顶尖硅谷导师的TED演讲：工作中，如何与千禧一代相互学习？（附视频&演讲稿）
“约40%美国人有一位比我们年轻的老板，而且这数字还在快速增长。权力向年轻人转移的速度前所未有，因为我们越来越依赖数字智能。我们看到公司创始人在20来岁创立公司，在30岁时将规模做到了全球巨头。”
Chip Conley是一名有30年经营精品酒店经验的企业家，2013年他被Airbnb邀请去帮助公司成长，并担任首席执行官的内部导师。他发现自己年龄是同事们的两倍，而且这些科技天才们说的话他还听不懂。他认真地思考一个问题：我能提供什么价值？
由于Chip Conley在Airbnb的创业期加入，成为硅谷25岁CEO的导师，他指出——是时候让“知识员工”这个词退休了， 并用“智慧员工”取代之。在组织方面，你如何创造条件去培育智慧在代间的流动？“我不关心你是在B2B的世界， B2C的世界，C2C的世界，还是A2Z的世界， 商业本质上是H2H的世界：人跟人的世界。”
It was my third day on the job at a hot Silicon Valley start-up in early 2013. I was twice the age of the dozen engineers in the room. I'd been brought in to the company because I was a seasoned expert in my field, but in this particular room, I felt like a newbie amongst the tech geniuses. I was listening to them talk and thinking that the best thing I could do was be invisible. And then suddenly, the 25-year-old wizard leading the meeting stared at me and asked, "If you shipped a feature and no one used it, did it really ship?"
"Ship a feature"? In that moment, Chip knew he was in deep ship.
I had no idea what he was talking about. I just sat there awkwardly, and mercifully, he moved on to someone else. I slid down in my chair, and I couldn't wait for that meeting to end.
That was my introduction to Airbnb. I was asked and invited by the three millennial cofounders to join their company to help them take their fast-growing tech start-up and turn it into a global hospitality brand, as well as to be the in-house mentor for CEO Brian Chesky. Now, I'd spent from age 26 to 52 being a boutique hotel entrepreneur, and so I guess I'd learned a few things along the way and accumulated some hospitality knowledge. But after my first week, I realized that the brave new home-sharing world didn't need much of my old-school bricks-and-mortar hotel insights. A stark reality rocked me: What do I have to offer? I'd never been in a tech company before. Five and a half years ago, I had never heard of the "sharing economy," nor did I have an Uber or Lyft app on my phone. This was not my natural habitat.
So, I decided at that moment that I could either run for the hills, or cast judgment on these young geniuses, or instead, turn the judgment into curiosity and actually see if I could match my wise eyes with their fresh eyes. I fancied myself a modern Margaret Mead amongst the millennials, and I quickly learned that I had as much to offer them as they did to me.
The more I've seen and learned about our respective generations, the more I realize that we often don't trust each other enough to actually share our respective wisdom. We may share a border, but we don't necessarily trust each other enough to share that respective wisdom. I believe, looking at the modern workplace, that the trade agreement of our time is opening up these intergenerational pipelines of wisdom so that we can all learn from each other.
Almost 40 percent of us in the United States have a boss that's younger than us, and that number is growing quickly. Power is cascading to the young like never before because of our increasing reliance on DQ: digital intelligence. We're seeing young founders of companies in their early 20s scale them up to global giants by the time they get to 30, and yet, we expect these young digital leaders to somehow miraculously embody the relationship wisdoms we older workers have had decades to learn.
It's hard to microwave your emotional intelligence. There's ample evidence that gender- and ethnically diverse companies are more effective. But what about age? This is a very important question, because for the first time ever, we have five generations in the workplace at the same time, unintentionally. Maybe it's time we got a little more intentional about how we work collectively. There have been a number of European studies that have shown that age-diverse teams are more effective and successful. So why is that only eight percent of the companies that have a diversity and inclusion program have actually expanded that strategy to include age as just as important of a demographic as gender or race? Maybe they didn't get the memo: the world is getting older!
One of the paradoxes of our time is that baby boomers are more vibrant and healthy longer into life, we're actually working later into life, and yet we're feeling less and less relevant. Some of us feel like a carton of milk -- an old carton of milk -- with an expiration date stamped on our wrinkled foreheads. For many of us in midlife, this isn't just a feeling, it is a harsh reality, when we suddenly lose our job and the phone stops ringing. For many of us, justifiably, we worry that people see our experience as a liability, not an asset. You've heard of the old phrase -- or maybe the relatively new phrase -- "Sixty is the new forty, physically." Right? When it comes to power in the workplace today, 30 is the new 50. All right, well, this is all pretty exciting, right?
Truthfully, power is moving 10 years younger. We're all going to live 10 years longer. Do the math. Society has created a new 20-year irrelevancy gap. Midlife used to be 45 to 65, but I would suggest it now stretches into a midlife marathon 40 years long, from 35 to 75. But wait -- there is a bright spot. Why is it that we actually get smarter and wiser about our humanity as we age? Our physical peak may be our 20s, our financial and salary peak may be age 50, but our emotional peak is in midlife and beyond, because we have developed pattern recognition about ourselves and others.
So how can we get companies to tap into that wisdom of the midlife folks, just as they nurture their digital young geniuses as well? The most successful companies today and in the future will actually learn how to create a powerful alchemy of the two.
Here's how the alchemy worked for me at Airbnb: I was assigned a young, smart partner, who helped me develop a hospitality department. Early on, Laura Hughes could see that I was a little lost in this habitat, so she often sat right next to me in meetings so she could be my tech translator, and I could write her notes and she could tell me, "That's what that means." Laura was 27 years old, she'd worked for Google for four years and then for a year and a half at Airbnb when I met her. Like many of her millennial cohorts, she had actually grown into a managerial role before she'd gotten any formal leadership training. I don't care if you're in the B-to-B world, the B-to-C world, the C-to-C world or the A-to-Z world, business is fundamentally H-to-H: human to human. And yet, Laura's approach to leadership was really formed in the technocratic world, and it was purely metric driven. One of the things she said to me in the first few months was, "I love the fact that your approach to leadership is to create a compelling vision that becomes a North Star for us."
Now, my fact knowledge, as in, how many rooms a maid cleans in an eight-hour shift, might not be all that important in a home-sharing world. My process knowledge of "How do you get things done?" based upon understanding the underlying motivations of everybody in the room, was incredibly valuable, in a company where most people didn't have a lot of organizational experience. As I spent more time at Airbnb, I realized it's possible a new kind of elder was emerging in the workplace. Not the elder of the past, who actually was regarded with reverence. No, what is striking about the modern elder is their relevance, their ability to use timeless wisdom and apply it to modern-day problems.
Maybe it's time we actually valued wisdom as much as we do disruption. And maybe it's time -- not just maybe, it is time -- for us to definitely reclaim the word "elder" and give it a modern twist. The modern elder is as much an intern as they are a mentor, because they realize, in a world that is changing so quickly, their beginners' mind and their catalytic curiosity is a life-affirming elixir, not just for themselves but for everyone around them. Intergenerational improv has been known in music and the arts: think Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga or Wynton Marsalis and the Young Stars of Jazz. This kind of riffing in the business world is often called "mutual mentorship": millennial DQ for Gen X and boomer EQ.
I got to experience that kind of intergenerational reciprocity with Laura and our stellar data science team when we were actually remaking and evolving the Airbnb peer-to-peer review system, using Laura's analytical mind and my human-centered intuition. With that perfect alchemy of algorithm and people wisdom, we were able to create and instantaneous feedback loop that helped our hosts better understand the needs of our guests. High tech meets high touch. At Airbnb, I also learned as a modern elder that my role was to intern publicly and mentor privately. Search engines are brilliant at giving you an answer, but a wise, sage guide can offer you just the right question. Google does not understand, at least not yet, nuance like a finely attuned human heart and mind. Over time, to my surprise, dozens and dozens of young employees at Airbnb sought me out for private mentoring sessions. But in reality, we were often just mentoring each other.
In sum, CEO Brian Chesky brought me in for my industry knowledge, but what I really offered was my well-earned wisdom. Maybe it's time we retire the term "knowledge worker" and replaced it with "wisdom worker." We have five generations in the workplace today, and we can operate like separate isolationist countries, or we can actually start to find a way to bridge these generational borders. And it's time for us to actually look at how to change up the physics of wisdom so it actually flows in both directions, from old to young and from young to old.
How can you apply this in your own life? Personally, who can you reach out to to create a mutual mentorship relationship? And organizationally, how can you create the conditions to foster an intergenerational flow of wisdom? This is the new sharing economy.
Thank you.
这是2013年初，我在硅谷一家热门创业公司工作的第三天。我的年龄是那个房间中十几个工程师年龄的两倍。我进到这个公司是因为我在自己的领域是资深专家，但在这个特定的房间中，我感觉自己就像一群科技天才中的菜鸟。我听着他们交谈，觉得我最应该做的事儿就是隐身。突然，一位25岁主持会议的奇才盯着我问：“如果你发布了一个功能，但没人用，它真的算是发布了吗?”
“发布一个功能?”在那一刻，我开始意识到自己正处于水深火热之中。
我压根儿听不懂他在说什么。我只能尴尬地坐在那里，不过好在他直接转向了另一个人。我浑身瘫软地坐在椅子上，迫不及待地等待会议结束。
这就是我在Airbnb(爱彼迎)初来乍到的表现。我被三位千禧一代的联合创始人邀请加入他们的公司，帮助他们快速成长的科技公司成为全球知名的住宿品牌，同时我也成了首席执行官布莱恩·切斯基的内部导师。我在26到52岁期间是一位经营着一家精品酒店的企业家，我猜我在这一路上多少学到和积累了一些酒店业的知识。但在我加入爱彼迎的一周后，我意识到这个全新的民宿共享世界并不需要借鉴太多传统实体酒店行业的经验。一个严酷的事实震撼了我：我能提供什么价值?我以前从没在科技公司呆过。5年半前，我都还从没听过“共享经济”，手机上也没有Uber(优步)或Lyft打车软件。我感到有些水土不服。
于是，我在那一刻决定，要不就趁早溜之大吉，或者对这些年轻天才进行评判，亦或者反过来，把评判变成好奇，看看能不能用他们的新眼光来匹配我的智慧和经验。我把自己想象成这群千禧一代中的玛格丽特·米德，很快就发现我能提供给他们很多东西，就像他们刷新了我的认知一样。
我对我们这两代人了解和学习得越多，我就越意识到我们彼此常常不够信任，无法分享彼此的睿智。我们能够共享一个边界，但我们并不一定互相信任到能够分享彼此的智慧。看着现代的工作场所，我不禁相信，我们这个时代的商业协定打通了这些代间智慧的管道，于是我们都可以彼此学习。
大约40%的美国人有一位比我们年轻的老板，而且这个数字还在快速增长。权力向年轻人转移的速度前所未有，因为我们越来越依赖DQ：数字智能(digitalintelligence)。我们看到公司的创始人在20岁左右创立公司，在30岁时将公司规模做到了全球巨头，然而，我们期待这些年轻的数字领袖能够奇迹般地拥有我们年长工人在几十年中学到的关系智慧。
把你的情商像微波加热那样快速提升是很难的。有充分的证据表明，性别和种族多样化的公司效率要更高。那么年龄呢?这是一个非常重要的问题，因为我们在不经意间，破天荒的同时有五代人在一个场所工作。也许是时候让我们更有目的性的对待我们的合作方式了。欧洲有很多研究表明，年龄多样化的团队要更高效，更成功。那么为什么只有8%拥有多元化和包容性项目的公司扩展了这个策略，把年龄跟性别或种族等重要人口属性一样包括进去了呢?也许他们没能得到这份备忘录：世界正在老龄化!
我们这个时代的一个悖论是，婴儿潮时期出生的人更有活力，更健康，我们实际上会工作到更晚年的时候，却感觉越来越不重要。我们有些人感觉自己就像一盒牛奶——一盒旧牛奶——皱纹遍布的额头上印着过期日期。对于很多人到中年的人来说，这不仅仅是一种感受，这是一个残酷的现实——当我们突然失去工作，电话不再响了。对我们当中的许多人来说，我们担心人们把我们的经历看作是一种负债，而不是一种资产。你可能听说过这个古老的短语——或者可能是一个相对新的短语——“60岁的人有新时代40岁人的体魄。”对吗?当谈到今天的工作场所的权力时，30岁则是新的50岁。好了，这很令人兴奋，对吧?
事实上，权力在向年轻10岁的人转移。我们都会活多10年。算算吧。社会创造了新的“20年不相关鸿沟”。中年在过去是指45-65岁的人，但我觉得现在它延伸到40年的中年马拉松了，从35到75岁。但等等——这里有一个亮点。为什么随着年龄的增长，我们在人际关系上会变得更聪明，更睿智?我们的生理机能可能在20多岁达到顶峰，我们的财务和薪水高峰可能在50岁，但我们的情感高峰在中年及之后，因为我们已经形成了对自己和他人的模式认知。
那么我们怎样才能让公司充分利用中年人的智慧，正如培养他们的数字青年天才一样呢?今天和将来最成功的公司将会是学到如何融合这两种能力的公司。
这是我在Airbnb工作时发现的有效方式：我被指派了一个年轻，聪明的搭档，她帮助我开发了一个住宿公寓。早些时候，劳拉·休斯可能看到我在这个“栖息地”有点迷失了，于是她常常在会议时坐在我旁边，自愿做我的科技翻译，我记下笔记给她看，她就能够告诉我：“就是那个意思。”我认识劳拉时，她27岁，她在谷歌工作了4年，然后在Airbnb工作了一年半。像很多千禧一代的同龄人一样，在得到任何正式的领导力培训前，她实际上已经具备了管理者的能力。我不关心你是在B2B的世界，B2C的世界，C2C的世界，还是A2Z的世界，商业本质上是H2H的世界：人跟人的世界。然而，劳拉的领导方式实际上是在技术官僚世界中形成的，基本上是纯指标驱动的。在起初几个月中，她告诉我的一件事是，“我喜欢这个事实——你的领导方式是创造一种引人注目的愿景，为我们指引正确的方向。”
现在，我对现实的知识，比如，一个女佣在8小时的轮班中打扫了多少房间，在民宿共享世界中可能没那么重要。我的基于理解房间中每个人的潜在动机，关于“如何把事情完成”的过程性知识才是有重要价值的，特别是在一家大部分人都欠缺组织经验的公司。随着我在Airbnb工作的时间越来越久，我意识到可能有一种新形态的长者在工作中出现了。不是过去的长者，那种被尊重的人。不，现代长者的惊人之处是他们的相关性，他们运用永恒智慧，并将其应用于解决现代问题的能力。
也许是时候，我们应该像重视颠覆行为一样重视智慧了。也许是时候——不仅也许，的确是时候——让我们去重申“长者”这个词，并给它来个现代版的转变。现代的长者既是实习生，又是导师，因为他们意识到，在快速改变的世界中，他们的初学者思维和催化的好奇心是生命的灵丹妙药，不仅对他们自己，对他们周边的人也是如此。代间合作的表演在音乐和艺术中并不罕见：想想托尼·班尼特和LadyGaga，或者是温顿·马萨利斯和年轻的爵士明星们。商业世界里的这种行为通常被称为“相互指导”：千禧一代的数字智能搭配X一代(20世纪60-70年代生人)和婴儿潮一代的情商。
我和劳拉以及出色的数据科学团队就经历了这种代间互惠，在改造和发展Airbnb的点对点评价系统时，使用了劳拉的分析头脑和我那以人为中心的直觉。通过算法和人类智慧的完美结合，我们能够创建瞬时反馈回路帮助我们的房主更好理解客人的需求。高新科技遇上高级体验。在Airbnb，我也学到作为现代的长者，我的角色是在公共场合做实习生，而私下则扮演着导师的角色。搜索引擎十分擅长为你找到答案，但一个睿智，贤明的向导可以给你正确的问题。谷歌还无法理解，至少现在不行，像人类心灵和思想这样的细微差别。一段时间后，让我惊讶的是，在Airbnb有数十名年轻员工开始向我群求私人辅导。但在现实中，我们通常相互辅导。
总而言之，CEO布莱恩·切斯基因为我的行业知识找到我，但我真正提供的是丰富的智慧。也许是时候让“知识员工”这个词退休了，并用“智慧员工”取代之。今天我们在工作场所五代同堂，我们可以像割裂的孤立主义国家那样运作，或者，可以开始寻找跨越这些代间鸿沟的方法。现在是时候让我们来看看如何改变智慧的工作方式，让它真正实现双向流动，从年长者到年轻人，从年轻人到年长者。
你如何在自己的生活中应用这些呢?就个人而言，你能找到谁来建立一种相互的指导关系?在组织方面，你如何创造条件去培育智慧在代间的流动?这才是新的共享经济。
谢谢。