Everyone wants long term success. But it is elusive for most.

Long term success is dependent on knowing where you are now and where you are headed. Then closing the gap. Frequently. Continuously.  Whether it’s your business, your career or your life at home., it’s easy to get off track, lose touch or get buried under. Without a true sense of where you are in the moment, it is impossible to realize your dreams or be a leader in your field.

Re-calibrate your profound knowledge

The only way we can take 100% responsibility for sustaining our success is to keep re-calibrating-in every aspect of our lives and organizations.

Key to successful recalibration is to acquire what my dear departed mentor, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, coined as Profound Knowledge. This umbrella phrase emphasizes understanding change and how to measure it, being aware of emerging trends and shifts, and learning how to apply this knowledge to leading and sustaining long term success.

Bottom line: If we don’t acquire Profound Knowledge we cannot know how to prepare for and leverage coming change, thus how to sustain our success long term.

Understanding change means understanding shifts in our personal world as well as tracking trends that capsize us, overtake us, or cause us to flounder.

Learning the Hard Way

Unfortunately one of my Gen X male clients learned this the hard way. A rising star in his field and recently married, he was planning far a great future for his kids, tons of time for fun and all the trappings of success. As if out of the blue, the rug got pulled out from under him. His “Happy Homemaker” wife fled, saying I’m out of here!

Somewhere along the way there was a breakdown or perhaps many small fissures below the surface. Had they been recalibrating an checking in with each other, communicating the truth of what was so for each of them…perhaps they could have saved their marriage…or at least ended it with love, grace, and forgiveness.

Even in the most secure relationships, unexpected change happens to ruffle our plans. A recently returned to work mother of teenage kids reported that her new career is now going gangbusters and she no longer worries about the empty-nest . But, the new ripple in her life is that her once very successful husband, in his late 40’s, now faces an unknown future. Surprised by the shifts in his industry, “suddenly” he and his business partner are facing the probability of closing their doors. What once appeared to be the sure path to their dreams, is no crumbling beneath them.

Change is inevitable. If you can learn what Profound Knowledge is and apply it you can avoid these same pitfalls and NOT LEARN THE HARD WAY!

What steps are you going to take to future cast your long term success?

Perhaps we should drop the label “senior” or redefine it. Clearly this term has helped to embed ageist stereotypes into our societal psyche. It used to be, as David Wolfe, author of the pioneering books Serving the Ageless Market (1990) and Ageless Marketing (2003), wrote,

“Senior is not an inherently negative term…Being a senior used to connote a superior standing in every context but aging.”

Sure, many don’t mind enjoying the “senior” discounts. And for those who do retire—fully or partially—the advantages of having more free time, fewer demands, and less stress overall are additional perks.

But of course we don’t have to wait until we retire to create this kind of lifestyle. We don’t have to retire at all.

In fact, many characteristics of the stereotypical senior citizen don’t really have much to do with age at all. Or at least they don’t have to be related to age, even if we as a society have somewhat arbitrarily decided they

One of the most important tasks we have together, all generations, is to change the story we tell one another and ourselves about aging.

These characteristics can include retirement, volunteer work, adapting our lifestyle to physical changes, having more control over our time and environment. All of these are choices we might make at any age.

So if we strip away other people’s definitions of what it means to age, what it means to be over 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100…where does that leave us? How do we define ourselves as protagonists in our own aging story?

We all have different comfort levels with various terms. Some shy away from “elderly” but don’t mind being seen as an “Elder.” Some don’t mind being called “older” but feel uncomfortable being called simply “old.” Yet another person might get fed up with euphemisms and actually demand to be called “old,” dammit!

I’ve always relished the term “Crone,” the idea of taking back its original meaning of wise old woman. Some, including those who have chosen not to have children, prefer to be seen as grandmother. In ancient times, the Crone was valued and revered as a wise and prophetic goddess in her own right. Traced back to pre-history, societies that are thought to have been the first “partnerships” between women and men lasted for about 20,000 years. Then as Riane Eisler describes in her underground classic, The Chalice and the Blade (1988), these early societies “veered off on ‘a bloody 5,000-year detour’ of male domination.” Along with these partnership societies, the Crone and all images of the positive feminine were devalued, leaving only the Divine Feminine (e.g., Mother Mary) as the preferred universal Mother image to survive intact into our modern day.

Fortunately, today’s twenty-first century women are resuscitating the whole panoply of feminine archetypal goddesses, like those we have buried way below our consciousness carrying the powerful energy of the Black Madonna, the flip side of Mother Mary (e.g., Mary Magdalene, Sophia, Kali Ma, Kuan Yin, and more), so that we can reclaim our fullness by embodying the whole range of our womanhood.

I’ll tell you a secret. Every time I write—for my blog, for a workshop or keynote, for a book or article—I have to stop yet again and consider this issue: What do we call ourselves? Elders? Do I avoid the word “old” or use it unabashedly? Do I refer to us as aging or stick to euphemisms or numbers, like post-50? Maybe the over-sixties? But what about including 40-plus? Boomers…and older? Matures? How do we distinguish between the early and late Boomers, who are as different as the Brat Pack is from the Beatles? At what point do generational labels lose their usefulness?

Amazon #1 Best Seller Author of 11 books including The Ageless Way, Gray is the New Green, Visionaries Have Wrinkles, The Greatness Challenge and more.

However, from the vibrating heart of our dissipating structures comes the promise of our true greatness: a greatness of awareness and action that will change the world. From the midst of the evolving Great Transition, we leave the Great Recession and the uplifting Obama era behind us as we enter an unknown, unchartered new cycle of populism and extreme radicalism ripping our valued democratic tenets to shreds and putting each of us on the line.  This Great Shift demands that we each unlock our potential for greatness which lives in each of us, and we are being called to make a difference. That is the premise of The Greatness Challenge, in which I offer a template for embracing and embodying our unique Signature Greatness DNA^SM to unleash our personal and collective greatness.

The Greatness Challenge is a manifesto for the growing wave of us who want to add value in all we do and who are being called to personal and collective evolution—from dentists to doctors, executives to engineers, artists to teachers and visionary leaders and futurists who are looking to redesign their lives so that every moment counts . . . for those of you who seek work that not only fills your bank accounts but your “values” bank as you yearn to do well doing good . . . for leaders who seek a pathway to visionary leadership, so the impact you have is of the greatest benefit for all.

To be one of the first to hear about The Greatness Challenge when it releases join us in the Secret Facebook Group here.

With more people living longer, active lives, we are at a historical crossroads in which the demographics of business environments are shifting. It’s time to drop the narrative that persists about Boomers vs. Millennials battling over jobs, being on different planes or coming from opposing perspectives. It’s time to undergo the complex transformations necessary to modify our connections, attitudes, and work environments to create, as in our best relationships, “great chemistry.”

No transformation is inevitable, however. It is up to all of us, together, to shape the changing workplace for a future which will benefit workers of all ages (hence society as a whole), one, as I discuss in my soon-to-be-published book, The Ageless Way, that is focused on the Triple Bottom Line of people, planet, and profits.

I see signs of this trend toward intergenerational cooperation developing, such as in the egalitarian digital future laid out in Dan Abelow’s book Imagine a New Future: Creating Greatness for All. Despite such progress, however, we need to keep moving forward with unity of intent and purpose, since life and society “can change on a dime.”

I believe multigenerational age-friendly trends are worth developing and will result when we all work together based on common interests and visions for the future. A future that has a place for all of us is one with more genuine connections and fewer artificial barriers, such as those based on age, gender, race, and class stereotypes.

For starters, we can:

~ engage in collaborative multigenerational conversations, hands-on discussions about best practices, (mis)perceptions, inclusive decision-making that supports all ages;

~ explore alternative scenarios and solutions together based on the probable and preferred future, not the past;

~ look at intergenerational partnerships, such as job sharing/mentorship arrangements (which enable two people to be employed instead of one, combine training costs and salary, stretch a company’s dollar and quicken the pace at which younger employees can gain the skills, knowledge, and some experience they need to be more valuable to that company and the marketplace);

~ cultivate environments in which diversity and work-life balance are key (Whether we want that balance because we’re starting a family or because we want time to visit our established families, the outcome is logistically the same. Work locations and hours must be increasingly flexible for everyone, without penalty);

~ encourage people over 60 (and in fact those 40+) to remain employed by starting their own businesses – as encore entrepreneurs (These could be less complex solopreneur home offices or larger operations that would not only remove the competition for the same job between two generations, but would also generate employment, services, and products relevant for healthful, fulfilling lives).

The world in which we are living and working longer demands a new business model to serve consumers, our culture, and our workplace environments. By working together, we can solve, or at least ameliorate, multiple societal problems simultaneously through the specific social missions of companies serving multiple generations. No doubt the formation of more startups focusing on the Triple Bottom Line will have a significant positive effect on the job market, offering a way for all generations to make a living and a difference, and to secure their future and that of the world for generations to come.

Again, it’s the chemistry that matters. Together, we are stronger and can share our skills, knowledge, and creativity to discover more than “just” a new molecule. We can discover — we can create — new worlds. Together, we can engage in interactions that generate reactions which change the story around aging so that we model the new Ageless Way across generations.

In what ways is your company, or another business you are familiar with, already mastering the art of intergenerational collaboration? How are you doing this in your own life?

(Image credit: test-tubes-color-fluid.jpg by r.nial.bradshaw, Flickr.com)