Chip Conley, Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder (2018). (Goodreads/review - notes)

I first heard of this book when Chip Conley gave a talk at one of the Long Now's Seminars on Long Term Thinking in March 02019: The Modern Elder and the Intergenerational Workplace. I didn't consider reading the book after listening to him then. The talk was interesting, but I didn't give the book any thought at all.

Then earlier this week, while compiling a list of things to read on the topic of managing older employees, the book popped up again. This time I had a reason to get it, so I picked it up immediately on Kindle (a rarity for me—I tend to get things at the library or used).

Why?

The reason for picking up this book is mostly tactical. I want to convince a certain target audience to pick up the mantle as an elder—an experienced person with something to give rather than something to prove. Growing up in aerospace from the mid-2000s on, there always seemed to be some sort of catastrophic warning about the coming workforce turnover, like the punchclock at the factory was going to strike midnight and all the boomers were going to turn into pumpkins. It seemed like an opportunity, honestly. How many times we were told that the average age of engineers on the Apollo program were some obscenely low age, something in their 20s. (Parenthetically: those opportunities exist and existed in this era if you know where to look for them; suffice it to say that it's a fool's errand to look for them in established places.) More than a decade later, the feeling is some uncomfortable amalgam of "please don't go I have more questions" and "why don't you leave already?" The former feeling derives from knowing that they know why things actually work the way they do; the latter feeling is a visceral frustration at the clot of upper-level staff forever occupying the upper-level positions.

So it makes sense, I think, to try to understand how things feel from the other side. And it also makes sense to plan for how to engage that experience and wisdom without casually tossing it out.