Background

Rowland Hanley is the Founder of ROLE Advisory, an independent research and advisory firm focused on leadership and organizational effectiveness - as well as demographic economics, wealth dynamics, and their implications for financial markets and public policy. He possesses a rare perspective well-grounded in theory, data, and applied business contexts - including P&L accountability. His thirty-year career advising C-suite executives and boards includes senior advisory roles at IBM and Xerox/ACS — where he counseled Fortune 500 firms on human capital strategy and technology. He has held executive positions in Human Resources at IPG, Altria, Gartner, and MetLife. Earlier in his career, as a pre-doctoral researcher within IBM’s Global Employee Research group, he conducted the demographic work that planted the early seeds of the Boomer Asset Mirage framework.

He served as a Member and Chairman of his local School Board of Education in Connecticut from 2011 to 2018 and currently serves on the board of the Stamford Public Education Foundation. He holds an M.S. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Ohio University and pursued his doctoral training (ABD). In addition to teaching graduate statistics and research design, he conducted research on work teams and interactive, multi-media, computer-adaptive assessment and training. He is an Associate Member of the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science.

Rowland is a master builder of highly effective leaders and teams.  An incisive analytical change agent with proven impact at large-enterprise, mid-sized, publicly traded, PE-backed, and privately owned companies. A trusted partner to C-level leadership in achieving business objectives and financial results.

The Boomer Asset Mirage series represents his first work in demographic economics.

The Research

The Boomer Asset Mirage series has two origin points, twenty-five years apart. The first was IBM, 1999 to 2000, where Rowland became preoccupied with a question the workforce planning literature wasn't quite asking: what happens to the institutions and assets built around the Baby Boom generation when the generation itself begins to leave?

The question went dormant. It was revived through the second thread: seven years serving on his local School Board of Education. Sitting through budget hearings in a small Connecticut town — watching enrollment drift, the property tax base stagnate, and state aid formulas strain — he recognized the demographic logic underneath what looked like local problems. That pattern recognition reconnected the macro hypothesis from 1999.

In a real sense, the companion paper came first emotionally. The concern for what boomer demographic exit means for public schools and local government is what brought the broader macro argument back into focus — and generated the need for the theoretical architecture that explains it.

Approach

The Boomer Asset Mirage framework is the work of a practitioner who went looking for the structural explanation of something he watched happen, and found it. The papers draw on existing research from the Federal Reserve, Freddie Mac, NYU economist Edward Wolff, Wellington Asset Management, the Government Accountability Office, and others — synthesizing dynamics that the relevant disciplines have addressed only in fragments.

The framework is explicit about what it does and does not claim: the mechanisms are carefully argued and the supporting data is solid; the magnitude of the effects is unmodeled, and the papers call for the integrated empirical research that would quantify them.

CAREER

ROLE Advisory

Founder

Gartner · Xerox · IBM

C-suite client advisory roles

Altria · Metlife · IPG · Gartner

Executive positions in Human Resources

EDUCATION

Ohio University

M.S. (ABD), Industrial/Organizational Psychology

BOARD SERVICE

Stamford Public Education Foundation

Board Member (current)

Sherman School Board of Education, CT

Member/Chairman, 2012–2018

CURRENT RESEARCH

The Boomer Asset Mirage

A Cohort Asset Circularity Trap · SSRN, 2026

The Fiscal Fracture

Property Tax Erosion and Municipal Consequences · SSRN, 2026