Mauro Guillén: Why You Should Think Healthspan Not Lifespan

0:00Here's something remarkable, and not in a good way. Disengaged employees cost$1.9 trillion a year. That's a lot of zeros. Why? Because when teams lack the right skills, productivity declines, turnover increases, and strategies stagnate. But it doesn't have to be that way. At Project Management Institute, home of the PMP and globally recognized certifications, your people can learn to collaborate, deliver on time, and actually get things done. The cost of not upskilling? Way higher than the investment. Project Management Institute. Find the answers at PMI.org.

0:50I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Mauro Guillen. He is currently the Dean of the University of Cambridge Business School. He's an esteemed keynote speaker, a frequently engaged consultant, and a recipient of prestigious awards including Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. His insights and commentary are highly sought after by major media outlets including NPR, Bloomberg, and CNN. In addition to these roles, he is an accomplished author. Among his influential books that have garnered worldwide recognition is 2030, how today's biggest trends will collide and reshape the future of everything.

1:39His most recent literary endeavor, the perennials, the megatrends creating a post-generational society, challenges the conventions such as boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z. He proposes that discarding these dated classifications is key to unlocking our collective potential. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. I'm thrilled and honored to have on my podcast, Mauro Guillen. With no further ado, let's begin this thought-provoking discussion.

2:17The title of your book is just great. Maybe, thank you Gina Pell, but two of you have coined this term that's going to be used. Yeah. It may also be that you would like to become a perennial. I don't know whether it's self-interest or it's just admiration. No, it really is admiration for the title. I hate to burst your bubble. I'm not that deep a thinker. So the first example you bring out about BMW having five generations. So that is a stunner in and of itself. But then I tried to do the math and I don't understand how the math can work because if the youngest person at the BMW factory is 20 and the father is 40 or the mother, and then the next generation is 60, and then the next generation is 80, five generations means there's a hundred year old relative working or am I doing the math?

3:12How can five generations be working at BMW? Yes and no. So you're doing the math correctly, but you're assuming that only people who belong to the same family or the same lineage are working there. Generational groups sometimes are only 10 years. So it's people that were born in a given decade. You see what I'm saying? So the requirement here for working at BMW and counting generations is not that grandparents and grandchild and everybody in between are there. So some of these generations like millennials and others, they're defined as people born between certain years. And so the interval is typically 10 years or 12 years or something like that.

3:50And that's how in the end you can get to five generations. Okay, but maybe you were testing your readers. It's a very good question. It's a very good question, but you made an assumption that is not necessary. Okay. Good catch. I passed the test. Like did any other podcaster ask you that question? No, no. Good catch. You pay attention. Absolutely. So what has been the benefits to BMW of these five generations working at BMW? So what we know is in general that work teams that include people with diverse backgrounds, and that diversity could be ethnic diversity, could be diversity in terms of education or training, or it could be diversity in terms of age, tend to have higher productivity and higher creativity.

4:32So this has been found in many settings. But in this particular case, what they found was that having the generations together essentially increased productivity and also satisfaction at work. And again, they seem to enjoy the fact that there were different people there with different capabilities because we develop different kinds of skills at different ages. And so people with different ages or belonging to different generations can bring to the table different kinds of skills. It can be experience or it can be technical expertise or it can be the latest knowledge about computers, whatever it is.

5:01But essentially that's what happened. Has there been any kind of negative to affect like 50, 60 year old person saying, I refuse to work for someone 30 years old who has only been at BMW for 10 years and I've been here for 40 years. I'm not going to take orders from this punk. Yeah, no, absolutely. The problem with all of these multi-generational settings is that sure, there are advantages to be obtained, but there's also the potential for intergenerational conflict. And not only that, also, why don't you work harder? You have to pay for my healthcare and pensions, or I don't want to work here and pay taxes and then go into the health care and pensions.

5:38So the potential for intergenerational conflict is always there. So you need good managers to essentially set up the right conditions so that then you only obtain the benefits and you try to avoid the shortcomings of a multi-generational workplace. I was thinking about this. If the president of the United States is 84 years old, you could make the case that the federal government is a multi-generational organization ahead of its time. It's a hyper multi-generational. Yeah, right now. And remember, we also have the Supreme Court. We've always had the Supreme Court where appointments are for life.

6:14So some justices just go on forever, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So sure, actually in the government, if you include all of the branches, that's where you see, I think, the most extreme example of, or let's just say a piece of the government, the White House. So in the White House now, you have a lot of generations. Remember, Remember, they start with interns who could be like 20 years old in the White House. And then you have the president who is in his 80s. Absolutely. I don't think we should get started discussing the Supreme Court because that's not an organization I hold in high regard right now.

6:49I don't think anybody does really. So can you explain what the traditional perspective is like the four stations of life? Yeah. And once upon a time, about 140 years ago or so, some geniuses came up with the idea of having universal schooling. So everybody had to go to school. And also the idea, roughly about the same time, that everybody should get a pension after working for so many years that everybody should have a right to a pension. Once those two innovations became the norm in the world and they spread from one country to another slowly. But by 1960 or so, every developed country in the world, for sure, every emerging market also, not the poorest countries, but every emerging market as well, had universal schooling and old age pensions.

7:38So once you said that those two things and that they should happen at certain ages, then you're dividing life into before you go to school, that's when you play, you're very little. Then you're a student in school, possibly university. Then you work, that's the third stage. And then finally, you're entitled to dispension. Not only entitled, actually, by law, you are in many countries obligated to retire. Not in the US, but in many other countries in the world, you're obligated to retire. And that's the fourth stage of life. So we've been living life in that way. And it's too compartmentalized.

8:09It's too regimented. It's just too strict. And it doesn't allow for deviations. And if you take the wrong turn or you're unlucky in life and you don't make it to the next stage at the right time, then you're going to be permanently disadvantaged. I mean, that's the problem with this. But also in this damn energy in which we have technological change and we have so many things just shifting, it's too rigid. It's not flexible enough to enable people to do the kinds of things that they would like to do. So that's the business of the four stages of life or the four stations of life. Do you think that the original reasons for coming up with this have largely disappeared and now we're preserving something that is no longer necessary or positive or desirable?

8:56Oh, absolutely. Let's take universal schooling first. So universal schooling was created to help people learn, but also to essentially come up with a large enough number of industrial workers for manufacturing that would be disciplined. Remember, school was not only about learning. It was also about discipline. And teachers used to be very strict about all sorts of things. And then old age pensions, the logic for them at a given age, at a mandatory age in particular, has also broken down because now we live much longer. And not only that, we stay healthy much longer than 100 years ago. Somebody these days who qualifies for a pension, let's say, at age 64 or 65, that person is still in very good physical and mental shape, could continue working.

9:40And in fact, so many people prefer to continue working, especially in the United States when they're allowed to do this, because retirement, I think, has been completely oversold. When people go into retirement, they get cut off from social networks at work. They become isolated. they start watching more TV because people when they retire we know this from research instead of doing great things like volunteering or spending time with the family or with friends what they do is they spend more time watching TV or they spend more time with screens, with their phones and so on and so forth in other words it's not the best lifestyle for retirement so I firmly believe in response to your question that the motivations the reasons for having those two things in place have nearly disappeared

10:33you touched on this very briefly just now but could you explain the difference between lifespan and health span and what are the trends for both absolutely so this is very interesting Thank you for asking that question. So the lifespan is life expectancy, how long we are expected to live. And this has been increasing for the longest time, obviously, as we have managed to control disease and we have come up with medical procedures and with medications and all that. The health span is how many of those years of life expectancy that we have are going to be in good health, mental and physical health, so that we could be active, we could work or we could travel and so on and so forth.

11:15So typically, of course, the lifespan is longer than the health span by about, I would say, on average, maybe eight years. So normally the average American, for example, the last eight years of his or her life or their life would be not in perfect health. So in some kind of situation in which they're limited, they cannot do whatever they want any longer. Now, listen to this guy. This is really interesting. The United States is the only country in the world. I've checked this many times. It's the only country in the world where the lifespan, health, so in other words, life expectancy has grown faster than the health span.

11:52In other words, in the US, we have added more years of life, but the years in which we remain healthy have stagnated, haven't grown as quickly. All right. In all other countries in the world, both things have been growing at about the same pace, but not in the United States. So we're adding years of life, but not as many years of healthy life. So in other words, the growth in the health span has been slower in the United States than the growth in the lifespan. And it's the only country in the world in that situation. And why? Because I think we eat too much processed food. We have a lot of people who unfortunately have excess weight.

12:35We have a lot of people who don't follow a healthy lifestyle. And that takes a toll. So modern medicine has given us the possibility of extending life or making it possible that we don't die from certain causes. But because we have in America, the average American has these very unhealthy habits, then sure, medicine keeps us alive, but not necessarily healthy, right? Not necessarily 100 % healthy so that we can travel and we can do everything we do. It's the only country in the world where this is going on. So are you telling me that the last eight years of my life is going to suck? If you're the average person, yes.

13:17But I don't know whether you're average or not. I don't know enough about your lifestyle. Okay. Old age is not a road of roses, but if we follow a healthy lifestyle, we can enjoy a lot of years beyond, let's say, eight, 70 or 80, being in good shape. Okay. So would you describe the structure of a multi-generational work team? Like, how does this work? It is a team in which, as you said before, it could well be that a person of a given age is reporting to somebody who is younger. And what we know from research is that people are very accepting of that. And of course, in Silicon Valley, which you know very well, this is not unusual that younger people are the bosses and older employees are the subordinates.

14:09But of course, in traditional companies like GM or you name them, General Motors or any of the old, great old American companies, it was extremely unusual that a younger person would be the boss. So that's one way in which these teams operate. But more importantly, young people and people with more experience on the job bring different kinds of things to the table. They may bring technical expertise or they may bring experience and so on. And therefore, in that diversity, that's where you find the roots of that higher productivity and higher creativity that I was referring to earlier.

14:47so let's assume that's going to happen i just have a list of areas that i would like you to explain the implications of multi-generational longer lifespan longer health span and what it means for society so the first one is education how should education change knowing that this is what teams will be like. Let me put it this way. Education used to be something like a gift, learning that we would experience when we were young. And we were supposed to learn at school or university everything that we would need in order to be able to work for 40 years or so, and then we would retire. But technological change has rendered that model implausible for the future because we see all of these workers who are now being replaced by machines or by AI.

15:40They need to be retrained. So learning now has to be something that happens at every stage of life. Now, intriguingly, technology is also coming to the rescue. So it's causing the problem, but it's also creating the solution. Because I think online learning will be the way in which we can have very large numbers of people engaged in lifetime, lifelong learning throughout their lives. And in so doing, of course, they may be taking classes with people from other generations. So that's the multi-generational learning that I talk about. This is already happening. I mentioned in the book that upwards of 30 % right now of the American population is engaged in some form of online learning.

16:21And typically that takes place with other people of different ages. So this is already going on and the percentage will keep on growing. Most companies right now that have more than 500 employees, they offer lifelong learning for free for their employees because they have realized how important it is for their employees to continue learning. So this is something that is already in motion. And I think new technologies, new entrepreneurs who have launched educational ventures online, especially online, I think are facilitating this process big time. Do you have kids? Of course, two of them. How old?

16:55One is 24. The other one is 22. Okay. So they're about the right age. Maybe if they asked you as they're in college or senior in high school, so, you know, dad, you're the expert. What should I be studying? Like, how do I prepare for this world? Like, how can I study for a job that doesn't exist yet? Dad, give me the parameters. What kind of education should I get? So first of all, I don't think my daughters would ever refer to me as an expert and would want my advice on that issue because they would prefer to make up their own minds. Okay. But if we're talking about other people's kids, so I get this question frequently.

17:35And what I always tell both the parents and the kids is something very simple, which is, look, you're going to have to switch jobs very frequently. You probably will have to switch careers once or twice because now we live very long and things are changing so quickly. So what you need to do is to learn the most important skills that underlie everything else. So what are those? The ability to read and to write very well and the ability to handle numbers and abstract concepts very well. There's a number of majors in college that prepare you for that. There's a number of high school programs that prepare you for that.

18:09But in addition to that, it's not just technical knowledge or technical skills. What I also tell them is that you need to be good at social skills because they're increasingly important in the workplace. What do I mean by that? The ability to work in teams, the ability to communicate, the ability to negotiate, the ability to resolve conflict, and also emotional intelligence. Those are social skills, and they happen to be as important as technical skills, I think, for the future.

18:37Now, what if your hypothetical kids or daughter say to you, Dad, I don't need to know how to read and analyze and manipulate data nearly as well, because there's this thing called artificial intelligence. And so it'll write for me. It'll speak for me. It'll generate content for me. Dad, your advice is already wrong. It's outdated. Yeah. So what's the answer to that? Yeah, no, I get this very frequently, both from my kids and from my students. You're too old to understand what's going on. And AI certainly is going to change quite a few things here and there. But, Guy, we're going to have to learn how to interact with AI.

19:20I don't think AI will just do its job by itself. We're going to have human beings. What we're seeing, at least in these initial stages, is that workers like you and I, we use AI tools. And we tell the machine, did you do that correctly? We prompt it. We try to essentially lead it to where we want it to go. It's a fantastic tool. I'm not saying that we're not going to be using it. I'm using it almost every day. But I think we will need to learn how to do that. And in order to learn how to interact with artificial intelligence, I think we will need to have the skills that I mentioned earlier. We will need to understand what artificial intelligence is all about.

19:55We will need to understand the technical aspects of the problem that we're trying to solve. And we will also need to have those social skills that I told you about earlier. How does multi-generation, healthspan, lifespan, these changes, how does it affect the careers of women? Women, I think, have the most to gain from the breakdown of the model because for them, these four stations in life were very limiting. So women, because in addition to all of the other clocks that we have in life that you have to complete high school by a certain age, that you have to do this and that, they also have the biological clock.

20:34If they want to have children, that also imposes some kind of a constraint. So I think that the ability now that I think shifting away from the old paradigm into this perennial way of life that I talk about in the book is going to be very helpful to women. Because if we're talking about enabling people to have several careers, if we're talking about enabling people to learn at different stages in life, that's only going to help women, which now oftentimes lose their possibilities for promotion if they stop to have kids. So if we look at professional progression in life in a different way, I think women, more so than men, I would say, stand to benefit more, although men will also benefit from a departure from the old paradigm.

21:15Except that men are still making the rules. Correct. So a woman is saying, okay, so I can have kids, I can stop out, that's career. I had a career before that. I had kids. Now I'm coming back, it's career number two or three. but aren't men still making the hiring decisions? And you cite in your book that with the same qualifications, when you're able to infer the age of the applicant, 40 % more callbacks for a younger person than an older person. So who's making that rule? Obviously, it's always the same people, but if we give women more opportunities, then eventually there will be more women in those positions of power in those positions of decision-making.

22:01It's very difficult to change the top of the pyramid by going directly to the top of the pyramid. But if we start introducing change from the bottom of the pyramid, then we will see that it's just a matter of time, hopefully a relatively short period of time, that we start seeing more women in positions where they can make decisions and they can change things. Okay. What's the impact of this perennials on marketing? Marketing has always had a very strong ageist bias. In other words, and it was for a good reason, I guess, for many decades, the largest segment in the consumer market was people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, because we had a baby boom, and therefore younger people were numerically more important than older people.

22:45And all marketers, advertisers, public relations folks, they were always addressing the needs and the aspirations of the younger age groups. But now, beginning in roughly speaking about 10 years from now, first with Japan and then China, then Europe, then the US and Latin America after that, what we're going to see is the largest segment in the consumer market is going to be people about the age of 60. Because we have all of those baby boomers becoming older and we're seeing that fewer babies are being born. So more people at the top of the age pyramid, fewer at the bottom. And marketers will have no option but to recalibrate their messages because otherwise they're going to miss out on the largest segment in the market.

23:24So it's just as simple as that. That's going to be the biggest change. But in addition to that, let me add one thing that I think is really interesting is that influencers have become in this age of social media so important. Influencers. So far, up until maybe five years ago or so, we primarily had influencers that were from the same generation as the people who were being influenced. But we're starting to see more cross-generational influencing. Consumers being influenced by people who are of a different age group or generation. And that I think is really interesting because it will at some point then create a lot more convergence in terms of all of this marketing and all of the associated processes of introducing new products and tailoring them to the needs of different groups.

24:06Now, are you saying that young people are influencing old people or old people are influencing young people? Both, but the most striking is the second alternative, meaning older people influencing younger people. This is really changing very quickly. And it's something that the marketers didn't see coming. Wait, so this is the so-called grandfluencers? Grandfluencers, exactly right. Okay, so I'm 68, so I'm a grandfluencer. But like, you're telling me I'm influencing people in their 20s? Or I can? You can, exactly. And people in their 20s are increasingly more willing to accept influences from people who belong to other generations.

24:54And again, marketers have assumed that most of the influence was happening inside generations, within a generation, but not across. This is good. I'm going to raise my prices. Absolutely. Absolutely. Up next on Remarkable People. You don't have to make decisions whose consequences are going to last a lifetime because you see everything is changing so quickly. So what I advise you to do is to take a deep breath and think about what you want to do next. Have a plan for the future, but a flexible plan for the future and think that things are going to be shifting. And therefore, the single most important thing for you to do is to learn how to be flexible, how to be adaptive to change.

25:39If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. You're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. How are we going to be defining retirement in this perennial world? I think retirement will be a far more flexible stage in life in which a whole array of possibilities will be available to us, in part thanks to technology. Most people in retirement would like to do something that earns money for them, but they don't want to go back to the office. They don't want to commute. They don't want to work so many days a week or so many hours.

26:23They want something more flexible. And of course, gig work or certain categories of gig work or freelancing come handy. But I think we should take this one step further, which is that companies should also see that they can use a few hours of people above a certain age because that's all they want to work. And they should engage with them and retain them as providers of certain kinds of services to the company. So I think it's not just gig work or freelancing. There's so many other things or systems or possibilities that could be put in place and made available to people above a certain age. And that's going to help everyone.

26:57It's going to help them stay connected. It's going to help them not fall into this terrible thing of loneliness during old age. It's also going to help them make a little bit of money because remember that the average American doesn't save enough for retirement. And in general, I think it's going to propel the economy forward. I think it's going to have so many positive implications. So let's pretend that Joe Biden calls you up and says, Mauro, I need some help. So you are advocating that this is multi-generational, perennials, all these factors are happening. So how do I fix social security? You fix social security by encouraging people to save more, that's for sure.