Living and Working in the Age of Longevity

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0:32Lynda Gratton:I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

0:43Lynda Gratton:So, Alison, as you know, my father passed away recently at the age of 104. He stayed sharp pretty much up to the end, and that is relevant to our conversation today. Yes, I was so sorry about his passing. He was such an amazing man, not only a father to you and several highly accomplished siblings, but Secretary of the Navy in the 1960s and then a successful businessman. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. But my point in mentioning that is that a lifespan like his is becoming less and less rare. We're living longer. We're living healthier. There are many more centenarians, and that has profound implications for work and for our careers.

1:19Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I personally want to work until I'm 100, but I do think that old notions about retiring at the age of 60 or 65 don't really make sense anymore. Many of us can be very productive and lead valuable work lives for much longer.

1:36Lynda Gratton:Yeah, exactly. And I think management has to adapt to this. I mean, individuals do too. And our guest today, Linda Gratton, has excellent advice on how people should think about their career options over a relatively long time span. Gratton is a professor of management practice at London Business School and is author of the new book, Living the 100-Year Life, which builds on her earlier book, co-written with Andrew Scott, called The 100-Year Life. She has a lot to share about how we can plan our careers differently in light of our longevity and what organizations need to do to keep up. Here's our conversation.

2:08Lynda Gratton:You know, for our audience, I want to talk mostly about the implications of this on work and career. But before that, I mean, you know, at a high altitude, how should we think about all of our very possibly centenarian lives, about the pace, the expectations, about the pursuit of happiness? Well, I would say we've always wanted to have more years. Anyone, if you ask anyone, what would you like? Would you like more years? Everybody's going to say, yes, of course, I'd love more years. And actually, right now, we have that opportunity. We have the opportunity to do what our parents and grandparents didn't do, which is to live a great deal longer.

2:46But of course, that's complex for us in many ways, because some of the ways that our institutions are formed, the assumptions we have about our lives, all of those are based on the idea of a three-stage life. You know, you are educated, you work and you retire at 60 or 65, and then you live maybe for 10 years. But now I'm saying you could live to 100. Everything else has to be remade. This generation of people, whatever age or this age you are right now, all of us are learning how to do that, whether we're 70, 50, or 30. We're actually learning, what does it take when you live a 100-year life?

3:21I'm incredibly optimistic about it. I think it's a wonderful thing. But it does mean that we have to change the way we think about our lives.

3:29Lynda Gratton:So I tend to be somebody who lives to work as opposed to works to live. How should somebody like me think about my working identity in this era, in this new world? Well, the economics of 100-year life is that you need to make money in some form or another, probably into your 70s or even your 80s, unless you've saved 20 % of your income from the time that you started work, or maybe 15%. And very few of us have done that. And so you haven't, no, neither did I. So it's a sort of a financial reality, but I don't think it's really that that makes it important. I think what really makes it important is the idea that work can be such a wonderful thing for humans.

4:13You know, it brings so much things. It develops our skills. It allows us to meet new people, especially of different generations, which I think is really important as you age. It allows us to have new experiences. So I am all for working into our 70s and even possibly our 80s. But then, of course, to do that, you've got to think about, well, how are you going to do that? And what sort of work do I do? And that, I think, is the question that lots of people are asking right now.

4:40Lynda Gratton:Well, and it is the career ladder. I mean, the blueprint of the working life now for younger people is very different from when I entered the workforce, where you work for one company or maybe a couple for long stretches. Is the career ladder obsolete? Is that not the way to think about work and career now? Well, if you think about a ladder, you can imagine yourself climbing up that ladder. And what does it require? Well, it requires a lot of energy, but not really a lot of agency, because all you have to do is put one hand on the next rung. What I think is happening now is that we have to use our personal agency.

5:22And that's something that's entirely different from what we've had to do in the past. And, you know, there's lots of ways of thinking about, you know, lots of metaphors to think about your life. The one that I use is the idea of weaving your life, where you're the weaver and you're weaving your life. And, you know, every day you're weaving a life that creates both productivity for you, but also nurture. And those two elements to your life are so important because you need both of them. But the reality is that they're hard to deliver at every point in our time.

5:55Lynda Gratton:I think many of us are relatively passive, have exercised relatively little agency in our careers because we've been headhunted. Somebody has come out and or we need a job and we apply to 10 places and one says, yeah, you know, there's a passivity to that. you know you're really urging us to be to have that kind of agency and that's important if you're going to live to your 70 or live to your 100 but why are we so bad at that and how do we get better at that well i think you know fundamental to the career ladder was this idea that the transaction between you and the organization is that you were a child and the organization was an adult it was sort of adult child thing where the organization said don't worry i'll look after you and you as a child said okay i'll do the best i can you know i'll put one hand above the other on the ladder we've actually moved to something which is much more adult to adult the adult in the time in the sense of what organizations require of you and what they say they want and the deal they describe but also adult in terms of how we as individuals make commitments understand ourselves decide in a reflective way what we want and i think we've been moving i wrote a book years ago called the democratic enterprise which described the beginnings of that shift and i think that shift is now really, really on its way.

7:09And being an adult means you have to be proactive. And that's something that I talk about a lot in the book. How do you gather your proactivity?

7:20Lynda Gratton:So you write that we should all try to weave our 100-year life into our 20s, into our 30s, into our 40s and 50s. What do you mean exactly by that? What I love about the metaphor of weaving a life is that when you think about your life as a loom, There's a past, you know, all the stuff you've woven already. There's where you are right now, the choices you and I are making right this moment. And then we have the future, which, of course, is hard for us to imagine, but we do have a sense of what our future self is. And I think that's a really profoundly human idea. And across that loom, there are threads that help us to be productive.

7:59You know, threads like mastery or knowing, cooperating or amplifying, which is the way we work with AI. and they're really important but if you just have that then you burn out so the threads of nurture are also really important threads which are about our relationships intimacy friendship but also how we manage energy both in terms of calming ourselves and indeed in terms of creating adventure and those eight threads are there in our lives at all times and it's it's we who choose which to strengthen and which to leave fragile. Now, often we don't make that choice consciously, and sometimes we regret those choices.

8:40But each one of us has got to that stage at any point in time in our life.

8:45Lynda Gratton:So we've been talking mostly about how individuals should think about their lives and their careers. But I want to move it into the institutional level now, because I don't think our laws or our protocols or our practices are in step with everything you're writing about, You know, that we, our institutions do basically shuffle people off when they're 60 or 65 because they're too old or they're too highly paid or don't know the new technologies. That seems to me that needs to be resolved, that that's a fundamental conflict in this era where we are living, not only living longer, but we're healthy and we can be productive.

9:22Lynda Gratton:We need to be productive. And workplace laws that are probably 100 years old. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we just haven't yet designed institutions for longevity. We really haven't. We're beginning to design them for technology, but we still haven't designed them for longevity. And that's going to be difficult because it means letting go of a whole lot of assumptions that came with the career ladder about promotion being the only way up, about people staying for a long period of time and never coming back again or not coming in at the age of 30. about, you know, every step, every step is a step that you take.

9:57You can't take sabbaticals, you can't work flexibly. So, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff that has to change. And, you know, when you see change happening at the level of a society, individuals are always the first sort of thing to change. And then institutions eventually catch up. And I think we're in that stage right now. I mean, I have colleagues who are working into the 80s, other companies have. I've got friends who are taking sabbaticals at different times in their life. There's fathers who are doing parental leave in a way that they never did before. So the world, you know, freelancers, you remember the HBR article that Dan Gerson and I wrote about the huge increase in freelancers.

10:36So we're already seeing a lot of those early signs that actually organizations perhaps not realizing that that's what they're doing, they are becoming more flexible about the way they employ people. And that's really, you know, helps anyone who wants a portfolio life or a multi-stage life.

10:57Lynda Gratton:Can many of us afford the portfolio life or is that, I mean, the portfolio life sounds great to me at my stage and at this stage in my career. A portfolio life, you know, my kids, young people I know, you know, there's no health insurance, there's no, you know, the portfolio life is a constant hustle. Is that what we need to adapt to? Well, it could be. You know, there's lots of different ways of running a life. And, you know, my thinking is that there might be times when you just want to stay with a company. There might be times when you want multi-stages. And a multi-stage means that you stay with a company and then perhaps you start your own business.

11:30Perhaps you do something else. So the variety is in a sequence. But the variety can also be horizontal, like in a portfolio, where you try and do all these things at the same time. And as you rightly say, Adi, I mean, that's hard to pull off. And we think about people in their 60s and 70s being able to pull it off. But interestingly, when I asked my MBA students, how many of you anticipate having some sort of a portfolio life? A load of them put up their hands. And then I said, well, what age do you think this is going to happen? And they said, right now. I thought, wow, that's really interesting.

12:05They're seeing it as a life choice from the beginning, not something you build up. Now, why are they thinking that? Well, I think that HBR article that Diane and I wrote about freelancers gives you a little bit of an understanding of that. Because actually, if you build skills, if you work as a freelancer, if you start your own business, you actually can begin to build a portfolio much earlier than we had imagined would be possible. Now, that's not to say that lots of people are going to build portfolios. It'll be the majority. But I think what we are going to see is a lot more variety about the fabric of our life.

12:41You know, when you say it's a ladder that everybody's climbing, everybody's climbing the ladder together and they're all going up in the same way. When you say it's a fabric that we're weaving, actually your pattern could be so different from my pattern. And that's what I think we're going to see, a lot more choice, a lot more variety. But of course, that brings the question of personal agency right to the center again.

13:06Lynda Gratton:You know, that sounds great in terms of personal development. Why should managers care about this? You know, why, you know, as we as individuals weave our lives and our work lives, Do leaders need to change their mindset to appreciate that and absorb that? Or, you know, how should leaders respond to this? And, you know, what way is this in the interest of managers who are trying to run a business? Yeah, well, I just ran a pilot program this year with three very large companies, with the executives from three large companies. And the question is 10 week program. And the question was, how do we think about supporting longer lives?

13:41and actually the results of that program were really sort of fascinating because what it showed well the first thing it showed is that there is real burnout going out in 40 year olds in fact I wrote an hbr.org piece about this the sort of pivotal 40s so if you're a manager and you're worried about burnout in your 40s you need to be worried about longevity because what's happening is people are getting to their 40s and going really is this it is this another another 20 years of this, you know, I'm out, either physically or metaphorically out. And you don't want that. So I think that it's in your best interest.

14:19Second reason why managers should care about this is that in a time of AI, where AI knows so much, wisdom, networks, judgment are really important. And that develops with experience, with age. And I think thirdly, we know there's so many advantages for multi-generational teams to work together. So there's all sorts of good reasons why you should think about openly about employing people at whatever age they're at and not really thinking too much or worrying too much about are they over 50, are they over 60, are they over 70. And if you've got a really good performance management system, you can do that.

14:59So at London Business School, for example, we have a couple of faculty who teach into their 80s. Why are they there. Well, in part because we have a feedback system with our students where every student has to rate every professor at the end of the semester, and that's made public to all of the other professors. And let me tell you, if you're not really on your game, you don't need anyone to tell you that. And so as long as you have really good performance management, people know whether they're still performing, you don't need to use age as a proxy.

15:30Lynda Gratton:Right. You probably also have tenure, though, that is part of the explanation. Yeah, we do have tenure, and that is part of the explanation. But actually, I think that pride is even, well, not always, in every case, but often pride beats tenure. They say that every day your business is late to AI, you fall two days behind. But how do you keep up? The competition is only moving faster. Fortunately, there's NetSuite next. NetSuite is customized for a wide range of industries, so it supports the way your business truly works. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to netsuite.ai slash ideacast.

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16:57Lynda Gratton:So you mentioned AI, and I'm sure a lot of listeners are thinking about, wait, wait, wait, wait, AI, maybe this all makes sense, but AI changes everything. You know, our assumption has been AI wipes out entry-level work, it wipes out a lot of other work, and the conversation shifts to, you know, instead of this sort of work ethic that you talked about, that maybe we redefine the definition of happiness in life, which is not necessarily I derive happiness and satisfaction from work, but maybe there's another measurement and maybe I work less and have hobbies more and, you know, and because AI is doing all the work.

17:35Lynda Gratton:How do you think about how AI changes, accelerates, decelerates the phenomenon you're writing about? When I was naming the eight threads and certainly the four threads of productivity, I created the thread called amplification, which I certainly wouldn't have had 10 years ago. And the amplification is the thread that connects us to AI. you know, that actually brings us together. And, you know, what we know about AI right now, but of course this will change, is that if you're experienced and have good judgment, it will increase your productivity by six times. So one of the questions we have to ask, as you're saying now, is, well, if I'm going to be six times more productive, what do I do with all that time?

18:16And how do I spend it? Do I just do more of the same, or do I do different things? And the threads in a way, particularly the nurture threads like adventure and calm are a real invitation to do things differently. I think the second thing about AI is that we can anticipate that a proportion of our jobs will be taken by AI every year. And so weaving the fabric is a lot better than running up a career ladder. Because when you're weaving a fabric, you're already transitioning, pivoting, you've already got self-awareness, you're already thinking about what do I need? Who am I? Where am I? What are the promises I want to make to my future self?

18:56So it's a much more robust way of thinking about a life and thinking of simply as a career ladder.

19:02Lynda Gratton:So I want to ask you for really practical advice, starting with individuals, you know, what are some first steps people can take to start thinking about all of this in a healthy way? And when I say all of this, it is, you know, you are likely to live longer than you have imagined you're likely to be productive, maybe longer than you had anticipated, and your future happiness and self-worth sort of depends on getting this right. What are some of the first things people can do right now? Well, I think the first thing they can do, as you suggest, is actually acknowledge that they could live to 100.

19:33That's a big first step. Secondly, you can really ask yourself, where am I now? One of the things I did with a book is to build a diagnostic to help people work that out. You can go to the website, it's freely available, and you can download your report. Because I do think knowing where you are now is really important. So, for example, in my case, when I started working on this, I realized that my thread of friendship was pretty fragile. I'd spent so much time working, building mastery. And it really made me think, okay, if I want to live to 100 and have a great life, I know friendship's really important.

20:09And that leads to the third point, which is to say, small actions and experiments. I don't think anyone pivots. You know, I couldn't say today, okay, I'm going to have a great friend by tomorrow. But what I could do is to say, you know, I could talk to one of my friends this evening for eight minutes. It turns out it's only eight minutes you need. And I'll promise myself to do that. Or else I could say, you know, I'm not feeling very calm at the moment. I'm going to go for a walk tomorrow morning. So what I'm saying is that you actually commit to things that are going to be useful for you in the future.

20:42I know those are things like friendship, calm, having an adventure, building a skill. These are all relatively small things that you can start. So I would say start now and choose something that's going to help you that lasts into the future.