Young Startup Needs the Wisdom of Elders
Young Startup Needs the Wisdom of Elders
When it comes to your leadership team, it’s time to mix it up.
In 2013, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky called serial entrepreneur Chip Conley with an unusual request: Would he join their company as a strategic advisor on the hospitality industry?
What made the offer noteworthy is Conley, then 53, was a generation older than Airbnb‘s twentysomething founders and, by his own admission, “clueless” about tech disruption and the sharing economy. Conley is founder of Joie de Vivre hotels–the second largest operator of boutique hotels in the U.S.–as well as author of several must-read leadership books, including The Rebel Rules, Wisdom at Work, and Peak.
What turned this offer into a business inspiration was how it evolved: What Airbnb valued most wasn’t Conley’s subject matter expertise but his wisdom. “I agreed to give Brian 15 hours a week as his leadership mentor. That quickly turned into 15-hour days,” Conley tells me.
Inspired by his Airbnb experience, Conley launched an educational institute called Modern Elder Academy (MEA), essentially a wisdom school for midlife. At Airbnb, Conley was nicknamed the “Modern Elder,” and he wants to return the word to its original connotations of wisdom and perspective.
MEA is born of technology’s disparate impact on the young and the old. Tech disruption is putting more digitally native young entrepreneurs at the heads of companies. The result is often a mismatch between technological prowess and leadership ability.
“The business world is full of brilliant young people with great ideas about disrupting the status quo,” Conley says. But, he adds, “We expect them to miraculously embody leadership skills and emotional intelligence that actually take decades to develop.”
At the same time, the older workers being sidelined actually have those qualities in abundance and are looking for ways to put their skills to work. In fact, when I attended an MEA course last month, hosted at Conley’s Pacific oceanfront compound in Mexico, most attendees were entrepreneurs and C-suite executives in their 50s and 60s, looking for guidance in their next big act.
