The gnomes know: wisdom and judgment tend to come with experience ... and, yes, age.

• Author: Kaback, Hoffer
• Position: QUIDDITIES

ALATE APRIL Wall Street Journal article analyzed Coca-Cola Co.'s rejiggering of its board in the decided direction of more youthfulness. Written by Mike Esterl and Joann Lublin, the article cleverly bears the Coke advertising-referential headline "Coke Refreshes Aging Board."

Esterl and Lublin observe that nine out of 17 members of the Coke board who were elected in 2012 were 70 or older, and that, at PepsiCo, the comparable figure is ... zero. Moreover, they note, six of Coke's directors have served on its board for at least 20 years.

It is asserted that Coke needs to "attract teens and other young consumers to keep growing." Paul Lapides, director of the Corporate Governance Center at Kennesaw State University, opines that the makeup of Coke's board does not reflect its need to "serve a larger market of young people." He favors Coke's reinstating a mandatory retirement age for directors.

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Longtime readers of this column know that I have consistently maintained the propositions that: (a) The checklist mentality concerning self-styled governance "best practices" is misguided, (b) What is needed in directors is, instead, CASH (Character, Ability, Smarts, and Honesty), and (c) All the rest is noise.

Imposing a mandatory retirement age for directors is an element of a one-size-fits-all, checklist mindset. It is, on net and from a substantive standpoint, confining, not liberating; constraining, not freeing; restrictive, not expansive; short-sighted, not broadening; wasting, I not conserving, valuable resources.

When I first served on a not-for-profit theatre board, I was under the age of 30. When I took a seat on a public company board for the first time, I was not yet 40. There are some things I knew better then than I know now (e.g., certain technical aspects of financial accounting, of auditing, and of securities law). But, today, at an age with a "6" in front of it, do I know more than I did then about business, corporate board dynamics, human relations, emotional intelligence, marketing, life--in short, the way the real world works? Yes.

Is not a more sophisticated and refined knowledge of these matters a good and desirable thing for a corporate director to have?

* Item: Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967) was chancellor of (West) Germany from 1949 to 1963--that is, from ages 73 to 87. He was the oldest elected leader in the history of the world.

* Item: Paul Volcker (born 1927) was chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979...