Ages and roles and the Marine Corps

As has been the theme for this Spring, I've been thinking about what is wrong with big companies. Another aspect that came to mind is the age old dynamic between young and old people: young people think older people are complete fossils and the old people think the younger people are obnoxiously arrogant and don't respect age. But the thing is that the last couple of generations of work force are part of a very fundamental shift in technology, which can be shortly characterized as the first time in history when technology life cycles have become shorter than the working lives of people. What this in practice means that your technical skills will be significantly outdated well before you ever reach retirement.

In practice this is quite obvious if you look at technological evolution. Agricultural technology took a lot longer to become widespread than the printing press, which in turn had a longer life cycle than the steam engine, which in turn was outpaced by radio technology, and so on leading up to the niches of today's IT world. To put it blatantly, I'm twentysomething and I've already sort of fallen out of the cutting edge of technological evolution that I once was very much into. In the current world of the world wide webs, cycles are measured in years, at best, and in months at worst. So while all of the above might not necessarily be exactly accurate enough to be an academic thesis, the trend is still clear.

This in fact led me to think about how different people create value. As an analogy I started thinking about a friend of mine who plays floorball very actively and is apparently quite good at it. The situation that he is encountering is that now that he's about 30, he can no longer keep up with the young guys. So instead he has to start playing with more intelligence. I also get the impression that he also brings a lot of spirit into the team and is in fact very crucial in fostering the team spirit and acting as an "older brother". So in brief, the value add that he brings is different from the value add that the 20-year-old guy brings to the team.

Related to this, I was recently skimming over the US Marine Corp's document named MCDP 1: Warfighting. It is a very interesting read and one of the things that I think fits here nicely is the concept of different levels of war, which range from strategic to operational to tactical. In brief, the strategic level is focused on the question of how to win wars. The operational level in turn focuses on how to win campaigns, while the tactical level addresses how to win battles. So if we apply this type of approach in a very raw fashion to the floorball analogy and ages, we might get something like the following situation: the 20-year-old guy operates on the tactical level, i.e. how to win over the ball and score goals. The 30-year-old guy operates on the operational level and works on keeping the spirits up, the team functioning during the match and is ultimately looking at how to win games. Then, the coach, who I guess can be of various ages but for the sake of discussion is now 40, then operates on the strategic level and is focused on how to win the whole season.

So it's clear that the value add that each of these guys brings to the table is fundamentally different and is based on each one's intrinsic capabilities, which are also very much tied to age. The 20-year-old guy is often very self-centered and focuses on shorter time horizons (take it from someone who is still twentysomething... :). The 30-year-old is getting into the family-fostering mode, to be provocative. While the 40-year-old is slowly starting to realize that if he wants to leave behind any type of legacy, then now is the time to start doing so or else it's not going to happen. But these guys can't generally operate very efficiently on each others' levels as they don't have the capabilities for that. And there's nothing wrong with that, because everyone is still needed.

Now, how does this in any way relate to big companies? Well, in big companies it's not so different: recent graduates are very keen on technology and represent the running power of the athlete and are able to do the heavy lifting. Slightly older guys in turn have slightly more perspective and experience and while no longer representing the cutting edge of technology, they might still be able to contribute by being efficient in managing the younger guys and pointing them in the right direction while being able to support and serve their subordinates in their daily jobs. And eventually we should ideally have people who have seen how the world works, have become the statesmanlike leaders that the world needs and are still able to stand solidly enough to keep things sane (we younger guys tend to like to run very fast and if we're not careful, we often just run for the sake of running and occasionally in the wrong direction). But again, to overly simplify the situation, these roles and the types of people may have difficulty operating on the wrong levels.

The problem, then, is when this nice and neat theoretical approach doesn't work out in practice. You have the middle-aged guy who is painfully outdated technologically trying to keep up in the role that's in fact meant for the twentysomethings. Or when a recent graduate is thrown into the difficult task of making longer-term strategic decisions without the capabilities and the experience of truly understanding or appreciating the complexity and trickiness of the task at hand. And this, I argue, is one large problem in large incumbent companies. How should one solve this, then? That's a completely different question and hopefully the statesmanlike leaders are able to solve that question. Because I sure can't...