siyli ceo, rich fernandez hosted adam smiley poswolsky, millennial workplace expert and author of ‘the quarter-life breakthrough’, for a lively discussion on how to build a thriving organizational culture while working in multigenerational and remote environments. rich and smiley discuss the importance of psychological safety in teams, how to create supportive and innovative work-culture and the ways mindfulness and emotional intelligence can support businesses to thrive.
adam smiley poswolsky is a millennial workplace expert, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of the quarter-life breakthrough (penguin random house) and the breakthrough speaker. his third book, friendship in the age of loneliness, will be published by hachette in 2021.
smiley helps companies attract, retain, and empower millennial talent, and he has inspired thousands of professionals to be more engaged at work, through speaking at companies like google, apple, sap, facebook, genentech, unilever, salesforce, deloitte, and ted. an internationally renowned motivational speaker, smiley speaks about millennials, employee engagement, and intergenerational collaboration at fortune 500 companies, business conferences, leadership trainings, and universities.
smiley’s tedx talk has been viewed over 1.5 million times, and he has done hundreds of speaking engagements, reaching over 50,000 people in 20 countries. smiley has been a guest lecturer at stanford university’s graduate school of business and university of california berkeley’s haas school of business, and has advised heads of state and foreign leaders about retaining millennial talent and multigenerational engagement.
smiley’s work has been featured in the new yorker, the washington post, usa today, fast company, forbes, entrepreneur, cnn, cosmpolitan, and the world economic forum, among many other outlets. he is on the faculty at esalen institute and general assembly, a mentor for startingbloc institute for social innovation, and serves on the board of advisors at camp grounded.
in 2017, smiley launched the women speaker initiative, a community that aims to increase the number of women and people of color speaking at conferences and companies, as well as ensure that women and other underrepresented speakers are paid competitively as compared to their colleagues. the group now has over 4,000 members.
smiley is a proud graduate of wesleyan university, and can usually be found dancing in oakland, california.