22 January 2009

anything you geezers can do

we can do younger! Oh yes we can! :o)

On a serious note, I am happy for the new meritocracy that the Obama administration represents. A 26-year-old fashion designer and a speechwriter is 26 (or 27, depending on which source you believe). Obama himself is young, especially for a President, and companies around the world are increasingly comfortable with handing over the reigns to ever-younger CEOs.

I'm firmly convinced that a person's decision-making process can be just as sophisticated at 25 as it is at 52 (rare, but possible). Nowadays people in their 30s-40s are savvier than ever, and oftentimes the only thing holding a candidate back is access to information. With the ever-widening scope of databases and technologies to make that raw information useful, the underlying intellectual processes of the decision-maker take front and center - not just "experience." Of course, data is not a substitute for *all* experience, not by a long shot, but much of what used to take corporate drones eons to learn can now be experienced in a small fraction of the time. This trend of younger CEOs is a marker of a larger shift towards trend towards true meritocracies, a change I fully embrace.

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