Nelson D Schwartz
As the partner of a top Los Angeles law firm, Norman H Levine is no stranger to what might be called the Posada problem. Nothing, he said, is as tough as telling fellow partners that their best days are behind them. If anyone doubts the sensitivity of the task, consider the case of Jorge Posada, the once-formidable New York Yankee who at 39 years found himself demoted, unable to consistently do what a designated hitter does?hit. When he got the news, he walked into his manager?s office an hour before the game was to start and announced he wasn?t going to play.
The painful encounter between coach and lagging star is one that is taking place with increasing frequency in the wood-paneled aeries of law firms, banks and other elite professions.
?All the rules have changed,? said longtime New York executive recruiter Richard Stein of Caldwell Partners. ?In a market that?s become extremely lean and mean, these individuals who have tended to be the senior statesmen of their day are sometimes the first to go.? It can happen at any age, of course, but it?s an especially delicate issue in an era when many workers stay on after they turn 66.
As roughly 44 million baby boomers hit retirement age over the next decade, the problem of how and when to step aside is becoming a hot-button issue, said Robert J Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University. Some jobs will always have age restrictions?police officers, firefighters, air traffic controllers and the like. But chief executives have a habit of hanging on, said Jeffrey A Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management and the author of a book on the subject, ?The Hero?s Farewell?. Sonnenfeld has even developed a taxonomy to describe how different executives handle the challenge of retiring.
The monarchs stamp out rivals and remain on the throne until they die or are forced out, while the ambassadors become senior statesmen, attending the economic forum at Davos, Switzerland, and similar affairs. Generals leave under pressure and spend their days plotting a Napoleonic return to power. Finally, there are the governors, who go on to do something else, like philanthropy or public service.
Rupert Murdoch at the News Corporation and Sumner M Redstone at Viacom are quintessential monarchs, but Andrew S Grove has became an ambassador for Intel, Sonnenfeld said. Steven P Jobs is a general at Apple, and Henry M Paulson Jr, formerly of Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a governor with his tenure as treasury secretary under president George W Bush. On Wall Street, firms like Goldman don?t have a mandatory retirement age, but there are other ways of easing people out, like ?de-partnering?, when partners are quietly dropped from the top ranks.