This HBR acticle about why a GenX CEO hired a millenial to continue his own learning, is fantastic. He states "If I don’t find ways to stay relevant to today’s 20-somethings, I will become a dinosaur in five years, probably less.".
I couldn't agree more, we need diversity in our businesses and networks to continually learn and gain insights into the changing market place.
We should all consider not just hiring those that we can learn from, but actively engaging them as mentors. Mentoring is not an older-to-younger experience, it's an expert-to-learner experience, and we should be open to context-specific mentors, and embrace diversity when doing so too. I won't get into the foundations of what makes for an effective mentoring relationship at this stage, however I will leave you with this thought ...
“Mentoring brings us together - across generation, class, and often race - in a manner that forces us to acknowledge our interdependence, to appreciate, in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words, that 'we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny.' In this way, mentoring enables us to participate in the essential but unfinished drama of reinventing community, while reaffirming that there is an important role for each of us in it." Marc Freedman
