. Neiman Marcus is a 105-year-old company with employees who have decades of tenure. If you’ve been there for 10 years, you’re still considered a new employee, says Keith Meyerson (@KeithMeyerson), Director of Learning and Development for The Neiman Marcus Group Services. That tenured environment speaks well for retention, but turned out to be a roadblock when the company tried to adopt a new talent management solution. It included a learning management system, performance management, succession planning, and a social planning and learning collaboration tool. Since the shift was CEO-mandated, Meyerson thought they’d get C-Level support that effectively trickled down. Unfortunately, that was not the case. “[We] got a lot of resistance because many were adverse to technology and adverse to change,” Meyerson says. “It was less of an age issue and more of a tenure issue. The longer people were there, the less they were open to new technologies.” His team realized traditional implementation wasn’t going to work, so they inversed the strategy to become a bottom-up grassroots effort driven by younger employees. Since Millennials use social media in their everyday lives, it made sense for them to drive their implementation into the workplace. Neiman Marcus let Millenial word of mouth drive adoption, which really took off. In the video, Meyerson gives a good example of how buyers and sellers in their merchant division have been able to use these tools to converse and collaborate in a way that wasn’t previously possible.