Ken Dychtwald

Ken Dychtwald, PhD, is North America’s foremost visionary on the lifestyle, marketing, healthcare, and workforce implications of the aging population. As the founding president and CEO of Age Wave, he has spent over 35 years helping Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and organizations navigate the massive demographic shifts transforming our world.

The Nation’s Leading Authority on the Age Wave

Dychtwald has served as a fellow of the World Economic Forum and received the American Society on Aging Award for outstanding national leadership. American Demographics Magazine named him the single most influential marketer to baby boomers over the past quarter century. His Harvard Business Review article “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” won the prestigious McKinsey Award, tying for first place with Peter Drucker. He has authored numerous books including What Retirees Want and Radical Curiosity: One Man’s Search for Cosmic Magic and a Purposeful Life.

Transforming How We Think About Aging and Longevity

Through Age Wave, which he founded in 1986, Dychtwald has guided organizations across healthcare, financial services, travel, automotive, and retail sectors in developing products and services for the boomer and mature adult markets. His presentations explore how increasing longevity, declining fertility, and aging boomers are creating both groundbreaking marketplace opportunities and compelling social challenges. Dychtwald dedicates his work to battling ageist stereotypes while promoting a vital, purposeful role for life’s second half, offering audiences a big-picture view of the demographic forces reshaping business and society.

How the Age Wave Will Transform the Marketplace, the Workplace & Our Lives

Increasing longevity, declining fertility, and aging baby boomers are triggering an enormous “age wave.” This demographic tsunami has the potential to create groundbreaking marketplace and work/talent opportunities—and equally compelling social and financial challenges.

This informative, motivating, and entertaining presentation will explore: How will people use their newfound “longevity bonus”? Why will the “cyclic” lifeplan replace the traditional “linear” model? How will aging boomers change established paradigms of work, leisure, learning, and retirement—as well as lifetime brand loyalty? What’s the most effective way to market and sell to “middlescent” boomers wishing to enrich the quality of their lives, while forestalling aging? Why is managing a four-generation workforce the new diversity mandate?

(Note: This presentation can be shaped to focus either on the US, North American or global Age Wave.)

Re-Visioning Retirement: New Timing, New Purpose, New Planning, New Funding

Everyone’s retirement clock has been reset as a result of the recession. But highly acclaimed Age Wave research reveals a surprising finding: This could be a good thing, for individuals, the consumer marketplace and financial planning professionals.

This presentation will explore: Why financial “peace of mind” has become far more important than “wealth” in the new American dream. How women’s rising financial power is transforming their attitudes and behavior toward money, their family dynamics, and the field of retirement planning.

How the adult lifestage demands of eldercare, sibling care, grandparenthood, singlehood, and rehirement will dramatically impact retirement preparation and funding. We’ll also discuss the products, services, and guidance people now seek from financial professionals to safeguard a successful retirement while avoiding the five retirement “wildcards” that could shatter their dreams.

The Cure for Our Aging Healthcare System

Whether we live long lives with vitality and purpose or sickness and suffering will depend to a great extent on our ability to reshape the skills, services, and incentives of our current healthcare system. This new presentation provides a visionary glimpse into the future, outlining the critical course corrections required to create healthy aging and productive longevity.

Topics to be covered include: Why we must accelerate the scientific breakthroughs needed to prevent, delay, and eliminate the horrific diseases of aging (such as Alzheimer’s); why training healthcare professionals to become “aging-ready” will both saves lives and money; how the boomers’ proclivity toward control, self care, and connectivity can help make disease prevention and self care a national priority; how new technologies and emerging community-based services can enable us to shift the healthcare focus from hospitals and nursing facilities to home-based care; why establishing a humane and dignified approach to end-of-life care has reached a critical tipping point.

A New Agenda for 21st-Century Aging: Seven Critical Course Corrections Needed for a Century of Successful Aging

Will the aging of America prove to be a triumph or a tragedy? Based on 35-plus years at the crossroads of demography, gerontology, healthcare, and business, Ken Dychtwald provides a big-picture presentation designed to inform, startle, provoke, and motivate us toward the seven critical course corrections needed for a century of successful aging.

Questions to be asked—and answered: Is the longevity revolution over—or is it just beginning? Can our country afford to have tens of millions of us living to 80, 90, or even past 100? Are older adults an asset or a liability? How will boomers age differently than their parents? When does old age begin—and should old-age benefits be indexed to advancing longevity? How must our current healthcare system change to manage the onslaught of boomers and their chronic degenerative diseases? Is retirement obsolete? What should be the new purpose of maturity? Are we becoming a political gerontocracy? Are our leaders capable of distributing limited government resources fairly among many generations, each with its own distinct needs, styles, fears, expectations, and political priorities?

Optimizing Generational Diversity: Four Cohorts Rethink Work, Money, Family, Retirement & Success

For the first time in history, four generations of active adults are simultaneously participating in the workforce and marketplace. Each has its own lifestyle values, attitudes about work and money, means of connecting and communicating, role models, and marketplace preferences.

This high-impact presentation will examine: What key social forces have shaped each generation and produced their distinct, core lifetime characteristics? What does each generation hope to get from—and give to—their jobs/careers? How do you manage and motivate each generation, from “encore” workers seeking stimulation and self-worth, to older workers looking for balance and purpose, to mid-career workers trying to reboot their enthusiasm for a longer and more demanding worklife, to young workers struggling to enter the workforce during tough economic times. How does each measure success?

This presentation can focus on how to attract and retain valuable talent and enhance productivity through the creative use of flexible work arrangements, innovative learning, mentoring and sponsoring opportunities, sabbaticals, retraining, re-careering, flex-retirement, and creative compensation and benefits programs. Alternatively, it can orient toward the most effective ways to reach out to—and connect with—Millennials, Gen Xers, Boomers, and members of the Silent Generation.