How a leadership expert is reshaping the future of work for parents everywhere This episode…
Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 63 – Chip Conley
What does it mean to be a modern elder? And do you need one in your workplace – or are you one already?
Our guest in this episode is Chip Conley, Founder of the Modern Elder Academy, Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb and author of “Emotional Equations,” “Peak,” and his newest book, “Wisdom at Work.”
Chip breaks down the concept of “Modern Elders,” and talks about age diversity as a fundamental part of the modern workplace. He also shares tips for writing a book and finding your best audience.
This episode is overflowing with great advice, so be sure to listen in!
If you are a Modern Elder looking to set out on your first business or redefine your current platform, Thought Leadership Leverage can help.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on our podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. And today I’m really, really, really excited to have Chip Conely on board with us. Hello, Chip.
Chip Conely Hello Peter, great to be with you.
Peter Winick Thank you. So let me give everybody, if you don’t know who Chip is, I’ll give you an abbreviated bio. He’s a rebel hospitality entrepreneur and a New York Times bestselling author. He disrupted his favorite industry twice, which is pretty cool. At 26, he founded Joie de Vries Hospitality and transformed an inner city hotel model, developed that into the second largest boutique hotel brand in America, sold that off. And then he was very involved at Airbnb blowing up the industry that he came from. He’s Ted speaker. He is an author. on a variety of topics, one better than the other, Emotional Equations, one of my favorite books, Peak is one of favorites. If you haven’t seen his Ted Talks, you’re in the minority because they’re fantastic. And here we are. So you’ve got a new book coming up and we can talk about that a little bit, but welcome. Thank you.
Chip Conely You know, I appreciate the fact that we’ve actually spent some time in the past brainstorming about my thought leadership and you were very effective in helping me sort of focus.
Peter Winick Well, thank you. I appreciate that. That was a while ago. That was fun. And I think that was during the emotional equation launch there. So let me ask you this, Chip, because you’re sort of you’re a nonlinear guy, I would say. So how did you get here from the standpoint of thought leadership, right? So there’s your business guy, and there’s lots of other things that you do. But talk to me sort of about how you think about content and thought leadership and how you put it out into the universe.
Chip Conely You know, I can’t say that I, you know, 20 years ago when I first wrote my first book, I can say that was looking to be a thought leader when I grew up, and if I go back even further, maybe 45 years to when I was 12 years old, I can tell you that I knew I would be a writer when I grow up. I actually told my parents I wanted to be a writer when I grown up and they said, writers are either poor or psychotic and most are both. And I didn’t really know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good. But what became cool to me after starting my boutique hotel company, she wanted even age 26 is that I appreciated every few years taking stock of what I’d learned and then looking at how can I encapsulate that? How can I metabolize that in a way that would be helpful for me, but also for my company. And then over time, maybe for a larger audience and So that led me to, uh, starting to give speeches, um, P that was sort of inbound interest that sort of said, Hey, we want you to teach. And then I spoke with a guy named Alan Weber, who, uh created fast company magazine, well, he was the managing editor of Harvard business review. And he really said to me, if you’re going to write books, go give speeches. His advice was when the process of, if, you have a seed of an idea, go out and talk about it and then see what gets juicy for you. and see what’s juicy for the audience, and follow that and focus on that, and then start writing articles about it, such that by the time you actually write your book, you’ve really become the thought leader in this space. And so that’s what I’ve tried to do, is I’ve try to seed an idea out there, develop it, and then by the time I actually launch the book, feel like, okay, I’ve become an expert in it, even though two or three years earlier, I might not have known a whole lot.
Peter Winick So let me play that back because it’s a very effective and smart approach. Cause oftentimes people do the exact opposite, meaning they create an isolation. I have this idea for a book. I’m going to drill down and sort of the stereotype of the isolated author with a, you know, a tweed jacket and a cigar or something like that, you know? Just, you’re whittling away and going and going, going, and then they put it out into the world and then it’s sort of binary, right? Like it’s either a flop or a hit, right. And more often it’s flop because there’s no feedback, but when you’re testing the ideas, right? You get up and do a keynote and you say, let me try this new thought I’ve been noodling with. You sort of know in real time, like if that’s a thing or they’ve glazed over and you do that a few times. By the time the book comes out, I’m not saying it’s guaranteed to be a hit, but it’s been market tested, if you will, from a conceptual standpoint.
Chip Conely Would you agree with that? It’s sort of like what happens in Silicon Valley now, with this agile development. People go out and try things, iterate, iterate. That’s it. By the time you actually go launch in a bigger way, you know that you’ve got a great product. This is my fifth book, but my third book, Peak, just hit the market at a time where the market really needed to hear it, I guess. It was not a New York Times bestseller. It had a deeper, more evangelical set of customers who loved, and then Emotional Equations was a New York Times bestseller, and that had a lot to do with just really getting me out there on the lecture circuit, giving talks such that by the time it came to the market, January of 2012, there’s a huge demand for me to be speaking about that. And Modern Elder Academy is, you know, it’s, luckily, I’ve spent the last five and a half years side by side with Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. He’s 21 years my junior. He asked me in early 2013, after I’d sold my boutique hotel company, if I could come in and help his little tech startup become a hospitality giant. And the reality is he wanted me to be his mentor, but I also was gonna be reporting to him as the head of global hospitality and strategy. And so I was able to start formulating this idea of like, Wow. This is not a traditional elder role. The traditional elder had all the knowledge and then dispensed it. And the modern elder is as much an intern as they are a mentor. Because I’d never worked in a tech company at age 52. And now all of a sudden I’m surrounded by people talking a language I didn’t understand. So that’s really where the idea got formulated. I started talking about it within Airbnb about what does it mean to be a modern elder because I was two generations older than the average employee. and it just allowed me to start to develop the idea such that now, what, three, three and a half years later after I first coined the term modern elder, the book is coming out.
Peter Winick One of the other themes that you mentioned, and I think it’s really, really cool is that you don’t just pull things out of the air, right? You’re a thoughtful person. I’d say you’re a lifelong learner. You’re curious by nature. And when you put content out, be that in speaking, and then ultimately in a book, it’s a result of you living through it. It’s not fiction, right. So this modern elder thing isn’t manufactured. You coined this because it was real and based on your experience. Define for me what is a modern elder? So you said it’s sort of the mentor and the mentee and the intern, but what is that and why do you think right now, because you’re really good on timing, why is now sort of the time that the world needs to hear this message?
Chip Conely Well, I think Travis at Uber wish he had had a modern elder by his side. He might still have a job, but the thing for me, just to answer your first part of the question is I’m a weird guy. I am both a practitioner, literally running companies in the workplace, doing 40, 50, 70 hour jobs, and then choosing to write at the same time. I don’t use ghost writers. I do all the writing myself. Um, and so that’s an unusual thing and I like it. It’s my way of, uh, again, trying to distill my wisdom. What became clear to me at Airbnb, and then as I looked at the sort of Silicon Valley world and realized that seven of the 10 most valuable companies in the world today are tech companies. So pretty much the whole business world now wants to be a tech company. Sure. Well, what we see there is there is a huge, huge preference, or you could almost say bias. for youth and because we are more and more seeking digital intelligence, what I call DQ. So EQ has become more important than IQ or EQ being emotional intelligence. Therefore, there’s a tendency for many, many companies, not just tech companies, but all companies to start looking at how are we going to get some more digital natives in here to help us become a modern company. That’s all great. I mean, there is a great piece to it. Now, never before in the history of business have we ever seen power cascading to young people like we do today, right? But the thing I started to notice is like, wow, we expect these young digital leaders to miraculously embody the relationship wisdoms or leadership wisdoms, we who have been around a little bit longer, I’ve had decades to learn and I really started seeing a lot of these companies don’t, they know technology well and they have a beautiful idea of the future of business plan, but they’re really off when it comes to understanding like organizational savvy. How do you create, you know, a culture? How do you create? You know, Airbnb had a great culture before I joined, but the guys, you know, they didn’t know how to run a business. They’d never run a business before. So there are a lot of things that I could be helpful with. So a modern elder is as much that curious learner, the person who sort of says, I’m going to put myself in a new environment and learn something new. because change is happening faster than ever before. And if you’re not constantly learning and you’re an elder, you become less relevant with time. The elder of the past was all about reverence. The elder is about relevance. And so that’s, and then of course you have your wisdom you can dispense as well. But I think that the idea of a modern elder is that they are very much a beginner’s mind, which is usual.
Peter Winick Well, I would think the other piece of that is, I think back in the old days, maybe 20, 25 years ago, you weren’t able to be an elder for long just to do the lifespan, right? You can be an older for probably another 40 years in your right. Thirty five, 40 or whatever, you know, that’s a long time to be a modern.
Chip Conely Yeah, and frankly, listen, in the Silicon Valley, you can be an elder at age 35.
Peter Winick Yeah, right.
Chip Conely who are 10 years or younger than you, on average you probably are an elder. So here’s the story on this. Midlife used to be 45 to 65 and we called it the midlife crisis back in 1965, but midlife today I think is 35 to 75 because people are feeling irrelevant faster, especially in technology, entertainment, advertising, retail, and you’re going to actually maybe until you’re 75. either because of necessity or choice. So midlife is now, you know, you could be a modern elder, you know for decades, because you may live to 100 and you may be in the workplace till you’re 75. So as such, the idea of how do you cultivate your wisdom and how do develop this opportunity to sort of be someone that people want at a table. And how do we help companies understand that diversity is not something you just do for gender and for race. But you also do it for age, because there’s a ton of evidence that shows that age-diverse companies and teams operate better.
Peter Winick Right, absolutely. And oftentimes you walk into a startup and everybody’s 28, which is good, and everybody is 28 which is bad.
Chip Conely There’s two sides to it. And as long as we say they’re both real, and there’s nothing wrong with having young people. And this is not a manifesto against millennials. In fact, quite the opposite. I’ve really written it from a point of view that these folks are really smart, and they are more passionate and more purpose-driven than maybe any generation before them.
Peter Winick Absolutely.
Chip Conely yet they want help. 75% of millennials like to have a mentor. We sometimes think that millennials want to do it all by themselves. Yeah, at times they do. And if you come across like their parent, so modern elder is not a parent. A modern elder adult supervision. A modern elder, is not anything that’s going to be pejorative to young people in the workplace who are smart. They are there to actually help advise, mentor, coach. And in some ways elder them, elder them basically means you can use your years to say, gosh, you know, I remember what it was like, Brian, when I was a young CEO like you. And here’s, here’s how I was able to become, you know a more effective CEO over time as I got older. So anybody could do this and it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have be someone like me who used to be a CEO, you can do this as a social worker or as an investment.
Peter Winick So let me ask you a couple of things, more on the business side of the thought leadership and the content. So you’ve launched several books. You’ve been speaking professionally for a long, long time. You’ve got a book that you’re in the process of launching now. What are you doing differently with the launch of Modern Elder? And what are you that you did in the past in hopes of it being a success?
Chip Conely Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts. I mean, my God, how many? So podcasts are the new plus.
Peter Winick Right.
Chip Conely Exactly, exactly. The graduate. I would just say that podcasts and bloggers are sort of central to the theme, primarily because it is one of the ways that people digest content, but not just digest content but take action. If you’re in Time Magazine, in the actual Time Magazine paper edition, back in the old days, that would be like, oh my God, that’s like
Peter Winick Home run.
Chip Conely people don’t actually read their time magazine and then go straight to their mobile phone. And, you know, if you’re on time magazine online, yes, actually, there’s more of a link to an actionable step a person takes. And the truth is, if you’re in the print version, you’ll be online as well. But sure, the point is, you know being on the Today show in the morning isn’t what it used to be. And so, you know we are doing some of the traditional stuff on that from that perspective. But Instead, it’s a combination of podcasts and bloggers. And then it’s building a movement, building a collectible. We, I took 153 people through a week long and two week long programs at our Modern Elder Academy in Baja as part of our beta test. And they all committed to buying 10 books each so they could actually give them to their friends. And so that’s a simple way, you know, sold 1500 books that way. And that’s the simple way to, frankly, the better part of it is not the 1500 books that are sold, it’s more like. There are 153 people who are absolute advocates and evangelists with this.
Peter Winick Well, and let me touch on that because one of the things that I think that there’s a disconnect between sort of traditional PR and the way it really works in the book world, right? So there’s sort of the book industrial complex and what you created with those 153 folks, yeah, you know, 10 books each 1500 books is great. They’re raving evangelists, right. These are people out there talking every day because they touched it. They feel it. They’re, they’re part of it and all you’re doing is empowering them and giving them some tools to help spread the message and now you basically have 153 people with soap boxes all around the globe. singing your praises because they mean it, not because they’re paid to, right? So people smell authenticity.
Chip Conely Yeah, no, so it’s and obviously we have a, you know, a Facebook group that’s a private group for that group. We have newsletters, but like this afternoon we have a digital town hall. So we have, um, 153 people and 90 of the 153 are going to be joining us. 60% of them. And these are people from all over the world, 90, you know, 60% are joining us for an hour and a half town hall this afternoon, uh, that we’re, we do once a quarter.
Peter Winick That’s phenomenal.
Chip Conely So all of those people will be engaged.
Peter Winick In a real way, and they’re opting in because they benefit from it. It’s, it’s, you know, satisfies curiosity. There’s part of a community, you know, there’s the, you’re not forcing anybody there. Let me ask you this. You’re a marketer, so you’ve got an advantage in this space. Cause a lot of thought leaders and content folks that come in think, you know, my job is to create great content, write the book and all that other stuff. I find it really upsetting when I talk to someone that’s wicked smart. really passionate and their heart and souls in a book. And I talked to them six months later and it’s like, oh, I just spent a zillion dollars with a PR firm and did an AM radio tour. And I’m like, okay, do you know anyone that listens to AM radio? Number one and number two, if they did, do you think they’re actually gonna respond and buy the book? Like, why did you do that? And they said, well, somebody recommended this great PR firm and that’s what they told me to do. How would you advise folks that are maybe not marketing savvy? to be not skeptical but logical when it comes to getting into sort of the marketing and the launching in the whole thought leadership plan.
Chip Conely I think the critical question to ask is this, it’s who is your core audience and what are the most influential ways for you to have them understand what you’re writing about and take action around it. And so I don’t think there’s a specific roadmap that’s perfect for all books. In some cases, getting you out, speaking about the book is a really important way to have people hear it. But in other cases, like the book, there’s no speaking platform for psychiatrists. You know, there is, yes, there are a few psychiatrist conventions, but not.
Peter Winick conferences here.
Chip Conely The conferences are limited and there aren’t that many companies that are going to bring in or industry associations are going bring in that psychiatrist to go talk. So, maybe in the psychiatry world, if you think your core audience is other psychiatrists, it’s one thing and therefore it’s more academic journals and other kinds of things, if it’s a lay audience, a broader audience, it’s a self-help book, then who is that audience? You know, is it what’s the demographic about them? I mean, you know, age. sex, gender, you know, color of skin, etc. What is that? And then what’s the psychographic? What’s the person? And how do they get influenced? And if it’s social media, then there’s a social media campaign that’s that might be behind it. You know, social media sort of can be applied to anything, frankly. Of course, there’s you know beyond that, my general feeling on something like the person I’m talking about is a psychiatrist is trying to pick a self help out there is, you know, you need to sort of say, okay, there are. Like who are the top 20 thought leaders out there in the space who have a large community and audience following them one at a time, look at those top 20 and know that of the top twenty, you might get three that actually will write about you, but figure out how to build a relationship and don’t just think like a cold call to Oprah and get you on her side and it ain’t gonna happen. She’s on your top 20 though. She might be number one, but the likelihood of you getting on Oprah’s small and it’s going to take some good luck or some good contacts to have it happen.
Peter Winick Absolutely.
Chip Conely But going beyond the top three, you know, you’re going to have Oprah and a few others. But once you like numbers 15 through 20, those people actually are more likely for you to actually get an audience with.
Peter Winick Well, and I agree with that. So two thoughts here. One is we live in the age of the long tail, take advantage of it, right? So everybody’s calling Oprah, but that number 15 to whatever, they’ve got a loyal following. It might be a small percentage of Oprahs in that example, but they’re more open to it, and if you get numbers 15, 18, 23, and 27, you’ve just hit a bunch of people that are lined up to your profile target. I wanted to touch on what you said a moment ago in terms of really getting specific. about who you’re writing the book for. The thing that I hear early on in a lot of client work is, ah, this book, this could be great for everybody. And I said, well, you know, the only one that’s got budget to market to everybody are companies like Apple and Coca-Cola, and you probably don’t have their marketing budget. So we really, really push, and I think it’s aligned with your thinking of, let’s really develop those client avatars, whether there’s three, four, or five, but the highest level of specificity you can around their psychographic, demographic, their emotional needs, their… whatever professional accomplishments whatever it is and then once you do that you can reverse engineer where are those people hanging out which is exactly what you’re saying and I think that’s a step that people sort of either do either don’t do where they do it sort of and like oh yeah this would be you know married women 30 to 50 like that’s sort of really lazy I think putting in that work. So give me an example on modern elders. Who are the avatars? Who describe for me?
Chip Conely So, an avatar could be a woman who has a graduate degree in business, who got married, ended up doing very successfully in business until age 33 when she had her first child. And she then spent the next 15 years bringing up her kids. And now the kids are in high school and are about to go off to college and she wants to come back into the workplace at age 48, but she feels completely lost. She didn’t, she’s never had a LinkedIn profile. So she’s someone who wants to repurpose herself in midlife. Another could be an example of somebody who is a business person, who has worked in many companies, but he’s, he’s ready now at age 53, uh, to actually go and start his own company, but that you need to have like both the confidence, but also the skills to say, how do I go launch a new business in my mid fifties? There’s enough, there’s stats on this. People in their fiftys are much more likely to start a business than people in their twenties. People don’t know that because, you know, the people in the 20s with the hoodies get all the attention, but people in their 50s do it all the time, partly because they’re tired of working for the man and partly because, let’s just be honest, it’s harder to get a job in your 50s than it is in your 20s. Yeah, of course.
Peter Winick And tangential to that, nobody in their 50s should be wearing a hoodie to look like they’re in their 20s, right? That should just be illegal, but that’s a difference.
Chip Conely So I think, you know, I think that’s a big piece of it as well.
Peter Winick But let me just pause you for a second, Chip, because I want to just, the way you describe those two, I have a crystal clear vision in my mind of each of those two avatars. They’re very, very different. But then if you said to me, go find them, I know exactly how to find both of them versus if you say, oh, it’s good for Millennials and Boomers. Like that would, that would cause me angst. So I love the level of specificity because then you can just go back and say, do that, you know, does that blog or does that outlet meet the criteria of where my peeps are and where I want to be. And then how do you message reporting?
Chip Conely That’s right. I mean, and so long story short is I think that I’ve also found LinkedIn as an amazing platform for a business book. What a surprise. I mean LinkedIn is a really good medium for business, but here’s the part that’s interesting about LinkedIn. You know, I wrote an article about three weeks ago and you know, don’t have a huge audience on LinkedIn. I only have 15,000 followers, 16,000 on LinkedIn because I’ve never really done anything until just the last few months. So, but I had over 105,000 views of something I read a few weeks ago, five days into Thank you for watching! But the thing that’s also important about LinkedIn is that there’s a long tale in terms of people looking at things, um, whereas on Facebook and, and Instagram, et cetera, frankly, once you’ve posted something within a day, it’s like, it’s sort of gone.
Peter Winick Yesterday’s newspaper, yeah
Chip Conely LinkedIn’s the exact opposite of that. It’s people actually are consuming content weeks later sometimes because they’re busy people and because partly they’re sometimes searching for a subject and trying to learn more about it in order to be more professionally proficient. And so I would just highly recommend LinkedIn as a platform.
Peter Winick No, I agree, and I agree with all that you said, because it’s not a flash in the pan, right? Because there’s all this research on what time do you have to post on Facebook and Instagram? And it’s like, geez, you know, LinkedIn, you post, I mean, there’s optimal times to post as well. But it’s as you know it’s, not as quick, it doesn’t expire as quickly, if it’s good. And I would argue that you’re going to continue to get juice out of the lemon of that article that you wrote that hit 100,000. it’ll be at 130,000 in six or eight months without you having to do anything, right? And you’ll get interest and comments and there’ll be conversation going on around that. So that’s great, cool. So we’re gonna wrap up in a moment or two here, Chip. Let me ask you this, as a modern elder thought leader, it might be a new thing, what would you tell the young up and coming thought leader the Chip minus 20 years or whatever the age delta is, specifically around the world of thought leadership and share some of your wisdom there.
Chip Conely I think it’s really important for you to be able to articulate in an elevator pitch what makes you different, what makes your message different. So many people who want to write books and I hear what they want to write about and my first reaction is I’ve read that already.
Peter Winick Yeah, five times
Chip Conely The key is to be, especially if you’re doing it from purely a sort of consulting thought leader perspective, if you are doing it and you have the added benefit of being a practitioner and an operator around it, then you do actually have a little bit of a leg up because you’re not relying purely on the thought as it is the thought and the practice together. Right. Whereas someone who’s a professor, a consultant, and they’re advising exclusively. Um, they, you know, they don’t, their thought better be damn good. Whereas the person who’s really telling their story has a story that goes with it. And for some people, that story is inspiring and is going to sell books because the story itself was valuable. Um, so I think, you now, I read when I first got into business, I read a Paul Hawkins book, growing a business, and it was the story of him creating Smith and Hawkin, along with some really tangible thought leadership around. conscious capitalism before we even had that term. Right. So I would just say, you know, just know that, that again, if you don’t have the practitioner side of this, you better actually really polish the diamond and have something that’s different.
Peter Winick Excellent advice and wisdom. Well, I wish you all the best with the new book, with Modern Elder, and I appreciate so much that you shared with us. There’s a lot in here to unpack in terms of being specific and the use of social and publishing and all that stuff. Tons of good stuff as I had expected it would be. And I appreciate your time and I Thank you for sharing with us.
Chip Conely Thank you, Peter, it’s great to be with you.
Peter Winick To learn more about thought leadership leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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