>> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in San Francisco at the Professional Business Women of California Conference, the 28th year, I think Hillary must be in the neighborhood because everyone is streaming up to the keynote rooms. It's getting towards the end of the day. But we're excited to have Adam Smiley on. He's the author of The Quarter-Life Breakthrough. Welcome Adam. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So you gave a talk a little bit earlier on, I assume the theme of kind of your general thing. Would you just, Quarter-Life Breakthrough, what is Quarter-Life Breakthrough? >> So this is a book about how to empower the next generation. How young people can find meaning in their careers and their lives. So the subtitle of the book is Invent Your Own Path, Find Meaningful Work, and Build a Life That Matters. So everyone talks about millennials, you hear them in the news, "Oh they're the lazy generation," >> Right, right. >> "The entitled generation." The Me, Me, Me generation. I actually think that couldn't be further from the truth. So the truth is that actually 50% of millennials would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values. 90% want to use their skills for good. So my book is a guide for people to find purpose in their careers and really help them find meaning at the workplace and help companies empower that generation at work. >> So from being the older guy, so then is it really incumbent, you know, because before people didn't work for good, they worked for paycheck, right. They went, they punched in, they got paid, they went home. So is it really incumbent then on the employers now to find purposeful work? And how much of it has to be purposeful? I mean, unfortunately, there's always some of that, that grimy stuff that you just have to do. So what's the balance? >> Yeah and it's not to say that millennials don't want a paycheck, everyone wants money. I obviously want to make more money than less money. But it's also that this generation is really looking for meaning in the workplace. And one of the main things, if you look at all the studies, whether it's the Deloitte Millennial Study or the IBM Study, this is a generation that wants to move the needle forward on social issues at work. Not just after work or on the weekends, but at the workplace. And I think it's incumbent upon companies to really think about how they're providing those opportunities for purpose. Both in the mission of the company, what someone's doing every day, and opportunities outside of work, whether it's service projects, paid sabbaticals for people to do purpose-driven projects, really thinking about how someone is inspired to do mission during work every day. >> Right, it's interesting, Bev Crair at the keynote talked about, the question I think was, do you have to separate, kind of your personal views from your professional views and your social life? And she made a very powerful statement, she's like, "I'm comfortable enough with my employer that I can say what I feel and if there's ever a question they can ask me about it. But I don't gait what I say based on my employer as long as I'm being honest and truthful." So you know it's an interesting twist on an old theme. Where before you kind of had your separate worlds. You know, you had your work life and your home life, but now between email and text and social media, there is no kind of they're there for work and it's really invaded into the personal. So is that why the personal has to kind of invade back into the work? >> And when it comes to millennials, one word that always comes up is authenticity. People do not want to separate who they are at home from who they are at work. They want to be their whole person. Now obviously there's a line you don't cross. I'm not going to tell someone exactly what I think of them or tell the boss to go screw themselves or insult somebody or put on social media something that's secret that we're doing at the company. But I think that people want to feel that they get to show up who they are, have their beliefs echoed at the workplace, be able to be their full self, their full values, their mission, their goals, have that reflected in what they do, and have people at the company actually acknowledge that. You're not just an employee, I actually know what's going on in your life. I know what your dreams are, I know what your family's going through. I care about where you're headed, not just today or while you work here, but when you leave the company. Because that's the other thing, is that we're accepting that most of the people entering the workforce now or starting a new job, they're going to be there on average two to three years, maybe four, five, or six years. They're not going to be there ten, fifteen, twenty years like they used to be. So how do you actually empower someone to make an impact while they're there. And help them find the next lily pad, as they call it. The next opportunity. Because they're going to have a lot of those lily pads as they go throughout their career. >> It's interesting. We interviewed a gal named Marcia Conrad at an IBM event many years ago. She just made a really funny observation, she's like, "You know, people come in and you interview them and they're these really cool people and that's why you hire them, because they've got all these personality traits and habits and hobbies and things that they do, and energy." And then they come into the company, and then the old-school, you drop the employee, you know manual on top of them, basically saying stop being you. Stop being the person that we just hired. So that's completely flipped up on its head. >> Right, one of the things I talked about in the session today was this idea of stay interviews versus exit interviews. Normally when we do performance managements, kind of like, okay, you're leaving, what did you think? Why are you doing that when someone leaves? Do it to be like, what would make you stay? What do you want to accomplish while you're here? And you're not being graded against what everyone else is being graded on, what do you want to be graded on? What are your goals? What are your metrics for success? Performance achievement versus just performance measurement. I think is very important for this generation, because otherwise it's like, well why am I being judged on the standards that were written in 1986? This is what I'm trying to do here. >> It's interesting, even Jeff Immelt at GE, they've thrown out the annual review because it's a silly thing. You kind of collect your data two weeks before and the other fifty weeks everybody is just working. I have another hypothesis I want to run by you though. On this kind of purpose-driven. Today so many more things are as a service, transportation as a service, you know there seems to be less emphasis on things and more emphasis on experiences. It also feels like it's easier to see your impact whether it's writing a line of code, or doing something in social media. And you know there was an interesting campaign, Casey Neistat did, participated a couple weeks ago, right. They raised $2 million and basically got Turkish Airlines to fly in a couple hundred thousand metric tons of food to Somalia. And my question is, is it just because you can do those things so much easier and see an impact? Is that why, kind of this, increased purposefulness, I'm struggling on the word. >> I think the tools are certainly more available for people to take action. I think the connection is there. People are seeing what's going on in the world in a way that they've never been exposed to before with social media, with communication technology. It's up front and center. I think also that as technology takes over our lives, you see this with kind of statistics around depression and anxiety, people are starved for that in-person connection. They're starved for that meaning, that actual conversation. We're always doing this, but really a lot of data shows that people experience true joy, true fulfillment, true connection, true experience is what you're talking about, when they're in a room with someone. So people want that. So it's kind of a return back to that purpose-driven life, that purpose-driven tribe, village experience because the rest of the time we're on our phones. And yeah, it's cool, but something's missing. So people are starting to go back to work and be like, "I want that inspiration" that other generations may have gotten from church or from outside of work, or from their community, or from their village, or from the elders, or from a youth group or something. They're like, "I want that in the workplace. I want that everyday." >> Well so this is more top-down right? I mean I just think again, kind of the classic, back in the day, you were kind of compelled to give x percentage of your pay to United Way or whatever. And that was like this big aggregation mechanism that would roll up the money and distribute it to God-knows-where. Completely different model than, and you can see, because of social media and ubiquitous cell phones all over the place, you can actually see who that kid is, that's getting your thing on the other side. >> And it's empowering someone to say, "Okay this is what's important to me. These are the causes that I'd like to support. This is where I want my money to go and here's why." >> So what do you think's the biggest misunderstanding of millennials from old people like me or even older hopefully? >> Well one thing that I do think that millennials don't get right is the importance of patience. I think a lot of times people say, you know, "oh millennials, they want things to happen too quickly." I think that that's true. I think that my generation, I'm going to be the first to admit and say that we need to do a better job of being patient, being persistent. You can't expect things to happen overnight. You can't expect to start a job and in two months get promoted or to feel like you're with the Board of Directors. Things take time. At the same time, it's incumbent upon older generations to listen to these young people, to make them feel like they have a voice, to make them feel like they're heard and that their ideas matter, even if they don't have the final say, to make them feel like they actually matter. Because I think sometimes people assume that they don't know anything. They don't know everything, but they have some really brilliant ideas and if you listen to those ideas they might actually be really good for the company both in terms of profit and purpose. So that's one thing I would say. >> Okay, just, so first time with this show, just get your impressions of the show. >> Oh it's great. This is a great show. You all are doing a great job, a great interview. >> No not our show. The PBWC, I mean of course we're doing a good job, we have you on. I mean the PBWC. >> It's a great, you know for me, it's real exciting to be at the end of an event where I'm one of the only male speakers. Because usually, I've been doing the speaking circuit thing now for a year or two. And I go to these events, I go to panels, I go to conferences, keynotes, and it's mostly male speakers, which is a huge problem. There's far far far fewer women and people of color speaking at these events than men. And one of the things I'm really trying to change is that but also pay equity around speaking, because I talked to some of my female colleagues about what they were paid for a specific event, and they'll say, "Well they covered my transportation, they covered my lift and a salad, or my hotel maybe." I'm like, well I got paid $5000. That's messed up. We did the same amount of work. We did the same panel or doing the same keynote, similar experience levels. That's messed up. And so I'm trying to change that by doing this thing called the Women Speaker Initiative. Which is a mentorship program to empower more women and people of color to be speakers and then to make sure that they're paid fairly when compared to men. >> So how do people get involved with that? >> They should just got to my website, smileyposwolsky.com and check out Women Speaker Initiative. >> Alright, well Adam, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Great great topic and I'm sure, look forward to catching up again later. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Alright. He's Adam, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. We're at the Professional Business Women of California conference, twenty eighth year. Thanks for watching.