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Chip Conley          

Strategic Advisor for Hospitality & Leadership at Airbnb; Founder of the Modern Elder Academy

Chip Conley joined the tiny tech start-up Airbnb nearly a decade ago after a successful career as a boutique hotel company founder and CEO. He was twice the age of the average Airbnb employee which earned him the title "Airbnb's Modern Elder" who was as curious as he was wise. As the internal mentor to the young Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Conley got to see the value of intergenerational collaboration in a company that has now grown to be the most valuable hospitality company in the world.

His bestselling book "Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder" is a testament to rethinking the value of having 5 generations in the workplace and why more companies are doing their best to encourage their older workers to stay in the workplace longer. Conley's Modern Elder Academy has more than 2,000 alums who've come to the Mexican beachfront campus and MEA will be opening two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico soon.

Speech Topics

DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION: Learning How to See and Surf a Disruption

Chip Conley has disrupted the hospitality industry twice, once as the founder and long-time CEO of Joie de Vivre Hotels (America's second largest boutique hotel company) and more recently in 2013 when he joined the three founders of Airbnb to help grow and lead the company to become the most valuable hospitality company in the world. Chip has identified his three rules of disruptive innovation in any industry and how start-ups as well as established companies can see the foreshadowing of a new wave on the horizon and surf that wave to competitive advantage.

Toward a Psychology of Business: Simple Truths for Creating a Culture of Happiness and Success

Chip believes the most neglected fact in business is that we're all human and that business schools don't do enough to help us understand that creating peak experiences for stakeholders can create peak performance for a company. The PEAK model can be used to understand how a company can relate to relationships beyond those with employees and customers: investors, vendors, the community, and, even with yourself. As a practitioner who has used his own company (with over 3,000 employees) as a laboratory for understanding the human condition, Chip's philosophical but prescriptive approach to leadership will be very illuminating.

PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow

Part memoir, part theory, and part application, Chip shares Joie de Vivre's remarkable transformation while providing real world examples from other companies and showing how attendees can bring about similar changes in their work and personal lives. He explains how to understand the motivations of employees, customers, bosses, and investors, and use that understanding to foster better relationships and build an enduring and profitable corporate culture.

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