Bridging divides between veteran executives and younger talent, emphasizing mutual respect to foster innovation without losing foundational principles. Join Ray Zinn, the longest serving CEO in Silicon Valley history for answers. (Watch Now On YouTube…)
Rob Artigo: This is a special edition of the Tough Things First Podcast, Ray. It is available on video. If listeners want to watch it, they can just go to toughthingsfirst.com and find the podcast. Just click the link for Watch Now, and you’ll be all set.
Ray, this is an interesting topic, kind of a minefield in modern times, because there’s a lot of talk about generational gap. When you’re running a business or running teams in tech or whatever the environment is, navigating the generational gaps in teams can be somewhat challenging. You, Ray, have worked with many college-aged kids who are searching for the next innovation or something they can wrap their entrepreneurial spirit around. Kids often wind up getting jobs, and they’re in teams. They can’t really get a business started. They will end up getting a job, and they’ll end up in a team, a creative team, something, a design team, whatever it may be, and then they are there with much older, experienced people.
Do you remember a time when you caught yourself thinking, man, these kids, they don’t get it, or they’re saying, “These old timers are holding us back,”?
Did it turn out to be an accurate assessment, or was this just something that you kind of thought was happening?
Ray Zinn: Well, I don’t know if I thought it was happening. I have 22 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren, so I have a lot of generational gaps, as you would, in my relationship with my family, but I bridge those gaps.
The whole concept is to bridge it. I have to be able to think like they think in order to communicate. If I try to get them to think like I think, it’s not going to work because I’m a lot older. The whole concept of working together is to understand who your audience is, and I think that’s a key in the team. If you’re an older person, maybe a generation or two older than the rest of your team, or maybe it is half and half, you can be the builder. You can be the bridge builder by understanding and adopting, to some degree, their understanding of the world because a generation is roughly 20 years.
If you’re in your 50s, as you would, and you drop back 40 years, those kids are just getting started. Things have changed, and they change rapidly, especially if you, as the older person, didn’t have the benefit of cell phone or at least the technology of cell phones and computers, and you’ve had to learn. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, which is somewhat true. It’s hard to get older people to adopt the up-and-coming technology. Number one, they’re lazy. We are lazy. We don’t want to have to learn that. We think, well, we’re almost ready to retire, so why should we have to learn all that? But if you want to be an effective leader of your team as an older person, you have to get up to speed. You can’t just say, “Well, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” because that puts a stumbling block or a roadblock in the relationship between you and your team.
Rob Artigo: Ray, just a quick story from me on my side is that I think it’s always been this way. It’s kind of more difficult now, but I think it’s always been this way. When I was a young reporter, my dad went to the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Vegas, and he came back with a little device called a MiniDisc recorder. And I bought a microphone for it, and I started using it. And you could edit on this device. You can edit the audio, and I could play off sound bites onto the phone with a speaker.
When I got hired at KGO, I’d been using this for a couple of years. I did it in Seattle at KIRO. And then I was in San Francisco with KGO, and I brought this device in. And the people who were there, who were roughly my same age, some a little bit older and had a lot more experience at KGO, they were still using tape decks. And they kept on using tape decks for years, even though I was using this device which was way easier to deal with, and they didn’t understand the concept I was trying to show them. But they didn’t understand the concept. That was a generational thing because I was an up-and-coming, new-generation kind of reporter, and they were great reporters, but they were still using old technology. And that happens, right?
Ray Zinn: Well, as I said, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. They don’t want to have to spend the time to learn how to do the new technology, especially if their older technology is doing the job for them. “Who moved the cheese?”, as they say. They’re not ready to go look for the cheese. They just want to stay with what they have.
We have to learn, as older people, to adopt new technology, new generation, or we’ll lose our team. Other words, we’ll be communicating on two different wavelengths. The focus has to be in developing a good working team is adopting the new technology or the new generation, as you would. I’m now doing AI material on my Tough Things First website and learning all about ChatGPT and some of the new AI technologies. And even at my advanced age, I’m digging in and trying to learn it and how to make it useful, functional in the things I’m doing with Tough Things First.
Even my books that I’m doing. And my teaching at the university. Staying abreast, staying up to date, no matter how old you are, is important if you’re going to bridge that generation gap. Otherwise, you’re just going to turn off those that you’re trying to lead.
Rob Artigo: For you, it’s not a matter of fear of missing out. It’s the idea that you want to stay up to date because, if you don’t keep moving forward, and that’s learning which you do regularly, then you fall behind. And when you fall behind enough, then you lose the plot, as they say. One last question.
I don’t know if there is a piece of hard-earned wisdom. But from the veteran side, have you noticed that there’s anything that the current younger generation is ignoring?
Ray Zinn: There’s that bridge between knowledge and experience. They have the knowledge, but they don’t have the experience. Just turning off the requirement for experience, I think, is a roadblock for the younger generation. They have to respect experience. And sometimes they say, “Well, you’re just not up to date. You’re living in the dark ages.” And they forget about how important experience is. Because the combination of knowledge and experience is what’s called wisdom. Older people do have more experience than the younger generation. That knowledge that they have, if it is based on keeping up to date with the technology, plus their experience gives them more wisdom than the younger generation has.
What the younger generation can do is help the older generation develop that discipline to learn the new technology. I know I said earlier you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can try. In other words, encourage them to stay up with the technology because, if they don’t, they’re not going to be able to bridge that gap between the younger generation and themselves. And technology doesn’t stay still. I mean, it’s rapidly changing. I never thought about the ChatGPT when I was in school 60-some years ago. I’ve had to adapt. I’ve had to learn. Here I am in my 80s, and I’m learning all about artificial intelligence.
Rob Artigo: It’s good to watch you doing it too. It’s fun. Lots of great ideas. And I want to thank the listeners for listening to the Tough Things First Podcast today. And also, if you did watch it on toughthingsfirst.com where you could watch the video, there is a link there at toughthingsfirst.com if you want to rewatch it. They can join the conversation at toughthingsfirst.com. If they have questions or comments, they’re welcome there. You can follow Ray on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and of course pick up Ray’s books. I really want people to follow this podcast, also rate it, so we can boost its profile. In the public eye, it’s a very popular podcast, but let’s make it more popular.
The books are Tough Things First, the original book, his flagship book, the Zen of Zinn series one, two, and three, and on sale now, The Essential Leader: 10 Skills, Attributes, and Fundamentals That Make Up the Essential Leader, and coming soon, the Zen of Zinn Daily. We’ll be launching it in March, soft launch in March, and it’s actually available at bookbaby.com right now for pre-orders if you want to get it. You can actually get a copy of it right now if you go to bookbaby.com, and they have their bookstore there.
Thank you very much for listening, and we’ll see you next time. Thanks, Ray.
Ray Zinn: Thanks, Rob.
