Harvard Business Review: “Today the workforce is getting older, and the number of younger workers in positions of senior management is growing. These two developments might appear to spell trouble, in that they seem to set the generations against one another, but the author of this article argues that in fact they represent an important opportunity: If companies can figure out how to enable the intergenerational transfer of the wisdom that comes with age and experience, they can strengthen themselves — and the workplace as a whole. We’re in the midst of two enormous demographic shifts in the workplace that seem to be at odds with each other. We’re living longer and working longer — either by choice or necessity. In the last century, the 65+ age group has grown five times faster than the rest of the population and, by 2031, according to a recent Bain & Co. estimate, employees 55 and older will constitute a quarter of the global workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly half of the increase in the number of people participating in the U.S. labor force between 2016 and 2026 is attributable to those 60 and older. At the same time, there’s such a growing reliance on DQ (digital intelligence) that companies are desperate to hire and promote digital natives, who are often much younger. According to Harris Interactive in 2014, 38% of Americans reported to a younger boss and the Department of Labor suggests the majority of Americans will have a younger boss in the near future. Physiologically, 60 may be the new 40, but when it comes to power in the modern workplace, 30 is the new 50. And as the pool of older workers and younger managers grows, so does the necessity for understanding the value of age diversity on teams. With five generations in the workplace for the first time, some observers have predicted that battles will break out among the generations. I beg to differ. For years, in my role as the mentor to the Airbnb and other start-up founders — and as the CEO of MEA, the world’s first midlife wisdom school — I’ve observed how symbiotic relationships among the generations can develop in ways that take companies to great heights. For that to happen, though, we have to move beyond the obsession with “knowledge work.” That term dates back to 1959, when it was coined by the visionary management theorist Peter Drucker. “The true investment in the knowledge society,” Drucker wrote, “is not in machines and tools. It is in the knowledge of the knowledge worker.” That insight held true, with extraordinary influence, for more than half a century, but today anybody with a computer or mobile phone has vast amounts of the world’s knowledge at their disposal, and AI is increasingly able to handle knowledge-based tasks that until just a few years ago only people could perform. With this shift, and in a world where more and more young people will be running organizations, there will be less demand for human knowledge — and more for human wisdom…”