? What if there was a new, modern archetype of elderhood, one that was worn as a badge of honor, not cloaked in shame? What if we could tap into our know-how and know-who to be an asset in the workplace rather than a liability? With more generations in the workplace than ever before, elders have so much to offer those younger than them, including introductions to those who can cultivate and harvest their skills.
Maybe eldership offers a higher form of leadership. Gray heads are generally wiser than green ones. What if Modern Elders were the secret ingredient for the visionary businesses of tomorrow?
MODERN AGE WISDOM
Not every aged wine is a spectacular vintage. Similarly, just because you’re older, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wiser. Paul Baltes and Ursula Staudinger of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development did a comprehensive study and found the average correlation between age and wisdom is roughly zero from ages twenty-five to seventy-five. While this may be disappointing on the surface, the researchers did find that many people cultivate something even more valuable: a skill for gathering wisdom as they age.
Dr. Darrell Worthy, who led a group of University of Texas psychologists in a series of experiments on wisdom, found older people were far better at making choices that led to long-term gains. Younger adults made faster choices that led to more immediate rewards, while older adults were more adept at making strategic choices that took the future into account. Gandhi once wrote, “There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.” Maybe the Modern Elder can be the designated driver in a world where the accelerator pedal is pushed to its limit.
Professor Robert Sutton suggests that the hallmark of wisdom is an alchemy of confidence and doubt, and knowing when to up the ante of one versus the other. Scholar Copthorne Macdonald has listed forty-eight characteristics of wisdom that can help create a framework for making the best choices. Wise people tend to acknowledge their fallibility, are reflective and empathetic, and have sound judgment, but these characteristics alone don’t define wisdom.
If there’s one quality I believe defines wisdom in the workplace more than any other, it is the capacity for holistic or systems thinking that allows one to get the “gist” of something by synthesizing a wide variety of information quickly. Part of this is aided by the skill of pattern recognition that helps you come to hunches faster that account for the bigger picture. And this is where age gives us the indisputable upper hand: the longer you’ve been on this planet, the more patterns you’ve seen and can recognize.
And this capacity for seeing the big picture can foster novel thinking. In his book, The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain, psychiatrist Gene D. Cohen explains that older people, with the advantage of years of experience, have a vast storehouse of solutions embedded in their maturing brains that allows them to synthesize more information and poten...
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- Publication date2018
- ISBN 10 0525572902
- ISBN 13 9780525572909
- BindingHardcover
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Experience is making a comeback. Learn how to repurpose your wisdom.At age 52, after selling the company he founded and ran as CEO for 24 years, rebel boutique hotelier Chip Conley was looking at an open horizon in midlife. Then he received a call from the young founders of Airbnb, asking him to help grow their disruptive start-up into a global hospitality giant. He had the industry experience, but Conley was lacking in the digital fluency of his 20-something colleagues. He didn't write code, or have an Uber or Lyft app on his phone, was twice the age of the average Airbnb employee, and would be reporting to a CEO young enough to be his son. Conley quickly discovered that while he'd been hired as a teacher and mentor, he was also in many ways a student and intern. What emerged is the secret to thriving as a mid-life worker: learning to marry wisdom and experience with curiosity, a beginner's mind, and a willingness to evolve, all hallmarks of the "Modern Elder."In a world that venerates the new, bright, and shiny, many of us are left feeling invisible, undervalued, and threatened by the "digital natives" nipping at our heels. But Conley argues that experience is on the brink of a comeback. Because at a time when power is shifting younger, companies are finally waking up to the value of the humility, emotional intelligence, and wisdom that come with age. And while digital skills might have only the shelf life of the latest fad or gadget, the human skills that mid-career workers possess--like good judgment, specialized knowledge, and the ability to collaborate and coach - never expire.Part manifesto and part playbook, Wisdom@Work ignites an urgent conversation about ageism in the workplace, calling on us to treat age as we would other type of diversity. In the process, Conley liberates the term "elder" from the stigma of "elderly," and inspires us to embrace wisdom as a path to growing whole, not old. Whether you've been forced to make a mid-career change, are choosing to work past retirement age, or are struggling to keep up with the millennials rising up the ranks, Wisdom@Work will help you write your next chapter. Seller Inventory # DADAX0525572902
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Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder by Conley, Chip [Hardcover ]
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780525572909
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Wisdom at Work Format: Hardcover
Published by
Penguin Random House
(2018)
ISBN 10: 0525572902
ISBN 13: 9780525572909
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Book Description Condition: New. Brand New. Seller Inventory # 9780525572909
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Wisdom @ Work : The Making of a Modern Elder
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Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 30626428-n
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Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # BKZN9780525572909
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Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder
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Book Description Condition: New. . Seller Inventory # 52GZZZ00Y3K1_ns
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Buy for Great customer experience. Seller Inventory # GoldenDragon0525572902
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Wisdom at Work The Making of a Modern Elder
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Book Description HRD. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000. Seller Inventory # WB-9780525572909
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