The youngest executive on Harvard Business Review’s list of the 100 Best-Performing CEOs is Simon Wolfson of Next, at age 46. According to research on age and innovation, even he may be beyond his creative peak.
As Ezekiel Emanuel summarized in The Atlantic earlier this year: “Dean Keith Simonton, at the University of California at Davis, a luminary among researchers on age and creativity, synthesized numerous studies to demonstrate 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.”
By comparison, the average CEO on our list is 58.
The number of CEOs in their 40s is dwarfed by the number who qualify for Medicare. Could the best CEOs be too old to innovate?
In a 2010 paper, Benjamin Jones of Kellogg found that Nobel prize winners and great inventors throughout the 20th century did the bulk of their breakthrough work in their 30s and 40s. Only 14 percent did so after age 50. This suggests that by the time most CEOs make it to the corner office, their most creative, innovative years are behind them.
But the average age of Nobel Prize-winning work and technical innovation has increased. In 1900 it came around age 30; by 2000 it was nearly 40.
In the natural sciences, the average age of Nobel Prize winners in physics is now 48.
Partly a result of longer life spans, this increase also reflects the additional years of education required to make scientific breakthroughs.
Management also takes time to learn. The best CEOs keep learning as they go, and this may more than make up for any decline in creativity that comes with age. Of course, the CEO job requires more than creativity. Researchers estimated the peak age for good financial decision-making to be 53.
So other critical management skills are still improving.
In a recent paper, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania found that firms with younger CEOs pursue innovation more aggressively, as measured by the number of patents they file.
These younger executives weren’t inherently more innovative, but they sought out more innovative companies and hired younger inventors.(This helps explain why the CEOs of successful tech startups are far younger than the heads of more established companies.) Building and maintaining an innovative organization means hiring the right people and funding the right projects, and experience is invaluable.
But youth has some benefits when it comes to creativity, and managers of all ages should remember that.
Walter Frick is an associate editor at the Harvard Business Review.