Is Your CEO too Old to Innovate?
Gijsbertus J.J. van Wulfen
Award winning innovation keynote speaker helping you to create innovative mindsets at your event and your organisation. Contact me for a proven innovation method to double your effectiveness in 2025.
Harvard Business Review reports that the youngest executive on HBR’s list of the 100 Best-Performing CEOs is Simon Wolfson of Next, at age 46. The average CEO is 58. A faster changing world confronts us with the fact that in the long run we cannot survive on doing the same things better and cheaper. Sooner or later there will be a market meltdown. Just remember 'golden oldies' like: the phone book, retail travel agencies, the fax machine or the pager. The challenge is how to lead a company to really foster innovation.
Research by Dean Keith Simonton, at the University of California at Davis demonstrates a typical age-creativity curve: creativity rises rapidly as a career commences, peaks about 20 years into the career, at about age 40 or 45, and then enters a slow, age-related decline. Walter Frick of HBR raises therefore the question: "Are CEO's with an average age of 58 too old to lead innovation?"
Another research from 2008 by Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University states however that a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old. He based his conclusions on data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors.
Now does a CEO get better in innovation with age or not?
It's my perception that an older CEO might be as effective leading innovation as a younger CEO for three reasons:
1. You have to learn the patterns before you can break them. As manager you first learn what made your company successful in the past. As you get older you dare to challenge and break patterns within the companies you work.
2. You learn from your mistakes. Your innovations were probably not all successful, but you learn from your mistakes. This leads to a better business intuition of what will work in innovation and what will not as you get older.
3. Grey hair helps convincing others. In companies the CEO can't innovate alone. You need a lot of others to get an idea out there on the market. Getting older, growing grey hair helps in getting confidence of others to follow you on your innovation expeditions.
Now what's your opinion on this? Is your CEO too old to innovate? Or is he/she getting better and better by the year?
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Gijs van Wulfen published the Amazon innovation bestseller: "The Innovation Expedition". Order it at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
5 star review: "Here's just about everything you need to know about how to establish and then sustain an innovation culture"(Bob Morris; Amazon reviewer).
Not really :)
huh?
Operations/customer Service Consultant, retired
10 年Willingness to learn/improve is the trademark for innovators, that surely isn't age limited on the contrary
Senior Consultant at Human Assets International
10 年It's not just a question of whether an older person can be as creative as a younger person, as the research shows. The applied question should also include whether the older person is humble enough and open-minded enough to work together with young people to design and diffuse innovations. The young person may have a more burning need and a different perspective (which fuels innovation, and the older person has historical perspective regarding how best to make the new idea implementable in the current environment (which still includes older people with power and resources). Together they can change the world! I get so inspired by working with Millennials. They keep me cognitively flexible!
Gestalt Consultant and Owner at ROC/COM Strategy, Socratic Practitioner, Futurist, Remote Viewer Ancient Paradigms.
10 年My mind is so far ahead of my students it bends even their minds when contemplating some of my concepts and ideation. I still have it but indeed, a youthful body can compete at the same thinking speed. It is creativity that is the causation of burning the midnight oil for a future charged with mindful plasma. Judge on an individual basis!