I had the privilege last year to have a conversation about company culture, value alignment, impact, and purpose with the wise & practical Chip Conley, of Airbnb and Modern Elder Academy, who says entrepreneurs are visionary people.
More About Chip Conley
Chip Conley is a rebel hospitality entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author, Chip Conley disrupted his favorite industry… twice. At age 26 he founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality (JdV), transforming an inner-city motel into the second largest boutique hotel brand in America. He sold JdV after running it as CEO for 24 years, and soon the young founders of Airbnb asked him to help transform their promising start-up into the world’s leading hospitality brand. Chip served as Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy for four years and today acts as the company’s Strategic Advisor for Hospitality and Leadership.
In 2018, he founded the Modern Elder Academy (MEA) in Baja California Sur, a wisdom school dedicated to helping people navigate midlife. MEA is a mission-driven organization that provides scholarships to 50% of students and graduates receive a certificate in Mindset Management.
His five books have made him a leading authority at the intersection of psychology and business. Chip was awarded “Most Innovative CEO” by the San Francisco Business Times, is the recipient of hospitality’s highest honor, the Pioneer Award, and holds a BA and MBA from Stanford University.
Below are some of the highlighted questions I asked Chip in September 2019 for my YouTube Channel.
Q: Tell us something from your journey as an entrepreneur. What struggles you had, and how those struggles have helped shape your career.
Chip Conley: An entrepreneur is a pioneer, a visionary, and the word visionary really means you can see the future earlier than other people. I like to think of a metaphor of a surfer; a surfer can look at the horizon, see the waves coming in and know which wave is the right one to catch.
Whether it was as an early pioneer of boutique hotels, a phenomenon in the 1980s in the United States, or more recently joining the founders of Airbnb in home-sharing. I have always been open to trying new things that people said to me was stupid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9301F_tqXZw
Question: Three years ago, you started the Modern Elder Academy. Can you tell us more about that? And how can companies benefit from the age diversity in the workplace these days?
Chip Conley: I worked at Airbnb and I was twice the age of the average employee there. That taught me quickly that I was an elder. They started calling me the elder, not the elderly, which is a relative term. When you are an elder, it means that you are older than the people around you. They started calling me the modern elder; a modern elder is as curious as they are wise.
I started spending more time with friends of mine who are similar in age. I heard a lot of people feeling anxious and bewildered by a world where we’re going to live longer. Power is moving younger and change is happening faster. I believe that there was a need for a midlife wisdom school, most people are between 45 and 65, and they are looking at how to repurpose their mastery and their wisdom in new ways in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBfJkhf1bE
In terms of how companies can take advantage of age diversity, let us start by saying that most companies do not think of age diversity as one of the demographic metrics. That is partly because the younger brain and older brain work very differently. A younger brain tends to be thinking fast, quick, and lots of ideas and open to taking risks. An older brain synthesizes things a little bit more. Instead of focusing, they can see the big picture. They see the holistic. The older person can see the forest as well as the trees, whereas the younger person just sees all the trees. I think because of that, companies are now starting to see that there is a lot of value in bringing people of different generations together on teams and within their organizations.
Question: Last year when you were at James Altucher show, you talked about the importance of Company Culture and you mentioned that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Can you elaborate more? What are some of the trends these days in terms of company culture?
Chip Conley: Think of a virtuous circle with the culture at the base. You have employees, customers, profitability, and culture. There’s a lot of evidence that a company with a strong engaged culture will compete more effectively than a company with a great strategy that badly executes because of a bad culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moByqoBDoWE
At Airbnb, we learned that it was important for us to be very thoughtful about who we brought onto the team. We had some core values interviewers so that if someone were coming on as an engineer, they did not just interview with the people they would be working within the engineering team. They also had an interview with two core values interviewers who looked at each potential employer in terms of a cultural perspective; does this person believe in our core values or not?
That is one of the many different things we did to build the culture. At the end of the day, there is a lot of evidence that companies with great culture and happy employees tend to have much faster stock price growth in the public markets.
We must be careful about one statement or question that comes up. Is this person a culture fit? People feel comfortable with the same type of people at the workplace and comfort is an important part of being in a workplace, but discomfort is often where some of the best ideas come from. Discomfort can breed innovation. If you want to create a company that feels like it is all your best friends, you may enjoy each other, but you may go nowhere as a company. Bringing in someone who might be a little bit of an irritant, someone who has a different point of view, comes from a different background, can give them the space to have a conversation with everybody else where their voice can be heard.
Q: Is it important when people are applying to have value alignment with the core values of the company? Is it okay to have a little bit of difference and see how they can present themselves? You mentioned that Airbnb has core interview questions. How can interviewers present themselves that they can do the job, but still be themselves?
Chip Conley: Core values speak to something that is beyond the demographics that are obvious on the surface. If a company does not even have clarity about what their core values are, then this is a hard place to even start.
Start with the idea of no more than six core values; four is an even better number. These are the values that the company holds dear, no matter how the company grows into the future.
Core values should be unique to your company, a fingerprint for the company. Once you have that, you help people in the organization know how those core values show up as behaviors in the company.
At the end of the day, just know that core values are the invisible glue that brings people together. The more global the company, the more virtual the company in terms of people not being in the same location all the time, the more important the core values become.
Q: A lot of people these days are talking about having an impactful life – having a purpose in life. In that sense, how can people identify what they are passionate about? How can they identify their purpose?
Chip Conley: A couple of questions that I would ask someone to understand their passion and their purpose would be the following:
First, if someone were to give you a billion dollars and said that you had to give the billion dollars away for something that had purpose attached to it, where would you spend that billion dollars? Where would you invest that billion dollars?
Similarly, if you could do anything and it did not matter how much money you had to make, what is it that you would do? Where would you spend your time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRyvasm9VHo&t=1s
Finally, who are the people you most admire? And what are they doing in the world?
When you ask those questions, it helps you to start getting a little bit clearer on your passionate purpose perspective. From a practical perspective, what are the things that give you a pulse and a heartbeat?
For many people, it comes back to something from childhood. As an adult, it became something that did not feel as practical or they did not have time to invest in it. I happened to grow up in the group in a nice neighborhood and I enjoyed it. I then went to Inner City High School, remarkably diverse and hugely different than my little neighborhood, which was predominantly white. For me, interracial diversity and getting to know different cultures is important to me.
One of the things I support with my foundation is teenage programs for people with diversity. This has zero impact in terms of on my day to day life, in terms of how I am living, but it means I live in Mexico most of the time now, which is where the Academy is located. To help invest and donate to urban teen programs at risk in the inner city means a lot to me because it takes me back to my childhood and my teen years.
Sometimes that purpose or passion that you have will be deeply ingrained in you and you have maybe even forgotten, because you became an adult and you have moved on.
Q: You also mentioned while you were talking to James Altucher last year in his broadcast that people have three relationships with their job; it’s a job, or career, or a calling. Can you elaborate more and why it’s important to distinguish those three?
Chip Conley: I like to think of it as in the shape of a pyramid.
Most people at the base of this pyramid have a job. When you have a job, you tend to be focused on the compensation package and the money and the scope of work. Sort of basic, you go do your job, and then you go home.
A step above and a smaller part of the pyramid is the career. When you are focused on your career, you are focused on your career path and recognition. You’re very internally focused a little bit more on the idea, “how do I get recognized and appreciated for the work I do, and what’s the path for me to grow personally?”
At the top of the pyramid is the idea of calling. Calling comes from the idea that you get inspired by the meaning of what you do. It comes back to the idea of purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCsvhH4f640&t=1s
A great company figures out how to take their employees up that pyramid. The number one reason people leave their job in the US and Canada is not because of money. It’s because of their boss, which is why that middle of the pyramid is important.
When a person feels recognized, they are more loyal; that is the middle of the pyramid. A great company helps recognize their employees. At the top of the pyramid is the idea of giving someone a feeling of purpose and meaning, not just in what the company is doing, but in what they do every day.
A great company gives a sense of meaning, both in work and at work. At work means the overall company purpose, in work, means the impact you have on that purpose.
It is important that a company has a clear, concise purpose that people can rally around.