Tammy Erickson

Why organisations work with Tammy Erickson

• A trilogy of Harvard Business Review Press books on Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y built on primary research, not commentary, giving leaders a defensible base for talent and engagement decisions.
• A McKinsey Award-winning HBR article (“It’s Time to Retire Retirement”) that reframed how Fortune 500 employers think about late-career workers, still cited in CHRO conversations.
• Five appearances on the Thinkers50 ranking, evidence that her ideas have stayed relevant across more than a decade of workforce change.
• Operating credibility from board seats at PerkinElmer and Allergan, plus client work with General Electric, Bank of America and Novartis, so the workforce arguments land with senior commercial leaders, not just HR.
• Co-direction of London Business School’s “Leading Businesses into the Future” programme, which keeps her arguments calibrated to current senior-executive challenges rather than past research.

Biography highlights

• Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School; co-director of the “Leading Businesses into the Future” programme.
• Founder and CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, a workforce and engagement advisory firm.
• McKinsey Award winner, Harvard Business Review, for “It’s Time to Retire Retirement.”
• Author of the HBR Press generational trilogy: “Retire Retirement,” “Plugged In,” and “What’s Next, Gen X?”
• Co-author of “Workforce Crisis” (Harvard Business School Press) and “Third Generation R&D.”
• Former director of Fortune 500 corporations PerkinElmer and Allergan.
• Ranked on Thinkers50 five times, including 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017.

Biography

Most workforce strategies still treat the employee base as one undifferentiated group with a single set of motivations. That worked when one or two cohorts dominated the org chart. It does not work now, with Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z sharing teams and reporting lines, each carrying different assumptions about authority, loyalty and what work is for.

Erickson built her career on closing that gap. Her Harvard Business Review article “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” won the McKinsey Award and reframed how large employers thought about late-career talent. The argument was not nostalgic or motivational. It was an operating case for redesigning roles, hours and contracts to retain expertise that the demographics said would otherwise walk out.

The HBR Press trilogy that followed, “Retire Retirement,” “Plugged In” and “What’s Next, Gen X?,” gave leaders something most generational commentary lacks: a research base built cohort by cohort, with practical implications for engagement, team design and career architecture. Her companion book “Workforce Crisis,” with Ken Dychtwald and Bob Morison, set the broader demographic context. “Leading Across the Ages” was named a Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea of 2008.

That research sits on top of a working role at London Business School, where she co-directs “Leading Businesses into the Future,” and a track record of Fortune 500 board service at PerkinElmer and Allergan. The result is a voice on workforce questions that boards and executive teams take seriously, because it carries both the scholarship and the operating context.

Key speaking topics

• Multi-generational workforce strategy
• Employee engagement and the changing employer-employee contract
• Workforce planning and talent shortage
• Collaboration in complex organisations
• Innovation in the intelligent economy
• Twenty-first century organisational design
• Future of work and changing assumptions about careers

Ideal for

• CHROs and chief people officers redesigning engagement and retention strategy
• Boards and executive teams setting talent and workforce policy
• Heads of organisational development and learning leading multi-generational team programmes
• Leadership development faculty and HR conferences

Audience outcomes

• A clearer read of how each generational cohort actually behaves inside organisations, beyond the stereotypes
• Specific implications for talent retention, engagement and team design across cohorts
• A reframed view of late-career workers as a retention and capacity question, not a cost question
• An organising frame for redesigning roles, hours and contracts to fit a five-generation workforce
• Vocabulary senior leaders can use in board and executive conversations on workforce strategy