A well-aged idea.

• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE

I OFTEN GET ASKED by people who are curious about how editors work, "Where do you get your ideas?" It's a fair question, considering the decades that I have been filling the pages of DIRECTORS & BOARDS.

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Some ideas have a very long germination. Here is the seed of the idea that resulted in the cover story of this edition--"Are Boards Too Old?"

It was planted in the early 1990s. You may recall how tough those years were for American corporations. One blue chip that hit a particularly rough skid was IBM Corp. In fact, things got so dicey for Big Blue, and investors got so restive, that the board did the unthinkable--it eased out the CEO, John Akers, in 1993.

At the 1993 annual meeting, one especially vociferous shareholder got on his feet to charge the board with being "too old." This owner further denounced the directors: "Most of them come from an era of manual typewriters and carbon paper." Ouch!

That made a big impression on me at the time. I wondered: Does this fellow have a point? Could the computer giant have missed a crucial beat or two in its business by not having some younger talent on the board? A study of the average age of the IBM board at that time showed it to be slightly over 61.

The seed was thus embedded. I "watered" the idea over the years: an interview with Richard Parsons in 1995 that touched on the topic (see page 36); a published anecdote in 1997 that cited the "awkwardness" of an aged director dying during a board meeting (page 39); and quite a few articles that critiqued the pros and cons of board retirement and tenure policies.

An eyebrow-raising statistic caught my attention. What would you have guessed if you were asked what the average age was of Silicon Valley...