Chip Conley
Workforces now span five generations, and most organisations still treat experience and age as a problem to manage rather than a capability to deploy. Older workers are pushed out at the moment their judgment is most useful, and younger leaders inherit responsibility without the wisdom infrastructure to support it. The cost is talent loss, weakened decision-making, and culture that does not know how to learn from itself.
Chip Conley is a hospitality entrepreneur turned author and Modern Elder Academy founder who helps organisations rebuild culture, leadership, and the value of experience across five generations at work.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Chip Conley
- He turned a single boutique hotel into a 50-property group as CEO of Joie de Vivre, then mentored Brian Chesky through Airbnb’s hospitality build-out. Few speakers can speak from inside both an independent operator and a category-defining platform.
- His Modern Elder thesis gives leadership teams a usable language for intergenerational collaboration at a moment when most companies are still treating age as a liability rather than a capability.
- He applied Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to corporate strategy in his book Peak and his 2010 TED talk, and the framework still reads as one of the more durable arguments for measuring culture, employee engagement, and customer experience as connected variables.
- The Modern Elder Academy he founded in 2018 is the only midlife wisdom school running at scale, with over 2,000 alumni and a second campus, which gives him real operating data on how mid-career professionals reset, retrain, and re-enter organisations.
- He is a New York Times bestselling author and three-time TED speaker, with books published across two decades that track the same throughline: human meaning as the underlying engine of commercial performance.
Biography highlights
- Founder and former CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which he built from a single property in 1987 into a portfolio of around 50 boutique hotels.
- Former Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, mentor to CEO Brian Chesky during the company’s expansion to hosts in 191 countries.
- Founder and Executive Chairman of Modern Elder Academy, with campuses in Baja California Sur and Santa Fe and more than 2,000 alumni.
- Three-time TED speaker, including “Measuring what makes life worthwhile” (2010) and his 2023 talk on the midlife chrysalis.
- New York Times bestselling author of Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder and Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, alongside Peak, Emotional Equations, The Rebel Rules, and Marketing That Matters.
- Stanford BA and MBA. Named Most Innovative CEO in the Bay Area by San Francisco Business Times and recipient of the hospitality industry’s 2012 Pioneer Award.
Biography
The conventional career arc treats age as a depreciation curve. Chip Conley has spent two decades arguing the opposite, and building the institutions to prove it.
He founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality in San Francisco in 1987, ran it for nearly 24 years, and grew it into one of California’s largest boutique hotel groups, around 50 properties at its peak. The book that came out of that period, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, applied Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to employee, customer, and investor relationships, and remains the most cited articulation of his commercial argument that human meaning is the engine, not the decoration, of business performance.
In 2013, Airbnb’s three founders asked him to become Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. He mentored Brian Chesky and helped translate a tech platform into a hospitality company operating with hosts in 191 countries. The label he picked up there, “modern elder”, became the seed of his next institution. The Modern Elder Academy, which he founded in 2018, has campuses in Baja California Sur and Santa Fe and has now run more than 2,000 mid-career professionals through structured programmes on transition, longevity, and the social contract between generations at work.
His more recent books, Wisdom@Work and Learning to Love Midlife, push that thesis into the corporate agenda directly: age as a category of workforce diversity, midlife as a strategic asset, and the intergenerational team as a more accurate model of how organisations actually learn. The argument is grounded in operating experience, not commentary, which is why boards and executive teams increasingly book him to challenge the assumptions inside their own talent strategy.
Key speaking topics
- The multigenerational workplace and the case for age as workforce diversity
- Modern Elder leadership and the redesign of mid-career
- Culture and employee engagement built on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- Disruptive innovation in hospitality and platform businesses
- Customer experience as a function of internal culture
- Emotional intelligence in leadership
- Midlife transition, longevity, and workforce retention
Ideal for
- CHROs and chief people officers redesigning talent strategy across five generations at work
- CEOs and boards facing attrition of senior expertise and weak intergenerational knowledge transfer
- Hospitality, travel, and consumer-facing leadership teams rebuilding culture as a commercial asset
- Executive development and leadership academy programmes focused on mid-career renewal and senior transition
Audience outcomes
- A clearer operating definition of intergenerational collaboration, with concrete language for treating age as a diversity and capability question
- A reframed view of mid-career and senior employees as a strategic asset rather than a cost line
- A working model, drawn from Peak and Maslow, for connecting employee meaning, customer experience, and financial performance
- Specific, named examples from Joie de Vivre, Airbnb, and Modern Elder Academy that translate into practical policy and culture changes
- A more honest conversation inside the leadership team about ageism, longevity, and what wisdom is actually worth in commercial terms
Talks
A working framework, drawn from his hands-on roles at Joie de Vivre and Airbnb, for recognising disruption inside an industry and responding without losing the operating fundamentals.
Key takeaways:
- How an established operator reads early disruption signals before they become competitive crises
- What the inside view of Airbnb’s hospitality build-out reveals about platform versus incumbent strategy
- A practical posture, beginner’s mind paired with operating experience, for leaders facing structural change
A talk built on his book and 2010 TED stage argument that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the most useful map of employee, customer, and investor relationships available to operating leaders.
Key takeaways:
- Why intangible drivers of meaning predict commercial outcomes more reliably than the tangibles most companies measure
- A framework for connecting employee engagement to customer experience to investor confidence
- Practical examples from Joie de Vivre on rebuilding a business through the dotcom downturn using this approach
The argument that age belongs in the diversity conversation, drawn from his role mentoring Brian Chesky at Airbnb and from Modern Elder Academy.
Key takeaways:
- Why pushing out experienced workers at midlife costs organisations more than they realise
- A model for two-way mentorship that values curiosity and wisdom together
- What boards and CHROs can do now to retain and redeploy senior talent
A culture and leadership talk built on Emotional Equations, applying simple emotional and cognitive frameworks to the work of building durable organisations.
Key takeaways:
- How leaders can use emotional equations as practical tools, not soft skills training
- The link between personal wellbeing and the durability of the organisations leaders run
- Patterns from his hospitality and Modern Elder Academy work that translate into management practice