Rachele Focardi

Rachele Focardi works on generational dynamics from outside the American frame, which is the reason to book her over a domestic generational speaker for an organization with people in more than one country.

Most generational research an audience has encountered was conducted in the United States and quietly assumes American career expectations, family structures and attitudes to authority. Applied to a workforce in Singapore, Jakarta or Milan it produces confident conclusions that are wrong, and the errors are hardest to spot in exactly the leadership teams that need them most.

Her book, Reframing Generational Stereotypes, was published by McGraw Hill and has since appeared in Italian and Chinese editions. Its argument is in the title: the generational categories in common use function mainly as permission to dismiss people, and the useful work begins once an organization stops asking what is wrong with a cohort and starts asking what each one has been trained by its circumstances to expect.

Italian by background, she spent twelve years in the United States before moving to Singapore in 2011, where she still lives. She spent fifteen years at Universum, latterly as chief strategy officer, opening the firm's Asia Pacific business and establishing its ASEAN operation, so the employer branding and talent strategy half of her material comes from having run it commercially. She founded XYZ@Work, chairs the Multigenerational Workforce Committee of the ASEAN Human Development Organization, and gave a TEDx talk arguing that generations are the solution rather than the problem.

She suits multinational organizations, regional leadership meetings and any employer whose talent strategy is written in one country and executed in several. She speaks in person and virtually, which is often the practical format for a business spread across time zones.