Who will be the boss in 2020?

A 60-page feature on the future of corporate life dominated the August 28 2000 edition of Businessweek magazine. Much of the content was given over to looking at what work will be like in the year 2020.

As you’d expect, plenty of content was downright silly – the editors should have saved the piece about corporations building airborne headquarters for the April 1 edition.

Despite the weird stuff, the feature makes thought-provoking reading.

For me the most interesting article is a look forward to the CEO of 2020 in “The Boss in the Web Age”. The story is a mixture of sound prophecy, sensible projections of current trends and blind optimism with a smidgeon of creativity thrown in for good measure.

In other words, it’s pretty much like the positive side of American capitalism.

No doubt a handful of Knowledge Worker readers will make it to the top of large organizations by that year – I will still be available for consultancy.

In the mean time let’s investigate what the future holds for some of you.

Businessweek’s 2020 CEO is a young or at least youngish Chinese woman.

How does that prophecy rate? Well, as someone once sang, two out of three ain’t bad. Simple common sense tells us that women are going to play a greater leadership role in the future. And, given the Chinese make up 20 percent of the world’s population the idea of a Chinese woman leading a large corporation 10 years from now is hardly far-fetched.

According to the story, the CEO is just 45 years old. Although it’s far from impossible, I suspect that the average CEO in 2020 will be older.

This runs counter to the current trend – in recent years the age of the average Fortune 1000 CEO has fallen rapidly. There’s less grey hair among chief executives these days and it’s not just thanks to Grecian 2000.

In my view there are three factors determining the age of the future CEO:

• Energy Levels: while there are plenty of energetic old codgers who continue to run around well into their twilight years, long hours and the 24 by 7 nature of today’s industry eventually take their toll. Then there’s executive burnout. The energy requirements of modern companies will exert a downward pressure on the average age of a CEO.
• Experience: employers value experience above all other qualities. They demand experience in a range of tasks and a track record of success. To get enough of the right kind of experience requires some 20 years in the workforce. Given that employers ask senior staff to have double degrees or post-graduate qualifications – in all about six or seven years of tertiary education – you’ll reach the conclusion than even high flyers won’t have enough runs under their belt until they hit their mid-40s.
• Demographics: by 2020 there will be fewer young people and more older people in the workforce. Internationally the big demographic bulge is for people born before roughly 1956 – Australia and New Zealand are different but we’re talking about a global market for big company CEOs.
  By 2020 many of the older baby boomers will have retired or made it to the great boardroom in the sky. However, the downward slope of the demographic curve isn’t that steep, so there will be more working people in their 50s than any other age group.

Indeed as compulsory retirement is on the way out and people’s health is improving. Skilled people who want to work through their sixties and seventies probably won’t face too many obstacles. Some estimates say there will be more sixty-somethings in the 2020 workforce than forty-somethings.