Dan Pontefract

And yet many of our organizations are still operating with assumptions about work, careers, and retirement that were built for a very different world.

My guest today is Dan Pontefract, and he calls the consequences of that mismatch age debt.

His latest book, The Future of Work is Gray, is one of the most thoughtful explorations I've seen on what an aging workforce actually means for organizations and its leaders.

In today's episode, we're going to explore what happens when decades of experience walk out the door without ever being transferred, why the traditional career ladder no longer fits your career, and how organizations can turn demographic change from a liability into what Dan calls an experience dividend.

And we had such wonderful people who had come that had built these amazing organizations and then came to teach us how to do things.

And Don and I became friends and he invited me and my business partners to his office, home office, which was gigantic, by the way, and really just helped us think about strategy, think about all the things that we needed to do in terms of growing the business leadership and all of that.

So I had kind of the reverse relationship where I was being helped through mentorship while I was building a mentorship program at Wired Women.

So that was my first kind of taste of what mentorship was all about.

I still run into people randomly and check in.

So it's built the most incredible relationships with these people.

that i wouldn't have known and some of them now i'm close friends like my wife and our close friends our kids are close friends but it all started because of this silly happy dance club i came up with 16 years ago and now some of these people are close friends as a result of that experience so i'm a big fan of as early as possible of forming If it's purposeful, it can be.

If it's just more like life success, like I wish I would have known about this concept probably in university because I went to UBC Commerce and I went to school with some unbelievably phenomenal people that are- Those

I love sharing such interesting stories each and every week.

And this week is no different with my guest, Dan Pontefract.

He's the founder of Pontefract Group and the author of The Future of Work Is Gray, and several other books.

He's based out of Victoria, British Columbia, and now he's with me here today.

I mean, yeah, there it is.

I mean, that's it.

So I feel like though, since I rudely peppered you with questions at the beginning, then it's only fair that I turn the tables and make this the, uh, Dan Pontefract Podcast.

Do, do, do, do, do, do.

We have a great guest.

His name is Dan Pontefract, and he is a renowned leadership strategist, keynote speaker, and he's a bestselling author with over two decades of senior executive experience with major companies like SAP and Telus.

And he has a new book out.

It's his sixth book.

So I put together a, this is how old I am, a VHS tape.

That is a five-minute introduction to Dan Pontefract, to the Dean of Computing and Academic Studies at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, at BCIT.

And he gets this VHS tape that basically

says...

But then flip that around a bit.

If you're doing something playful in the office, that's where the memories kind of get made and where people form, friendships get formed and connections get formed.

And those are super powerful for the business, the results of the business.

But, and I mean, I kind of see this, there's like this, there are a couple of different sides to this, the play side for our personal benefit, for the individual benefit.

And like, I still, even people who, you know, they don't work with us anymore, but I still, they still keep in touch with people who are still working with us because they became friends.

And I, I just love that.

Like, it feels good that, and I know they care about jam deeply because jam has been a place where friendships were encouraged and

I have a good friend, Dan Pontefract, who's a leadership author.