No Country for Old Men

A CEO client recently told me he had been fired through no fault of his own. His performance and business results had been consistently outstanding. Nonetheless, a regional executive vice president who met with him in Japan, ostensibly to discuss the future, told him he would be sacked. When asked why, the vice president explained paradoxically, “to make room for new blood and reduce headcount.”

The CEO later observed that he was not the only one. The vice president was going around similarly sacking other senior executives. All of those fired had one trait in common. Each was over fifty years old. Age is a sackable offense.

Wisdom is neither something you can buy nor train in others and comes only from accumulated knowledge through experience. You learn by doing, living, making mistakes, and succeeding. No one learns to ride a bike from a book.

Firing the excellent for the transgression of advancing age is the same as excising wisdom from the organization. Some misguided HR types who view people as interchangeable commodities have argued that firing expensive senior workers and replacing them with cheaper younger ones is a way to save money.

That might be so, but let me ask you. How much did the last bad business decision cost your company?

I once read about a company whose business was parachuting interim CEOs into companies in crisis. The company had a roster of seasoned CEOs. Frantic staff at one such company in crisis informed the CEO paratrooper as soon as he arrived that the company couldn’t make payroll. It was payday. That was only the first crisis of his first day on the job, and it was only 9:00 AM.

It takes wisdom to remain sanguine under fire. Not everyone can do that.

Some years back, with much fanfare at a splashy press event, the global CEO of a massive household-name global American company introduced a recently hired CEO with an excellent pedigree to lead the Japanese subsidiary. The Japanese business’s volatility was neither unsubstantial nor anything exceptional.

Yet pedigree, pomp, and fanfare beget no wisdom. The volatility proved to be too much for the new CEO. Some months into the job, he did not show up at work and never showed up again. No warning, no resignation, no request for help. He was a deer in the headlights, frozen with fright as if facing a lethal threat.

As far as I know, no one has ever died of a nasty missive from the boss.

I once asked a successful entrepreneur some years ago how he deals with stress, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

“Nothing is as bad as being chased through the jungle by people shooting at you,” he explained phlegmatically. In his previous “career,” he had been a CIA operative in Laos during the Vietnam War.

If not wisdom, some experiences definitely provide perspective.

So what about my CEO client, who was fired for being over fifty? He told me he had planned to retire in two years anyway and move to Portugal.

“I don’t see that for you,” I told him. “I think you’ll find Portugal amusing for three weeks. After that, you’ll be bored, and that’s not living. It’s waiting twenty-five years to die.”

In 1955, the life expectancy for men in Japan was sixty-three years. Today, it is eighty-five. No matter what social mores dictate, we do not exist to go gentle into that good night. Age is no disability unless you make it one for yourself.

• Acclaimed Japanese artist Kusama Yayoi still makes art. She is 93.
• Writer, actor, comedian, and television personality Takeshi Kitano is still practicing all of his art. He is 76.
• Paralympic cyclist Keiko Sugiura became the oldest-ever medalist at age 50 when she snagged the gold for Japan in 2021. She had decided not to compete because the conventional wisdom was that she was too old. Her coach convinced her otherwise.
• Kyocera founder Kazuo Inamori took the role of Japan Airlines CEO in 2010 at age 78. He successfully resuscitated the company from bankruptcy.
• Shigetaka Komori took over the CEO role at FujiFilm in 2003 at age 64 and successfully rehabilitated the business after the market for its core product, camera film, collapsed with the rise of digital photography.
• Iconic American novelist Cormac McCarthy, to whom the title of this piece is my homage, is still writing today. He is 89.