Youth and Leadership
Modern leaders lack exposure to genuine responsibility before declining brain plasticity begins to limit adaptive ability.
Young people have a greater appetite for risk, so it should be no surprise that many highly accomplished individuals started young. Napoleon was just 30 when he became the leader of France. The empire of Alexander the Great stretched from modern-day Greece to India by the same age. Of the world’s largest companies, most were founded by individuals in their 20s. Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple (Wozniak was 26). Gates was 20 with Microsoft. Zuckerberg 19 with Facebook. Page and Brin were 26 when they founded Google. It’s a common pattern: Walt Disney was 27, J.D. Rockefeller was 31 with Standard Oil. Founders in the famed startup incubator ‘YCombinator’ are mostly in their 20s, with only a handful ever starting above age 40.
Not all who’ve achieved greatness were young. Churchill did not become Prime Minister until he was 65 and was 70 when Germany finally surrendered. Andrew Grove, the man who led Intel to dominate the world of semiconductor manufacturing and literally ‘wrote the book on management’ only became CEO at age 51. Morris Chang founded TSMC at 55. However, when we examine the history of these individuals, we invariably find they have earlier experience with the difficulties of leading people and managing organisations. Churchill was a lieutenant in the British Army age 21 and was just 33 when he first became a cabinet minister in the Asquith Government of 1905. Grove was a director at Fairchild Semiconductors at 31, and Chang rose to manage the engineering section of Texas Instruments at 30, eventually becoming responsible for their global semiconductor business before leaving to found the company that would go on to produce all of the world’s cutting-edge AI chips.
This pattern fits with what we know about brain development. Though malleable throughout life, the brain’s ability to form new structures (aka ‘plasticity’) generally declines with age. While we can continue to learn and grow throughout our lives, the broad structures of the brain are mostly settled by our mid-30s. Thus, we tend to iterate and expand on what we’ve done and learned in our youth, while mastering something completely new later in life usually only comes with extraordinary effort.
One consequence of today’s relative peace and long-lived prosperity has been a dramatic reduction in the availability of senior roles for younger people. Where once conflict and disease would provide openings and opportunities for enterprising youngsters, these are thankfully now rare in the modern developed world. Yet rather than compensating for these trends, modern hiring practices have exacerbated it. Policies intended to make more decisions more fair and objective must emphasise the legible and measurable over the intangible. This inevitably favours the old, who’ve had more time to network and develop their resumes.
Modernity has delayed exposure to responsibility in a host of other ways as well. The universities, and the state through mechanisms like student loans, act as a sort of surrogate parents, sheltering us from consequences and extending adolescence into our mid-20s. Marriage and parenthood rarely occurs before our mid-30s, if at all. In the workplace, the post-war years saw a steady bureaucratisation of increasingly large and complex institutions, famously chronicled by the seminal ‘The Organization Man’ by James Burnham. These reforms sought to deliberately marginalise the role of the individual in favour of conformity and management by process. This model sees young live players1 able to route around process as a risk, and most pathways into early management were systematically eliminated from this time.
The result of these dynamics is that much of the economy (and the state in particular), expects people to become effective leaders and managers despite not being given an opportunity to develop these skills earlier than age 35. Even then, this is typically only with a title-inflated simulacrum of the sort of authority that the likes of Grove and Chang wielded to help shape the future of their organisations. Not only do many of today’s ‘managers’ lack any direct reports or budgetary responsibility, but even more senior roles, now thoroughly enmeshed in layers of process, will be often completely uninvolved in direction-setting, or even the semblance of independent authority and responsibility. It should be no wonder that so many individuals, finally reaching a leadership position in their 50s, find themselves lost at sea – dead players lacking the foundations for strategic thought and action or even recognise their absence.
Recognising the criticality of early experience, older civilisations often provided mechanisms for future leaders to gain vital experience while still young, despite higher attrition of the times naturally providing many more of these opportunities. The Royal Navy’s tradition of ‘midshipmen’ allowed teenagers to gain vital experience aboard ship through genuine responsibilities such as keeping watch, supervising gun batteries, and commanding small boats. In their late teens, they could take an examination to become a lieutenant, and from there, potentially progress to command a vessel by their early 20s, and in the case of talented individuals like Horatio Nelson, come to command squadrons and fleets by middle-age. The Roman ‘cursus honorum’ or ‘ladder of offices’ likewise provided a pathway for entry into civil leadership following an early military career. Here, term limits at each rung of the ladder ensured a steady supply of positions, newly freed from incumbents, for younger individuals to step into.
Today, the idea of young people in positions of leadership has become virtually unthinkable. Not only are we unwilling to grant genuine agency to people in their teens and early careers, but we can barely conceive of a time when it actually happened. Napoleon was the ruler of France by age 30, but was played in his recent biopic by a 49-year-old. Wellington first commanded a brigade at age 25 and was 46 at Waterloo, but was played by a man of 64, clad in the makeup of a senior citizen to further emphasise his age2.
Many business leaders in recent years have begun experimenting with hormone supplements and other anti-aging techniques in attempts to extend the benefits of youth. These address the symptoms of aging leadership, but exacerbate the cause by enabling older leaders to remain in positions of power for longer than ever, eventually to be replaced by a generation that has never had the opportunity to lead. Fundamentally, if we wish for future organisations to be run effectively, then younger people must be given the responsibility to lead and learn. Ideally, these positions are limited in scope, but deep in responsibility and authority within that scope. Channel youthful energy towards projects like overhauling decrepit IT systems or reforming dysfunctional institutions no longer serving their intended purpose. Such projects have relatively limited downside for failure, and a large potential upside for both society and the individual’s career if they succeed.
Pitt came into power after Britain’s humiliating loss to the American revolutionaries. Napoleon took power as a stabilising force against the chaos of the Directory. Systemic change is always more difficult absent a crisis. Political leaders conscious of stormy seas ahead but lacking a sweeping popular mandate for change have less margin for error. Without cultural change, a few high-profile failures could bring down a minority government if it were revealed that ‘unqualified’ youth were put in charge. Legible qualifications thereby mitigate downside political risk, particularly in non-priority areas where the potential upside is more limited.
How then do we enable young people into positions of leadership and authority? One solution is to recruit not based on certificates or what roles they’ve held but for what they’ve actually done. The world’s most successful companies make a habit of hiring accomplished individuals straight out of high school. Many of these people are passed over by universities and governments for not ticking the right boxes. Individuals who’ve achieved early success in a private capacity remain an underutilised resource for public service, but these people are often passed over for senior positions, and are anyway typically uninterested in working for dead players in positions with no authority to make change. Institutions should make greater use of standardised aptitude tests (where these have not been made effectively illegal) to cut through credentialism and provides greater opportunity to young people with high potential.
The average age of engineers on the Apollo Programme was 28. Today few at NASA are under 40, and sadly the majority of its funding is spent on obsolete boondoggles. Not every institution needs to be staffed by the best and brightest, but an institution unable to attract a healthy mix of young ambitious people struggles to adapt to changing circumstances. The opportunities presented by new technologies go unexplored, and the costs of risk avoidance3 and inefficiencies compound. In the private sector this manifests as transfer of wealth from shareholders to sinecured staff, and a slow then sudden decline into irrelevance4. In public bodies like state and local governments, we see spiralling costs of maintaining legacy infrastructure, slowly degrading service levels, and increasingly unserviceable debt. Young people with other options flee en masse, with the result looking like Detroit or Greece, where nominal GDP/capita has declined almost 30% since 2009.
Much needs to be done to reform our public institutions and rebuild a culture of competence. The current defacto system of eventual promotion to management all but guarantees that most will be unsuited to leadership and authority, having never been responsible for other human beings until promotion via seniority. A healthy culture selects its senior leaders from a large cadre of individuals who were given early opportunities and successfully seized them. Such a culture will take time to rebuild, especially in the face of an aging population. In the interim, those seeking to hire more effective managers should place much greater emphasis on candidates with early ‘extracurricular’ experience, such as leading large clubs, raiding guilds, university stage productions, and other activities where the success or failure of an undertaking was dependent on the individual’s ability to lead and manage effectively. Making better use of such people is the key to our future security and prosperity.
The live/dead player analogy was coined by Samo Burja as a way to succinctly distinguish between individuals and organisations with vitality who are able to adapt and respond to novel circumstances (live players), and those that are inflexible and running on legacy processes (dead players).
Tellingly, the actors portraying political or military leaders are often 10-20 years older than the people they portray, but non-political characters like Empress Josephine, who was six years Napoleon’s senior, are not.
Assymetric risk avoidance is the natural consequence of a culture that recruits for credentials rather than accomplishments. Failure might be career ending, if it ends up in the media, whereas success is just another day at the office passed over for promotion for somebody that attended the right school and collected the right job titles in quick succession. I previously touched on these ideas, and the need for a ‘generational reform’ of the public sector here:
Generational Reform
When I began my public service career, tenures were long. Many staff had 30+ years of experience in the organisation. As a young graduate, you were inducted into a team culture with its roots stretching back to before those people were themselves inducted. This ‘mid-20th Century’ cultural software once delivered some of the crowning achievements of our civilisation but has accumulated bugs over time and has largely failed to take advantage of 21st-century advances. The changes now underway open many possibilities for a more effective public sector, but also risks losing ‘load-bearing’ adaptations taken for granted by many senior leaders - particularly the induction of new members into an ethos of public service.
Examples include legacy defence contractors like Boeing and Lockheed, once-famous manufacturing businesses like General Motors, and stagnant media companies like CNN. Many of these can persist for decades or longer on an aging loyal customer base, or if lobbyists can arrange government protection (e.g. tariffs or regulatory barriers that effectively prevent new entrants into the market) or a pipeline of guaranteed uncompetitive government contracts (e.g. see again the ‘Space Launch System’).
The young can still start their own organizations!