Age and generational issues

As the world's overall population skews older, the workforce is aging as well, with more older adults working well beyond what used to be considered the...

If you had to name three characteristics of Millennials or Gen Zers right now, you probably could, right? But your generalizations may be largely borne...

A shadow board is a group of nonexecutive employees who work with senior executives on strategic initiatives. It is designed to leverage insights from...

Gender and age trends are redefining the “standard” career trajectory.

It’s popular today to point out that Gen Ys as children often received trophies for simple participation and extensive praise for just about any idea. Detractors criticize Y’s (individuals born between 1980 and 2000) as products of a misguided movement in parenting and education designed to buffer children from the negative effects of competition and […]

The U.S. educational system needs an update.

Four charts show how they vary by region.

At a recent dinner party, I was speaking with a friend who had just been promoted to vice president at a well-known New York hedge fund. The promotion was unexpected, involved an immediate 50% pay raise, and came with broad new responsibilities. When he should have been feeling optimistic and excited about his new position, […]

If you want to get in with Millennials, try talking to their parents.

Remember: You belong in the seat you are occupying.

Many companies consider age a competitive disadvantage. Here’s why they’re wrong.

So you’ve found the leadership at the bottom of the corporate pyramid – those smart hidden gems with the iPod earplugs peeping discreetly through carefully careless hairstyles: Generation Y, the young Millenials termed by Fortune as potentially most high-performing generation in history. A generation that is entering the workplace with more information, greater technological skill, […]

Tucked into this year's Fortune 500 issue is a short article on the annual Rice University Business Plan Super Bowl. With $1.3 million in cash, equity,...

The most successful entrepreneurs aren’t 20-somethings.

Of course there's no absolute either/or here, but there's a shift underway that matters to business. Boomers' focus was (and remains) on insuring that...

The hot book when I graduated from business school was Dress for Success, a compendium of the rules for proper appearance in the corporate world, by John T. Molloy. Millions of us devoured it. We were eager to gain every possible competitive advantage. To this day, I have never worn a brown suit in Boston. […]

What if you swapped all the roles of all the people on your team? Put people into leadership roles who hadn’t yet had an opportunity to implement their ideas? Asked former leaders to play support roles, contributing their expertise, but within a new framework, established by others? Brought in people who had never been included […]

I had just finished making a speech about choice – about the importance of finding work that you can feel excited about – when one of the audience members shared this story. Her soon-to-be college graduate son is in the job market. With a background in accounting, he is finding the job market pretty attractive […]

The good and the bad.

In recent years, many have focused on the challenges of Gen Y, the latest generation of workers to arrive in and begin to reshape the workplace. For me, they aren’t of merely academic interest. I live in a country where Gen Y represents nearly 40% of the population. I work in a company where the […]