With over 25 years of experience in the media industry at companies, such as Condé Nast, Lionsgate, CBS, Viacom, Discovery and Hasbro, Joanna Dodd Massey, Ph.D., MBA is an experienced C-level communications executive and Board Director. She has managed brand reputation, corporate turnaround, crisis communications, culture transformation, and multi-million-dollar P&Ls. Currently, she serves as a consultant, who advises clients on communicating with Millennial and Gen Z employees, consumers, and investors. She is a corporate speaker and trainer, as well as the author of the book, “Culture Shock: Surviving Five Generations in One Workplace.” As a Board Director, Dr. Massey is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) and currently serves on the Advisory Board of 8B Education Investments, a financial startup. Formerly, she served on the Board of Directors of The Resolution Project as a member of the Audit Committee, the University of Southern California New York Alumni Club as a member of the Executive Board, and Colors LGBTQ Youth Counseling Services. Dr. Massey is also an angel investor who advises female entrepreneurs on all stages of seed funding, including investor decks and go-to-market messaging. She previously served as a Managing Director at Golden Seeds, an early-stage female-led investment firm with more than $125 million in total investments in over 170 female run businesses, and she is a member of the Angel Capital Association. In addition, Dr. Massey is an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where she teaches a masters-level course in corporate communications. She holds four graduate degrees in both business and psychology, and she is a member of the American Psychological Association.
Her book is called Culture Shock: Surviving Five Generations in One Workplace.
“But I need me time!” When faced with a young employee looking at her disappointedly after being told she would have to work over a holiday, author Dr. Joanna Dodd Massey did what many Gen X managers do. She thought to herself, “You need what?! I’ve worked through every vacation I ever took!” But, instead of reacting, she paused and found a compromise that would serve both the company and her employee, whom they depended upon to produce good results.
“I need me time” is a much-maligned phrase introduced to corporate America by Millennials. It has made many Generation X, Baby Boomer and Silent Generation bosses roll their eyes in frustration. Older generations were raised in a working world where you paid your dues and climbed the corporate ladder rung-by-rung. But it does not work that way anymore, because Millennials and Gen Z do not need corporate America in the same way that older generations did when they launched their careers.
Love it or hate it, Americans are experiencing a culture revolution unlike anything we have seen since the hippie counterculture movement in the 1960s and 70s. Today’s young adults, comprising Millennials (born 1981-1996) and Gen Z (born 1997-2010), are dramatically changing the way we live and work. These two generations are nearly half of the U.S. population with $1.6 trillion in spending power and growing, so it is not surprising that they are affecting massive change.
Dr. Massey, a C-level communications executive with a Ph.D. in Psychology and an MBA, is a generational expert who has spent more than 25 years promoting to and working with 18-to-34-year-olds. In “Culture Shock: Surviving Five Generations in One Workplace,” Dr. Massey deploys her humorous and candid writing style as she breaks the news to her cantankerous Gen X, Baby Boomer and Silent Generation colleagues that resistance is futile and they need to change now or risk becoming irrelevant in the not-so-distant future.
Dr. Massey’s book does a deep dive into the five generations in the workforce, examining how they behave and why (hint: it has to do with the era in which they were raised). She explains why human beings resist change—we are hardwired for it—and she provides solutions for individuals and companies to help them embrace the shifts that are happening. As Dr. Massey warns, this virtual army of young adults is not going to adapt to us, we need to adapt to them.
No other book the market today looks at the collective impact that these two generations are having on American business and what managers and their organizations need to do to avoid becoming extinct.
