Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder - Hardcover

Conley, Chip

 
9780525572909: Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525572902 ISBN 13: 9780525572909
Verlag: Currency, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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...

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Verlag
Currency
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525572902
ISBN 13 
9780525572909
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
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