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It was my third day on the job at a hot Silicon Valley start-up
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in early 2013.
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I was twice the age of the dozen engineers in the room.
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I'd been brought in to the company
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because I was a seasoned expert in my field,
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but in this particular room,
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I felt like a newbie amongst the tech geniuses.
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I was listening to them talk
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and thinking that the best thing I could do was be invisible.
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And then suddenly, the 25-year-old wizard leading the meeting stared at me
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and asked, "If you shipped a feature and no one used it,
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did it really ship?"
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(Laughter)
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"Ship a feature"?
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In that moment, Chip knew he was in deep ship.
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(Laughter)
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I had no idea what he was talking about.
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I just sat there awkwardly,
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and mercifully, he moved on to someone else.
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I slid down in my chair,
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and I couldn't wait for that meeting to end.
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That was my introduction to Airbnb.
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I was asked and invited by the three millennial cofounders
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to join their company
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to help them take their fast-growing tech start-up
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and turn it into a global hospitality brand,
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as well as to be the in-house mentor for CEO Brian Chesky.
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Now, I'd spent from age 26 to 52 being a boutique hotel entrepreneur,
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and so I guess I'd learned a few things along the way
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and accumulated some hospitality knowledge.
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But after my first week,
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I realized that the brave new home-sharing world
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didn't need much of my old-school bricks-and-mortar hotel insights.
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A stark reality rocked me:
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What do I have to offer?
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I'd never been in a tech company before.
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Five and a half years ago, I had never heard of the "sharing economy,"
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nor did I have an Uber or Lyft app on my phone.
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This was not my natural habitat.
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So, I decided at that moment that I could either run for the hills,
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or cast judgment on these young geniuses,
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or instead, turn the judgment into curiosity
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and actually see if I could match my wise eyes with their fresh eyes.
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I fancied myself a modern Margaret Mead amongst the millennials,
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and I quickly learned that I had as much to offer them
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as they did to me.
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The more I've seen and learned about our respective generations,
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the more I realize that we often don't trust each other enough
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to actually share our respective wisdom.
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We may share a border,
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but we don't necessarily trust each other enough
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to share that respective wisdom.
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I believe, looking at the modern workplace,
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that the trade agreement of our time
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is opening up these intergenerational pipelines of wisdom
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so that we can all learn from each other.
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Almost 40 percent of us in the United States
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have a boss that's younger than us,
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and that number is growing quickly.
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Power is cascading to the young like never before
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because of our increasing reliance on DQ:
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digital intelligence.
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We're seeing young founders of companies in their early 20s
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scale them up to global giants by the time they get to 30,
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and yet, we expect these young digital leaders
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to somehow miraculously embody the relationship wisdoms
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we older workers have had decades to learn.
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It's hard to microwave your emotional intelligence.
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There's ample evidence that gender- and ethnically diverse companies
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are more effective.
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But what about age?
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This is a very important question, because for the first time ever,
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we have five generations in the workplace at the same time, unintentionally.
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Maybe it's time we got a little more intentional
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about how we work collectively.
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There have been a number of European studies
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that have shown that age-diverse teams are more effective and successful.
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So why is that only eight percent of the companies
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that have a diversity and inclusion program
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have actually expanded that strategy
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to include age as just as important of a demographic as gender or race?
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Maybe they didn't get the memo:
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the world is getting older!
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One of the paradoxes of our time
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is that baby boomers are more vibrant and healthy longer into life,
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we're actually working later into life,
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and yet we're feeling less and less relevant.
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Some of us feel like a carton of milk -- an old carton of milk --
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with an expiration date stamped on our wrinkled foreheads.
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For many of us in midlife, this isn't just a feeling,
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it is a harsh reality, when we suddenly lose our job and the phone stops ringing.
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For many of us, justifiably, we worry that people see our experience
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as a liability, not an asset.
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You've heard of the old phrase -- or maybe the relatively new phrase --
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"Sixty is the new forty, physically."
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Right?
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When it comes to power in the workplace today,
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30 is the new 50.
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All right, well, this is all pretty exciting, right?
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(Laughter)
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Truthfully, power is moving 10 years younger.
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We're all going to live 10 years longer.
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Do the math.
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Society has created a new 20-year irrelevancy gap.
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Midlife used to be 45 to 65,
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but I would suggest it now stretches into a midlife marathon 40 years long,
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from 35 to 75.
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But wait -- there is a bright spot.
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Why is it that we actually get smarter and wiser about our humanity as we age?
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Our physical peak may be our 20s,
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our financial and salary peak may be age 50,
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but our emotional peak is in midlife and beyond,
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because we have developed pattern recognition about ourselves and others.
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So how can we get companies to tap into that wisdom
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of the midlife folks,
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just as they nurture their digital young geniuses as well?
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The most successful companies today and in the future
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will actually learn how to create a powerful alchemy of the two.
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Here's how the alchemy worked for me at Airbnb:
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I was assigned a young, smart partner,
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who helped me develop a hospitality department.
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Early on, Laura Hughes could see that I was a little lost in this habitat,
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so she often sat right next to me in meetings
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so she could be my tech translator,
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and I could write her notes and she could tell me, "That's what that means."
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Laura was 27 years old,
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she'd worked for Google for four years
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and then for a year and a half at Airbnb when I met her.
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Like many of her millennial cohorts,
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she had actually grown into a managerial role
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before she'd gotten any formal leadership training.
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I don't care if you're in the B-to-B world,
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the B-to-C world, the C-to-C world or the A-to-Z world,
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business is fundamentally H-to-H:
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human to human.
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And yet, Laura's approach to leadership
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was really formed in the technocratic world,
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and it was purely metric driven.
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One of the things she said to me in the first few months was,
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"I love the fact that your approach to leadership
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is to create a compelling vision that becomes a North Star for us."
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Now, my fact knowledge,
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as in, how many rooms a maid cleans in an eight-hour shift,
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might not be all that important in a home-sharing world.
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My process knowledge of "How do you get things done?"
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based upon understanding the underlying motivations of everybody in the room,
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was incredibly valuable,
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in a company where most people didn't have a lot of organizational experience.
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As I spent more time at Airbnb,
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I realized it's possible a new kind of elder was emerging
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in the workplace.
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Not the elder of the past, who actually was regarded with reverence.
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No, what is striking about the modern elder is their relevance,
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their ability to use timeless wisdom and apply it to modern-day problems.
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Maybe it's time we actually valued wisdom as much as we do disruption.
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And maybe it's time -- not just maybe, it is time --
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for us to definitely reclaim the word "elder"
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and give it a modern twist.
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The modern elder is as much an intern as they are a mentor,
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because they realize, in a world that is changing so quickly,
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their beginners' mind and their catalytic curiosity is a life-affirming elixir,
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not just for themselves but for everyone around them.
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Intergenerational improv has been known in music and the arts:
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think Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga
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or Wynton Marsalis and the Young Stars of Jazz.
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This kind of riffing in the business world is often called "mutual mentorship":
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millennial DQ for Gen X and boomer EQ.
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I got to experience that kind of intergenerational reciprocity with Laura
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and our stellar data science team
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when we were actually remaking and evolving
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the Airbnb peer-to-peer review system,
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using Laura's analytical mind and my human-centered intuition.
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With that perfect alchemy of algorithm and people wisdom,
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we were able to create and instantaneous feedback loop
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that helped our hosts better understand the needs of our guests.
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High tech meets high touch.
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At Airbnb, I also learned as a modern elder
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that my role was to intern publicly and mentor privately.
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Search engines are brilliant at giving you an answer,
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but a wise, sage guide can offer you just the right question.
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Google does not understand, at least not yet,
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nuance like a finely attuned human heart and mind.
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Over time,
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to my surprise,
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dozens and dozens of young employees at Airbnb sought me out
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for private mentoring sessions.
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But in reality, we were often just mentoring each other.
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In sum, CEO Brian Chesky brought me in for my industry knowledge,
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but what I really offered was my well-earned wisdom.
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Maybe it's time we retire the term "knowledge worker"
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and replaced it with "wisdom worker."
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We have five generations in the workplace today,
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and we can operate like separate isolationist countries,
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or we can actually start to find a way to bridge these generational borders.
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And it's time for us to actually look at how to change up the physics of wisdom
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so it actually flows in both directions,
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from old to young and from young to old.
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How can you apply this in your own life?
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Personally, who can you reach out to
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to create a mutual mentorship relationship?
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And organizationally, how can you create the conditions
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to foster an intergenerational flow of wisdom?
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This is the new sharing economy.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)