Navigating the Aging Population in Business with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

Mike Lander (02:41.522)
Aviva, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast today.

avivah (03:04.238)
My great pleasure, Mike. Lovely to be here with you.

Mike Lander (03:08.044)
I always have such fun whenever we talk. We got introduced via Kane, Kane Euler, who's someone else I'm talking to in a few weeks. And just you come up with things with a very different perspective, as our listeners are going to find out very shortly.

avivah (03:24.664)
I hope so. Listen, now you're setting up the bar, so let's try and I'll try and do my best to try and reach it or hurdle it.

Mike Lander (03:28.458)
Hahahaha

Brilliant. So Aviva, what's your background? Just tell kind of people listening, what's your background? What do you do? What do you what? What's your kind of passion? What fascinates you?

avivah (03:42.37)
I like to say that I'm equally fascinated by people, numbers, and words. That's kind of been my bailiwick for the last 30 odd years. I'm Canadian born, I have three passports, I've worked all over the world for the last 20 years on gender and culture balance.

Mike Lander (03:54.038)
Hmm.

avivah (04:09.286)
So, you know, mostly in very globalized companies with lots of different nationalities that had to balance as they globalized or adjusted, and a big push on gender balancing. And increasingly over the last few years have added a layer of generational balance on top, which is remarkably reminiscent of the gender balance issue.

Mike Lander (04:09.644)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (04:33.906)
Interesting. So now I'm getting fascinated by both those kind of topics, especially the generational topics. I think lots of assumptions are made about differences between generations, but I don't see much evidence or data. So you clearly bring a different perspective to that, which I'm looking forward to.

avivah (04:55.99)
Yes. I must say I've totally enjoyed learning about this kind of massive, it's similar into the gender topic in that it's massive, global, and has been predictable for many decades. You know, you can see this ice, well demographic change doesn't happen overnight, right? You can see the curves evolve over...

Mike Lander (05:13.459)
Really?

Mike Lander (05:17.322)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

avivah (05:23.61)
decades, and then what you don't know how to predict is the impact of it. And now we're in seriously uncharted territory in terms of these new demographic shapes around the world where I say we're moving for the first time in human history from demographic pyramids to demographic squares.

We've never seen this before, right? There used to be very few old people and masses of young people who we could do anything we wanted to and have, unfortunately, and treat them any old way and just select a very few to make it up the pyramid. But now we're in front of these squares, which basically mean there are as many old as young, there are as many over 65-year-olds as under 18s now in some countries. And so...

Mike Lander (05:49.378)
That's right.

Mike Lander (05:54.303)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (06:00.279)
That's right.

Mike Lander (06:08.148)
Wow.

avivah (06:14.126)
That can be, you know, and everybody's yelling about, oh my God, what a catastrophe, we're living longer. It's, you know, aging societies. Or you can say, wow, look, we're generationally balanced between old and young. What does that offer? What does it mean? Are there advantages to this in the world, in the economy, in our politics? Maybe a little bit of gray hair and maturity might help us.

Mike Lander (06:27.916)
Yes.

avivah (06:43.662)
That's what I'm hoping, at least.

Mike Lander (06:46.69)
So let's dive into that. I mean, we've got a couple of questions that we kind of, so the questions, I'll just give both questions to people listening, and then we're just gonna have a conversation. We talked about kind of, are there any intergenerational and or gender differences when negotiating? And also the benefits of more gender balanced, intergenerationally balanced businesses when negotiating deals. But actually, those are the kind of the broad topics. But we're gonna talk about, I think what you just said, which is this kind of,

this square demographic, what are the opportunities?

avivah (07:22.742)
Well, I think for the companies that get this early, a little bit like the companies that got gender balance early, right? Women were the biggest impact on global GDP increases over the last 20 or 30 years. They were huge benefits. So companies that were first movers in understanding.

the opportunities that this vast, this is not some little segment. This is the majority of the educated talent in the world and it's the vast majority of consumer buying decision makers. Now we're doing this again on the generational front. So I don't look too much into the traditional categories of boomers, gen X.

Mike Lander (07:54.686)
No, no, no.

avivah (08:16.154)
Gen Y and Gen Z and all the sort of slightly stereotypical, you have to be a little careful with this stuff, differences between them. What I do think is perhaps simpler, especially for the listeners on the commercial front, is just to think in terms of what I call the four quarters of life. You know, who are you recruiting? Who is your systems designed for? Who are your sales and marketing designed for?

Mike Lander (08:24.417)
Yeah.

avivah (08:44.194)
And what is all your negotiating strategy? What assumptions is it based on? And does it change if you're dealing with people in Q2, which is age 25 to 50, or in Q3, which is 50 to 75, and a fast growing part of the workforces around the world? And basically, I just warn everybody that...

In the same way that most of our systems negotiating strategies were designed by men for other men and their behavioral styles and preferences, in the same way, almost everything is designed for Q2ers and their motivations and energy levels and priorities, which I would suggest somewhat different than Q3ers. And I don't want to over-stereotype, but it's a very different phase of life.

Mike Lander (09:19.414)
Yes.

Mike Lander (09:37.301)
Yeah, yeah.

avivah (09:39.49)
with very different priorities. And we're just getting into the research on this kind of thing, because basically up to now, we've ignored Q3. Q3 is the new chapter of our lives that's gifted to us by these extra 30 or 40 years of life expectancy that the 20th century gave you and me. We do not look like our parents did at this age and even less how our grandparents.

Mike Lander (09:40.703)
It is.

Mike Lander (10:02.39)
That's right, correct.

No. That's all.

avivah (10:08.61)
And so here we are doing podcasts and consulting and writing books and, you know, getting out and about around the world. And so how we used to deal with Q3ers has to change very dramatically, especially if you think in countries like the UK that the segment with the highest asset base is now the 60 to 64 year olds. Now who listens to 60 to 64 year olds? Like

Mike Lander (10:13.325)
Yeah!

avivah (10:37.658)
Who thinks that they're worth even negotiating with or adjusting to and who's even studying what it is those people want? Companies are trying to get rid of them. Marketeers aren't interested because their marketing departments and advertisers are usually run by 35-year-old young men who really aren't interested in the old ladies who might hold assets but aren't seen as being very exciting or cool. So I would say

Mike Lander (10:38.848)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (11:01.473)
Yeah.

avivah (11:07.034)
Listen, phase one of every organization that wants to start getting interested in these massive new emerging segments, whether they're women or Q3ers, is start doing some research, start talking to these people, start prioritizing them, and start getting your organization to raise their existence onto the leadership agenda, the issue still on gender balance.

Mike Lander (11:09.653)
Interesting.

Mike Lander (11:27.063)
Yeah.

avivah (11:36.746)
is that a lot of companies don't take gender balancing very seriously, nor as a priority. They kind of give it to their D&I departments like it's like women. I mean, it really has struck me for the last 20 years that women are considered a diversity dimension. Excuse me, you know, we are 60% of university graduates. We make 80% of buying decisions. And we're the diversity. That was always.

Mike Lander (11:56.774)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike Lander (12:04.255)
Yeah, exactly.

avivah (12:05.654)
a misframe and it comes back to haunt companies that accept it. The same will be true now on the older folk and even how we talk about it in the words we use. So, I came up with this four quarter thing in part to neutralize a bit so we don't have to keep talking about older workers, mid-career workers, silver workers, pre-retirement workers.

Mike Lander (12:08.447)
Absolutely right.

Mike Lander (12:13.111)
Correct.

Mike Lander (12:29.485)
Yes.

avivah (12:32.898)
There's a terrible slew of vocabulary that neither you nor I would recognize ourselves in. Whereas I think, you know, I don't mind being in Q3.

Mike Lander (12:40.286)
Exactly. I mean, this whole, yeah, same here. I'm very happy in Q3. And in fact, if you look at, I mean, all my only reference points, I guess, are my parents and how they behaved when they were in what you're calling Q3. Completely different to how I behave. And as you say, I still, I work with clients, I work with clients until, hopefully, they stop finding what I say interesting. There's no time limit on that.

avivah (13:08.89)
Which maybe never, right? Look at Henry Kissinger still writing books and running around the world at 100, right?

Mike Lander (13:09.966)
I find it interesting. Well, I believe it will be never, Aviva.

Mike Lander (13:18.846)
Amazing. And, you know, there's all sorts of people in life, David Attenborough, there's a whole range of people in life where you go. There is no reason to think of a certain timeframe as being you're in retirement. In fact, I would argue that retirement is a redundant phrase. I don't think it really exists. Not for me, certainly. I don't see myself retiring. Retiring to what? To do what? I don't know.

avivah (13:45.328)
Sadly, I think there are massive issues of inequality in our approach to older age and the health and wealth with which we approach it. And so yes, for a bunch of privileged, mostly Westerners, we can expect a quality of life, and especially knowledge workers. Because knowledge workers, yeah, you get more knowledge.

Mike Lander (14:03.564)
Yeah.

avivah (14:09.546)
longer you go, so you tend to ripen and wisen rather usefully. People who've had backbreaking work in front of sales, on counters, physical labor or exhausting NHS nurses and things like that are going to need a very different kind of evolution.

Mike Lander (14:13.314)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (14:21.43)
physical labor. Yeah.

avivah (14:33.61)
in later life and maybe things we haven't really discussed much like universal basic incomes and the rise of AI and displacement of talent. So there's lots to design and I think yes, there will be an emerging class of lucky, educated, service workers who will work far beyond what we currently imagine.

Mike Lander (14:45.59)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (14:53.857)
Yep.

avivah (15:02.598)
partly because they chose to, and partly because they don't have the financial resources to be retired for 30 or more years, the way our parents, some of them, did.

Mike Lander (15:09.973)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (15:17.246)
Because life expectancy, I don't know, what does the data tell us now? I guess it changes dramatically by which part of the population you're in, whether you've been doing manual labor or not, which part of the world you're in. But as you say, the fortunate, you know, the fortunate

avivah (15:33.93)
Do you know what the biggest predictor of life expectancy is? The number one biggest variable? Postcode.

Mike Lander (15:36.675)
Go.

Mike Lander (15:41.516)
No.

avivah (15:44.11)
your postcode. So yeah, it's super unequal. And it can vary even in the UK by some 15 years from a good postcode to a bad postcode. So we've got lots of things like that to address. But the average life expectancies are going up across the world except for two countries. Can you guess what they are?

Mike Lander (15:44.29)
Well.

Wow.

Mike Lander (16:11.086)
Uhhhhhh

Mike Lander (16:14.442)
guess. China and... China and India, I'll guess.

avivah (16:24.415)
If only. It's the US and the UK, I'm afraid. We are not becoming healthier countries. We are becoming more divided, more unequal, and not very healthy. So I don't know if you look at some of the stats and reports going on in the UK, there are about half a million.

Mike Lander (16:28.757)
Is it?

Mike Lander (16:34.026)
Oh my god.

avivah (16:50.054)
older workers, let's call them Q3ers for our purposes, who haven't returned to work post-pandemic in part because of for health reasons and you know that they're not necessarily getting that kind of health care that they would need in order to preventively age well. So health spans are going to be a big issue. Preventive care is going to be a huge um

Mike Lander (16:53.9)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (16:59.489)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (17:10.891)
Yeah.

avivah (17:19.182)
business opportunity, everything about health, I think, will rise up the equation. And we will all need, at every level, I think that's what's interesting too, individuals, companies, and countries will all be kind of united in trying to keep all of us healthier, longer, because we can't afford the ill health that comes at the end.

Mike Lander (17:45.922)
Correct. And how does that play in terms of, you talked to the beginning about intergenerationality. So between the kind of Q2s and the Q3s, how are we gonna interact then? Because there's a danger that we just become more and more separated and divided.

Like communities, how do communities exist?

avivah (18:04.654)
Yeah, I mean, I think.

Well, I think a bit like gender balance, right? The world was designed for centuries by men, for men, around men. And then it took a lot of attention, leadership, and redesign to bring a bunch of women in. We're only halfway through that transformation. But I think it gives you a sense of the work ahead of the next probably generation of how do we...

adapt a world almost entirely designed for Q2. Everything's designed for Q2. Career systems, pension systems, marketing systems, language, wealth management, everything is designed for those years. And we just ignore basically anything over 50. And so now we need to almost expand and double our perspectives and views to...

Mike Lander (18:43.777)
Yeah.

avivah (19:05.886)
redesign all of these systems to integrate Q2 and Q3, who might be quite different in the same interesting and varied ways that men and women are quite different, don't necessarily need the same things at the same time and have slightly different, you know, life patterns and career patterns. And we've only semi-adjusted to the ladies moving in, right? And I think that's what we're seeing just...

begin to emerge in companies now is okay. So how do we keep our over 50s retained, engaged, learning, upskilling? Do they want to? Are they curious and able and tech enabled? All these kind of things. And how ageist is our environments? And how do we start skilling people up to become?

beyond ageism the same way that we had to skill them up to become beyond sexism. It's a long haul kind of plan.

Mike Lander (20:09.584)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (20:13.582)
This isn't an overnight solution, is it? For sure. How should or how could organisations engage with Q3ers? Given, as you said, that collectively we've accumulated lots of knowledge, we have a slightly different view of the world based on our experiences. So we bring something to the table, but is that of interest or value, do you think, to organisations?

avivah (20:41.562)
There was some very interesting work that just came out of the OECD that I had my own podcast on called The Midlife Career Opportunity. It was super interesting in revealing basically that no, employers don't actually care that much if you have five years' experience of something or 25 years' experience, which is a little daunting if you have 25 years' experience. There's a misalignment of perceptions. The Q3ers with 25 experience.

Mike Lander (21:05.643)
Yeah.

avivah (21:11.046)
think that is their most valuable thing, that they've been around and they're super knowledgeable and they've seen every possible dimension. The trouble is employers don't see it that way. What they value is something different. They value recent credentialing, upgrading skills and certification, and five years of anything is more than enough for them. And so there's a perception mismatch,

Mike Lander (21:18.027)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (21:24.45)
Hehehehe

Mike Lander (21:37.994)
Wow.

avivah (21:41.154)
The good news is if they actually hire or keep these Q3ers, they can measure that their performance is as good or better than the Q2ers. So there's all kinds of, but there's all kinds of stereotypes and ageism that's rife in hiring managers and in all managers. We live in an extraordinarily, still unconsciously ageist world.

Mike Lander (22:19.334)
there, Aviv. So note to the recorders it's at 22 minutes 22. Yeah, carry on.

avivah (22:21.366)
Sorry, we lived. We survived from the coldest.

I'll just repeat that last one. So we live in an unconsciously super-ageist world. We are in fact ageist against our future selves. We can't imagine how we will be in 20 or 30 years. And so it's very hard to design for it. But we are now consciously sexist generally. I mean, we know a sexist workplace if we see it.

And we're going to have to sort of get people more aware of this ageism dimension and then consciously build systems, and I think AI should be able to help, that evaluate performance a little bit better and finally learn how to measure output rather than input and what people look like.

Mike Lander (23:14.974)
Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's been and that that's in its own right has been a long time coming about focusing on the output rather than the activity. Is that's a big commercial problem in terms of how people buy services as well.

avivah (23:31.91)
It's not really human nature, is it? We just really are primed and designed to like people like ourselves. You just have to recognize that. And then I think AI has the potential. It's very much feared in diversity circles for how it embeds historical biases into future models. But because we're kind of attuned to this, if you program it in quite intentionally to make it.

much more neutral and fair, it should actually potentially save us from ourselves, and we'll see how they do.

Mike Lander (24:10.726)
Mmm. Oh, no, just like just talk about that bit more. What did that mean? Just unravel that a bit

avivah (24:14.506)
But a really good, a really easy illustration that anybody can check in 30 seconds is a lot of the work that Google did on Google Images. Google Images, I think like two years ago, if you looked up a nurse or an engineer, you would have gotten lots and lots of women nurses, mostly white, and lots and lots of male engineers, mostly white, Westerners. Now, they said that's it.

we're reprogramming all this, and suddenly you click on engineer or nurse, and you come up with a completely gender balanced and mixed nationality and race series of pictures. Okay, so that's on the gender front. Now we need to do this on the intergenerational front, because again, if you click on any kind of visual, the visuals you see of anybody with gray hair is usually on a cruise liner going off into the...

Mike Lander (24:53.582)
Oh.

Mike Lander (25:01.133)
Yeah, yeah.

Uh...

avivah (25:12.73)
into the horizon. Or they're walking very slowly with canes, right?

Mike Lander (25:13.162)
That's right, correct!

Mike Lander (25:19.726)
I can't think of anything worse myself, my word. Good grief, yeah.

avivah (25:22.962)
No, no, never, never. We're the never cruise variety. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's the power of technology that practically overnight, Google can push a button and have most of our imagery shift and then we can adapt, right?

Mike Lander (25:28.313)
Correct.

Mike Lander (25:32.374)
H-

Mike Lander (25:42.754)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (25:46.85)
So, wow, yes, of course, a lot of the images that you see of certain professions or of most things you type in are probably Q2s, and it needs adjusting to the square, not to the triangle.

avivah (26:00.726)
So the only advantage we have when we hit generational balance versus gender balance is the top of most organizations, the leaders currently in power in most organizations are in Q3 and are getting older by the day. So they're a little bit more, they're a little easier to sell on the idea that maybe this is a good time of life that can be extended and better used than they were on the gender front where basically they had to, some of them.

Mike Lander (26:15.561)
Yes.

Mike Lander (26:19.374)
Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

avivah (26:27.695)
leave the room and let themselves be replaced by women. This should be easier.

Mike Lander (26:28.319)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (26:32.914)
Exactly. I mean, on the what struck me, what struck a real chord with me, something you just said, was around organizations, the research that you saw from the OECD, the organizations, they're not valuing 25 years in selling experience, for example. What they really want is, if you've got kind of three to five years experience in selling, but you're upskilling

you're re-skilling, you're more in tune with AI, what it can do, how it can help. So what I'm reading into that is adaptability. If you're adaptable, if you're a lifelong learner and you have more flexibility, you're far more likely to be employable generationally than you are by saying, oh, I've had 20 years as a sales director. That's not gonna cut it.

avivah (27:10.835)
Yeah.

avivah (27:24.886)
This is the big individual shift that we need to operate is for the moment individuals don't really know how to transition from Q2 to Q3 in a way that responds to both the age's stereotypes that they're going to confront and the expectations of the work world, which are manageable once you know, oh, okay.

if I have to go back to school and certify and do a few things, that's not very hard. But it also means you don't wanna oversell to some Q2er who's probably 20 years your junior that you have 25 years experience and you know everything he's never even met. You wanna kind of manage your conversation to respect your respective strengths and have a much more.

Mike Lander (27:52.267)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (28:04.077)
Yep.

avivah (28:12.47)
kind of intergenerationally attuned conversation where you can showcase what you've learned. And yes, we will all have to combat stereotypes and ageism in every conversation, which means you have to show and prove everything you just said, learnability, curiosity, growth mindsets, but also tech skills, you know.

tech adoption, latest platforms, social media, branding, all this kind of stuff. We will probably want to be able to demonstrate that we're open to that kind of stuff. Because the image that people have of some Q3ers, not all, is we sit on our laurels, we're a little condescending, we think we know everything, and we're...

Mike Lander (28:38.317)
Yeah.

avivah (29:06.166)
blocking spaces for the next generation, which is sometimes true.

Mike Lander (29:06.324)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (29:12.662)
Viva. It's been genuinely fascinating. I knew it would be. I knew when we agreed to do the recording that it would be fascinating. And you've left, yeah, you left me with some quite big thoughts about how that transition works, because I'm firmly in Q3, as we discussed, and about how I engage with people in Q2. And that whole thing about, it's not necessarily that I've been in a

Mike Lander (29:42.166)
that's as relevant. It's do I know what the current environment, things like AI-based sales enablement, how that can influence or how I can think about current technology and changes and how that might influence the way that we do things going forward and how some of the old assumptions are no longer true. I've got this bigger thing about, we all carry assumptions with us.

And the problem is my assumptions might be Q2 and Q3 based, but not as relevant for where we are now in 2023. So some of those assumptions I have to leave behind.

avivah (30:10.784)
Yeah.

avivah (30:23.634)
And I like to think it's kind of a both and. I think we're partly right that our experience is extraordinarily valuable. I think the issue is it's not perceived by Q2ers and some employers to be valuable. So we have to add more into the mix. But once we do that...

I think the whole package becomes extremely valuable, that we have both the experience and the upscaling and updated everything and what we've been discussing. That makes for very potent packages, which is why I think when you end up actually measuring performance of Q3ers, they perform and outperform. Just because employers don't yet have the tools to appreciate the experience, that doesn't mean it's not.

Mike Lander (31:04.107)
Yes.

avivah (31:14.71)
perhaps almost as valuable as we think it is.

Mike Lander (31:19.874)
And on that note, I think we'll close. Aviva, it's been fantastic. Where can people find out more about you?

avivah (31:23.059)
Bye.

on my two websites, so one's avivawittenbergcox.com, that's easy, and the other is 20-first.com, which is the consulting business side of things. And I also run a podcast called Four Quarter Lives, and a program for individuals to transition from Q2 to Q3 called the Midlife Rethink. All are welcome.

Mike Lander (31:51.783)
Viva, it's been amazing. Thank you ever so much.

avivah (31:54.354)
My pleasure, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Lander (31:58.346)
Right, so I'm going to stop recording, just make sure that...