The 30-30 Rule

The rule of 30-30, the brainchild of legendary Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan, states that a corporation should have 30 percent of the people responsible for its strategic thinking be under the age of 30.  This troubles me because I belong to the other, more stagnant 70 percent.  The younger 30 percent, claims the professor, would ensure that the corporation stay forward-looking enough to adapt to changes and remain relevant.  Not that these individuals’ ideas are more brilliant or even more practical, as those traits often require experience; it is precisely the lack of brilliance and, even more so, of practicality that makes the younger-than-30 ideas more valuable.

When I was in college, one of my mentors in the English Department used to tell us in our senior honors seminar: “You should not forget that, as 20-somethings, you are reading materials written by people who were not much older than you when they wrote them.”  He meant to urge us into becoming actors and not only students of profound acts.  You would think that such advice would be heeded readily by driven men and women being shaped into military leaders at the Naval Academy.  To what extent that got each of us to act, I’m not sure.

The professor was right, of course.  Fitzgerald was in his mid-20s when he wrote The Great Gatsby.  Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was barely old enough to buy a beer, and Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook while still struggling with post-adolescent acne and not yet old enough to drink.  Mary Shelley was 18 when she completed Frankenstein, a novel that we English majors, even at an engineering school, studied closely in two different courses: British Lit and Literary Criticism.

Why is 30 the threshold to truly creative thinking?  We spend the first decade of life soaking up the world like a sponge, learning any and all languages we encounter, including cultural ones.  Then, in our teens we define our self through trial and error (I mistyped “eros” just now, which is equally true).  Do we then get just one decade to pull it all together and produce some world-changing shit?  Of course, some later bloomers, like Plato, do not get started until their thirties.  His mentor, Socrates, turned 40 before he started walking around challenging others to be more ignorant than he.  Still, do we cross some kind of Styx at the end of our third decade?  Do we lose some capacity to be innovative?

What do we gain in its place?

The answer is wisdom.  Not the kind, I hope, that Socrates accused the Sophists of possessing, but the kind with which he rebuked them.  It is the wisdom to measure our experiences and observations against critical questions.  Only a fully developed frontal lobe would be capable of that, although such brain science would undermine the romanticism of philosophy.

How we define that wisdom, then, is important, because the definition can lead to the practice of obtaining it.  Wisdom is not the quality of or ability to act rightly or righteously in a given situation, but it is the ability to question one’s actions during the act.  The 30-something mind is more able to do this than its younger version.  At some point, I suspect, the mind crosses another threshold and begins to lose the ability to act at all, but I’m planning on enjoying these years of being in between.