'Flip generation leadership: on being a young director.

• Author: Weiner, Edie
• Position: BOARD COMPOSITION - Column

Young leaders will be board material faster than any previous generation. They will bring into the boardroom a window on the world to come, as opposed to the world that was. That's what I remember doing.

A new report issued by Deloitte's Center for Corporate Governance and the Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals noted age limits as the most prevalent mechanism contributing to board turnover, and such limits continue to rise. So it's not surprising that the report found very few boards with directors aged 40 or younger, noting that more than half of companies reported their youngest director to be older than 50. For 53% of all companies, director retirement, which is getting later and later, is the reason for change in board composition.

I have no issue with extending age limits for service. As people live longer and healthier lives, their capacity to remain productive longer is clear. But there is a great need for diversity in the boardroom, and that diversity is stifled when the only reason to change board composition is director retirement. And it is especially stifled when the youngest directors are in their 50s.

For those who are under 40, the world of competition, innovation, markets, workplaces and product cycles are profoundly different from the world in which the over-50 directors grew up. We are all shaped by our earlier years, and we tend to view the world through the lenses that governed our earlier lives. Yet decisions are being made in the boardroom not by those who wish to create the future, but by those struggling to preserve the present. And I know this. I've been there. Years ago.

Back in 1977, I became the youngest outside woman to serve on a major corporate board. I was 28 when tapped, and participated on the board until I was officially elected at 29. The story is, in retrospect, quite humorous.

I had just started my firm and I received a call from Colin Hampton, CEO and chairman of Union Mutual Life Insurance Co., the largest writer of long-term disability insurance. I had done a great deal of innovative social and futurist research for the life and health insurance business working at a trade association since my graduation from college. In the course of my work, I got to know all the heads of the major insurers. I was also considered quite controversial in the industry trade press. Some agents blasted my talks and reports as coming from a young, inexperienced woman who was bent on disturbing an industry that had been successful for over a century. Editors rose to my defense, saying that my beliefs about how technology, for example, would fundamentally change...