This is Part IV of our series Senior Class. Hear Part III, Part II and Part I.

Since 2017, the number of CEOs in their late 60s has doubled for Fortune 500 companies. What happens when our country’s most powerful business leaders don’t retire?

Guests

Chip Conley, founder of the boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre Hospitality where he was CEO for 24 years until stepping down in 2010. Co-founder of the Modern Elder Academy.

Damien Faughnan, he runs an executive coaching practice where he advises CEOs, increasingly on transitioning out of the role.

Also Featured

Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic. He runs Harvard Business School’s “Life After CEO Workshop.”

Igbekele Sunday Osinubi, senior lecturer and academic researcher at the University of East London.

Michael McMullen, former CEO of Agilent Technologies.

____

Transcript of Full Broadcast

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Over the course of more than 30 years, the billionaire owned or ran brands such as Viacom, MTV, Paramount Pictures, and CBS, and he gave the media world a phrase that’s still treated like gospel.

SUMNER REDSTONE: The phrase, “Content is king,” is a phrase I originated. It’s mine. And branded content, like the brands we have, will always reign supreme.

CHAKRABARTI: Redstone was born in 1923. Around 2007, when he was 84, he and his daughter feuded over his succession plan. Redstone refused to let go.

REDSTONE: I’m still very active. I work very hard. I travel the world for Viacom. I’m not about to give up control.

CHAKRABARTI: In 2014, he told The Hollywood Reporter, quote, “I will not discuss succession. You know why? I’m not going to die,” end quote. Later that year, his health declined rapidly. He was hit with a slew of lawsuits when he stopped actively running his companies.

NEWS BRIEF: Viacom and CBS chairman Sumner Redstone is now being ordered by a judge to undergo a mental health exam. This comes after a series of lawsuits were filed questioning the 92-year-old’s mental competence.

CHAKRABARTI: Shareholders were especially aggrieved. The CBS board of directors continued paying Redstone tens of millions of dollars while he was incapacitated. Meanwhile, shares were tanking.

NEWS BRIEF: Take a look at the two companies. Both CBS and Viacom, which of course were split, ending 2015 way down, 16% and 36%, respectively.

CHAKRABARTI: Redstone was forced to step down from Viacom in 2016, but he kept control of 80% of the voting shares in ViacomCBS, essentially still controlling the company, and he never let go of that control until the day he died in August 2020.

Sumner Redstone was 97. His former girlfriend called him a, quote, “living ghost.” This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti, and we’re at episode four of our special series, Senior Class: Gerontocracy in America. We’re calling this one Old Dogs, Old Tricks. Back in episode one, we looked at America’s aging political class and whether elderly elected officials are stymieing political modernization.

A similar question ought to be asked of the nation’s business leaders.

BILL GEORGE: When I was starting my career, men, and most of the CEOs were men, stayed until 65 and then retired, and frankly, many of them died in their late 60s.

CHAKRABARTI: Bill George is a former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, a $100 billion medical device company. He’s 84, and now runs the Life After CEO workshop at the Harvard Business School. George says business leaders are getting older simply because Americans are living longer and healthier.

GEORGE: The job pays very well, it has enormous prestige. You feel like you’re at the top of the mountain, and you say … you look down and say, “There’s nothing there.”

CHAKRABARTI: Back in 1965, when people like George were at the bottom of the corporate ladder, CEOs were paid 21 times more than an average worker in their company. By 2025, that factor had ballooned. CEO pay is now 325 times more than the workers they lead, according to the Economic Policy Institute. So Stanford emeritus professor Bob Sutton asks:

BOB SUTTON: Why would you let that go?

CHAKRABARTI: It’s not just the pay. It’s the pay and prestige, which together equal power. Here’s Bill George again.

GEORGE: Here’s the problem. When things are going well, you’re recognized in the media, you’re honored you get great stock options, and you don’t wanna leave. But then things may turn down, and then you feel like you can’t leave. You can’t leave the trouble. You don’t wanna leave at the bottom.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, it might feel like we’re stirring  up a tempest in a teapot here because in 2026, when you think about corporate leaders, the image of the move fast and break things gods of Silicon Valley might come to mind. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is 42.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is just 41. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang is the old lion of the group at 63. But the Valley has always been an outlier. Across the rest of corporate America, the corner office is graying. Just a decade ago, 7% of CEOs were in their late 60s. As of 2025, that number has more than doubled to 15%.

And the average hiring age for CEOs has also risen from 46 two decades ago to 55 today. That’s according to the Conference Board, a business research organization. Bill George worries that much older CEOs become more focused on themselves and less on the long-term growth of the businesses they’re leading.

GEORGE: I do think it’s getting worse in terms of the consequences. Things are moving so much faster today. Technological innovation is something that so many companies are having trouble keeping up with. Some CEOs I’ve seen, they stop investing in R&D. They stop investing in new geographic markets. They stop investing in creative new ideas.

CHAKRABARTI: Many factors go into CEO decision-making, of course, but there is some evidence that advancing age may be among them.

Igbekele Osinubi is at the University of East London in the UK. He led a study published this year that examined a dozen years of CEO investment decisions at 215 of Britain’s largest businesses.

Osinubi found that long-term CEOs did slow down R&D investment. The drop showed up after five years and kept going down after that, to the point where some companies’ R&D investments were 30% less annually than would be expected.

OSINUBI: Which could have a significant effect on the ability of the company to compete internationally and also contribute to the growth of the economy.

CHAKRABARTI: Osinubi acknowledges that aging CEOs do bring the advantage of experience, but that advantage may have a limit.

OSINUBI: And that’s where the problem lies. The threat of being rigid and not willing to new information far more exceed the advantage of experience, which comes as a result of old age and staying longer.

CHAKRABARTI: Leadership that won’t retire can also create a kind of sclerotic blockage that inhibits companies in another critical way. Let’s take a look at the example of Warren Buffett. In 2015, the then 85-year-old titan of American investing said he had no plans to retire.

WARREN BUFFETT: It’d be crazy for me to leave my job, assuming I can do it. I see these people, they spend a whole week planning their haircut. That is not my idea of living.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, to be clear, I am not saying in any way that Warren Buffett became an ineffective leader. After all, he turned Berkshire Hathaway into a trillion-dollar investment company that has mythical status in American business history.

I’m talking about something else. In 2025, then 95, he announced he was stepping down as CEO of the company he’d led for 60 years.

BUFFETT: I think it’s the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive officer of the company at year end.

CHAKRABARTI: Greg Abel became Berkshire Hathaway’s new CEO this January, and just last month, Buffett also resigned his chairmanship of Berkshire’s board.

Quote, “Father Time always wins,” he wrote in his resignation letter, and here’s where it gets interesting. Buffett named his son Howard as the new chairman, saying, quote, “Howard has been a Berkshire director for 33 years. That is a longer apprenticeship than I served before taking the reins at age 34.” End quote.

And that is the other reason why the trend of aging CEOs should matter to all workers. They are the iceberg’s tip of an overall shift in the labor market. More than a quarter of the U.S. workforce is now over the age of 55, an all-time high. Of course, millions of people are working longer because they have to in order to make ends meet.

At the same time, the longer seniors put off retirement, the longer younger workers aren’t getting promoted into higher paying jobs. Bill George, the former Medtronic CEO, worries about how discouraging that can be for younger employees. If they can’t advance, their ideas too might wither on the vine.

GEORGE: Or the people in the organization don’t feel there’s a sense of energy and support for innovation.

That’s my greatest concern.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s turn to Chip Conley now. He’s the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, a boutique hotel company where he served as CEO for nearly 24 years. After stepping out of that role in 2010, he went on to work at Airbnb in a mentorship role, and that led him to create the Modern Elder Academy, which he describes as, quote, “The world’s first midlife wisdom school.”

And he joins us from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Chip Conley, welcome to On Point.

CHIP CONLEY: It’s great to be with you. Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me a little bit about sort of your thinking about age and leadership after you were at Joie de Vivre for 24 years. But you weren’t in your 80s, though, at the time.

CONLEY: No. I was 50, and I was burned out, and I just knew that I was not as effective as the founder and CEO anymore.

But I think that the overall issue here is that we’re living longer and retirement, which used to be something that we looked forward to, especially if you’re doing backbreaking or mind-numbing work has a bad valence to it today. Retirement, most people consider it a sort of a dirty word and especially knowledge workers.

So retirement means irrelevance. And I think that’s one big issue. But labor force participation of people 55 or 65 and older is skyrocketing. People are staying in the workplace longer. So you can only imagine that if you are by choice or necessity staying in the workplace longer, you’re going to focus on, how do you stay relevant?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll get to the overall workforce a little bit later in the show, Chip, but let’s stick with the people at the top of the corporate ladder, the CEOs. Because I can also imagine that it’s really hard to step away no matter how old one gets, because you also … people are living healthier.

Their mental capacity, for most folks, stays intact. They have wealth. They have connections and influence. And it’s hard to rethink how do you use all those personal assets in a way that’s different from leading a major corporation.

CONLEY: No fun moving from being a VIP to a PIP, a previously important person. Yeah, people love the work, too. Let’s be honest. It’s not just that they’re holding on to control. In many cases, they feel passionately and purposeful about the work they’re doing. And they see their fellow friends who retired, drinking three martinis at lunch and golfing, and they see that actually, frankly, there’s data that shows that if you retire, it accelerates your mortality by two years.

So there’s a lot of messages saying, “Stay where you are.”

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Chip, I want to ask you quickly about another stat regarding aging CEOs. It’s not only that we have a higher percentage of CEOs staying longer past their late 60s, but the initial hiring age has also moved up, and this is for Fortune 500 companies.

About a decade ago, it was 46 years old, and now it’s, excuse me, two decades ago, and now it’s 55. Do you have any thoughts as to why that’s actually jumped up?

CONLEY: I think as people are staying in the workplace longer, it does mean that if you have a CEO of a large company sticking around longer, it takes longer for the next generation of people to move into the most senior ranks, especially as a CEO.

So I don’t think that’s surprising in an era of longevity. But I think what it does mean is if you actually only become the CEO of a company at 55 or 60, you’re not gonna retire at 62 or 63. You’re gonna stick around longer.

CHAKRABARTI: So there’s like a wave then or a domino effect here. Because you need experience, you need senior management experience to be an effective CEO, and for those folks, that experience is also being delayed is what you’re saying.

CONLEY: Correct.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And what impact then do you think that has on a company, or could have on a company long term?

CONLEY: I think one of the things I learned at Airbnb, they called me the modern elder there. They said, “A modern elder is someone who’s as curious as they are wise,” is I think we need a whole new approach to training older, senior leaders to help them to understand how important innovation is, how important mutual mentorship is.

So mutual mentorship is what I learned at Airbnb. I was mentoring Brian Chesky, the CEO, who is 21 years younger than me, but so I was mentoring him, but I was also learning from him. I called myself a mentern, a mentor and an intern at the same time. I was teaching him some emotional intelligence around leadership.

He was teaching me some DQ, digital intelligence that I didn’t have. And I think the more we create a workplace where older leaders are learning from younger leaders as much as possible, it’s better for everybody.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. That’s really interesting. And the idea of different kinds of intelligences being mentored through younger and older generations is really interesting.

CONLEY: There’s this idea of fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. The young brain has fluid intelligence, and it means you’re fast and focused. The older brain shrinks a little bit, but it actually has something called crystallized intelligence, that one of our faculty members at MEA talks about, which is this idea that you think more systemically, holistically, and you connect the dots. So creating leadership teams that have a diversity of ages is really good for decision-making.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that’s what you want to do. But later in the show I’m gonna ask you if that’s actually happening.

There’s a couple more sort of data points that I wanna test here a little bit ’cause at this show we actually like to test our hypotheses to be sure they actually hold together, and if not, why not? So let’s go back to the fact that I presented earlier that now we, 15% of Fortune 500 CEOs are in their late 60s, and that’s a doubling from about 10 years ago.

So on the one hand, the doubling might give us pause wow, that’s a lot. But on the other hand, it means that 85% of CEOs are not in their late 60s. Check me on this. Are we really making too big a deal of this, or is there a trend there that you do think we need to keep an eye on?

CONLEY: I would say, every case is a case of one, and so it’s hard to say across the board. I do think that for larger companies, the board of directors needs to be a little bit more activist in terms of making sure that an older CEO is still staying, like a modern elder.

They’re being as curious as they are wise and focusing on innovation and bringing in new ideas. So I think it’s requiring a little bit more vigilance from the board of directors of these companies.

CHAKRABARTI: Aha, okay. So there is a lot of responsibility that a board holds, and I think you’re right. We can actually look and cherry-pick examples of when boards have not done that.

The Sumner Redstone example from early in the 2000s is a really great example of that. But on the other hand, and this has come up actually in different ways in every one of our episodes this week, and that is the past 25 years have also held some major disruptions globally, socially, economically, financially, the two of them being the 2007, 2008 financial crash and then also, of course, COVID.

A board is charged with the fiduciary responsibility of keeping a company’s leadership on track and strong. Do you think there might have been a hesitation on the part of boards of various large companies to really bring in brand new leadership when there was so much political and economic uncertainty over the past couple of decades.

CONLEY: Meghna, I think that’s accurate. I think that when the world is swirling around and crazy, you tend to get a little bit more conservative in your decision-making, when in fact, maybe the opposite is needed. And so I do think that we have to recognize that. But also, let’s also recognize that the average age of boards has also been increasing. So if your board is the same age as the CEO, then there’s almost a sympathy there. So I think boards need to be younger as well.

CHAKRABARTI: No, completely, and everyone’s on each other’s boards as well.

CONLEY: Yeah, exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: It can be a hermetically sealed bubble there.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Chip, hang on here for just a second because we have another story of another CEO.

So everyone, I’d like you to meet Michael McMullen.

MICHAEL McMULLEN: I just turned 65. I just went on Medicare. So life’s been great. Active grandfather, a husband, and enjoying life.

CHAKRABARTI: Michael could still be working. His health is good. He’s full of energy. He retired while still performing very well as CEO of Agilent Technologies.

Now, Agilent is a spinoff company of the once mega blue chip Hewlett-Packard. Agilent focuses on electronics management and life sciences. And when Michael left in May of 2024, he was running a $7 billion revenue business and managing roughly 20,000 employees. Michael was in the job for nine years.

McMULLEN: Once you’ve established yourself and you’ve got the support of the board, the investors, the employees, it’s a great place to be because you’ve reached the pinnacle of your professional life.

All your incentives are for you to stay if you’re being successful. Compensation, affiliation, recognition, power. A whole system is geared towards keeping a high performing CEO in the role. I think they had hoped I would stay longer. The compensation is quite, quite good. My best years were probably $45 million or so a year, unrealized pay.

I think my target pay was 20-some million. The compensation increased pretty significantly over the years. There’s a fear of losing that, which is, “Oh, I’m losing that big compensation. I’m losing that status. I’m losing that power. Who am I as a person?” It’s hard to step back and say, “This company will go on without me.”

I used to have this discussion with our team because they said, “Oh, Mike, you’ve been here a few decades,” right? And that is so unusual these days. But why did I want to stay with the company? Because we were growing. New things were happening. I think you’ve got to create that … if you look at the top of HP and Agilent, there was movement, and people don’t see opportunities for advancement, don’t see opportunities for growth, are concerned that maybe the company’s getting stuck in its ways.

You’re gonna lose really good people. The company’s performance today may be strong, but what’s in the pipeline? Where are your leaders? Where are your new ideas? What’s the age of your workforce? Are you able to attract the new talent? I think you can stay too long. You really need to think of the CEO as a role you play.

It’s not who you are as a person. And it’s hard to not let your ego get in the way, which was, “Hey, I’ve had this great track record. Nobody ever can do this better than I can.” When I started to be in the role about five years or so, I started thinking how long do I want to do this?” And I was loving the role, and I put a dartboard out there that said, about 10 years or so would be a good run.

There aren’t formal programs within companies to help CEOs on the transition out. A lot of energy is put into developing CEO candidates to assess them, to support them while in role to deliver. But if you’re doing well as CEO, the board and investors want you to continue doing that. Probably at least two years or so in advance of when I actually announced my retirement, we were, I was getting quite serious in terms of thinking through what are the next phases of my life going to look like?

I don’t at all like the word retirement. I keep very active on boards, time with the grandchildren, time with my wife, family. You’re in a next phase of your life. You’re not retired. I’m always keeping a close eye on the Agilent stock price and how company … people are viewing the company, and I stay in touch with the CEO and others.

I’m happy to see that the company continues to do well.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Michael McMullen, former CEO of Agilent Technologies. I’d like to bring Damien Faughnan into the conversation. Damien runs an executive coaching practice where he advises CEOs increasingly on transitioning out of that role, and he’s advised more than 1,200 CEOs across Fortune 500 private equity-backed and privately held organizations as well, and he joins us from Palm Springs, California.

Damien, welcome to On Point.

DAMIEN FAUGHNAN: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be part of this conversation.

CHAKRABARTI: Now actually, if I understand correctly, Michael McMullen is one of the people that you helped in the transition out of the corner office. Is that right?

FAUGHNAN: That’s correct, yes. I helped him when he was a CEO candidate, and it was only natural then that I would prepare him to leave.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, interesting. Okay, so when you first started coaching CEOs, you were just stepping into that role, and as you said, for some people, as they were also coming into leadership roles, but then you transitioned to focusing on exiting CEOs. Why, what made you think that there was a need for that?

FAUGHNAN: I suppose it was a natural evolution in my conversations with my clients that at some point we started to talk about when they would leave. And then I started to see that it was a much bigger need. Because in 2025 Spencer Stuart produced some data, and hidden in that data is the fact that 25% of 1,000 CEOs surveyed reported that they had spent only a little time, 25% said that they’d spent considerable time planning their next chapter. So that means 75% are not planning extensively for what comes next.

CHAKRABARTI: In a way that seems very human to me. It may not be the best leadership decision, but it’s almost like planning your own funeral.

FAUGHNAN: Absolutely.

Bill, Mike, Chip have all alluded to the fact that these are executives who have carefully cultivated a career, and so their identity as a person becomes very connected to the role. And so when they think about leaving they think about this anticipatory loss of identity, loss of meaning, in addition to all the other things that they might lose.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, I would like to ask you both, and Damien, I’ll just stick with you for a second here. It’s one thing for a CEO him or herself, to think, “Okay, I’m burning out,” or, “I’ve been here too long. Maybe I don’t have the same sort of innovative streak I did before.” If they recognize that in themselves, that’s one thing.

But I’m wondering if there are other signals outside the person, him or herself, that can tell a CEO, “You need to start thinking about when to leave.” And if there are such signals, do folks recognize them? Damien, I’ll first turn to you on that.

FAUGHNAN: I’d love to think that every CEO had that level of self-awareness.

I’m not convinced that they do. I think that some CEOs will experience what I would call a cosmic two-by-four. So they have something that, yeah, we laugh, but it’s something that happens to them, either a health crisis or they experience a hostile takeover, or there’s some sort of a personal issue that they have.

But absent that, I think it takes a very self-aware CEO to say, “Hey, look, you know what? I’m feeling more drained. I don’t know that I have the energy to go on.” That’s a very tender place for a very powerful person to reach.

CHAKRABARTI: Chip, I’m thinking there should be external signals, share price, a view of the board, maybe discontent amongst employees.

CONLEY: I don’t know what they would be, but are there such signals? I think we need more role models, people like Michael McMullen, who Damien very capably coached. And we need more programs that help people to move into their … post-ambition, pre-retirement, so P-A-P-R. Basically means that it’s not about trying to need to remain indispensable and have a singular focus of one thing in your life, but it’s asking the question, I wanna keep contributing, and how might I create a purpose portfolio of things?

So we just don’t have very many examples of that out there, and I think we just, we need more press, media, and role models, for people who realize that it’s time for them to move from success to succession.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, interesting. I wanted to stick with the idea that a company’s performance should be a strong indicator of whether a CEO needs to think about exiting or not because so much of CEO compensation, or at least a significant amount of it, is directly tied to how a company is performing.

But then on the other hand, if share prices start creeping down, that’s actually almost too late, right? Something has already happened in the company that shouldn’t have. And I’m thinking back to what Bill George said near the top of the show, that just doing business right now is a very different thing than it was even 25 years ago because of the pace of political and technological change.

Damien, do you think that advancing age is potentially, can inhibit a person from being able to keep up with that change as a leader?

FAUGHNAN: I think it’s gonna depend on the individual, but it can. So think about a CEO as being very experienced, and so they have what we would call the experience paradox.

So they’ve got a lot of power recognition, they’ve got a lot of good judgment, but at some point, as one of the earlier people talked about on your show is that can become rigid. They lose their curiosity. They lose the ability to adapt and learn, and they sort of plateau, and someone has to call that.

CHAKRABARTI: Chip, your thoughts?

CONLEY: Yeah, I think not only does someone have to call that, but I think we need to have organizations that are constantly renewing themselves. And at the end of the day it starts with the most senior person in the organization. And the one question I’ve asked some people who are senior leaders who are fearful of retirement is instead of asking the question, “How will I spend my retirement?”

Might you ask the question, “How will I invest my wisdom?” And whether you’re investing your wisdom within the organization and creating a wiser organization, or you’re investing your wisdom outside the organization, that’s up to the CEO.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I do want to get in a few minutes to solutions on how to manage and in fact leverage the wisdom, experience money and connections that these CEOs have after they leave their formal leadership position. So we will talk about that in a second. But I wanted to focus for a moment on how an aging CEO might have an impact further down the org chart.

So first of all, Damien, CEOs aren’t just business leaders. They also establish a culture or they are the exemplars of the culture they’d like to see in their companies. This can be both good and bad. Do you have thoughts on how as a CEO becomes in their late 60s, early 70s, that sort of cultural influence changes?

FAUGHNAN: Yeah it can. The CEO’s behavior clearly sets the standard for how everybody behaves in the organization. I think that the wisest CEOs I’ve kind of worked with have very deliberately done what things like what Chip has talked about, become a mentern, what I would call reverse mentoring, finding younger people in the organization who can teach them and who can, who grew up as digital natives and who can share their perspective about AI, being open to being in reverse mentoring.

I say always do skip-level meetings where you’re talking to much younger people about their perspective on the business. These are some of the best practices. The best advice I give my clients, when you have a problem that feels like you can’t solve it, go talk to the young person who’s on the front lines.

Because I guarantee you they’re not gonna give you the PowerPoint version, and they’re gonna give you a perspective you don’t have.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, so Chip, this is interesting because that’s exactly what I was wondering about in terms of it’s not infrequently that I hear younger workers, and I’m not talking about people in their 20s, people in their 30s and 40s saying, “God, I really wish my company would adopt flexible work hours or have a better family leave or medical leave option,” but they feel that their CEO, who might be in their mid-60s, isn’t necessarily amenable to that. Because that person doesn’t, isn’t living a life right now where that kind of flexibility or the needs of younger children are front of mind.

And so that’s the kind of thing I’m wondering about in terms of not just business innovation, but even internal company culture innovation. Is there a problem there?

CONLEY: There is a problem, and because the kinds of cultural issues and social issues we’re dealing with today are very different. It’s not even just taking care of kids, it’s taking care of elders.

It’s that sandwich generation of people in midlife who are dealing with, caring for family members on both sides. When you’re at 65 or 70, you’re probably not dealing with that. But this is where the HR departments and other senior leaders who may be a little bit younger have to raise their voices.

A CEO who’s stuck in their ways, frankly, if they are stuck in their ways, they’re either running a company that’s in an old school industry that isn’t changing much, and that’s why they still have their job, or they’re not going to have their job much longer. Because the reality is that a CEO today is not about just business strategy.

They’re about culture and social strategy and frankly, brand strategy that has a lot to do with giving the world the sense that a company has great values.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. No, that’s a really good point. One more thing about this, because Damien when our producer Paige was doing the research for today’s episode, I think you told her something about actual changes that happen in the brain when you are for many years in a position of significant power.

Do you wanna talk about that?

FAUGHNAN: Sure. Yeah, I think when you when you get elevated to the CEO role, I always say that not only did you get a promotion, but your brain got a promotion. There are several neurological adaptions that happen, that can be both useful and problematic. Things like it can make you blind to your own biases.

You start to believe your own Kool-Aid because people stop questioning you, and perhaps you stop asking questions. A second thing is overconfidence. This comes with tenure in the role where you start to take bigger risks because you start to believe that you have the board has confidence in you.

You have confidence when you’re in the boardroom. But that can lead to blind spots. And I would say the final thing is you start to think really big, and you forget about the details and the impact on people. So there’s several adaptions that happen. These are not character flaws. I want to be clear about that.

They’re simply that your brain gets used to all the adulation and the certainty and the success. And so a really wise CEO is looking for people or to surround himself with voices that disagree with him or her. They’re looking for what we talked about earlier, not just diversity of age, but diversity of experience and perspective.

You need young, and you need people that don’t look like you. So that’s what I recommend is make sure you got people who challenge you.

CHAKRABARTI: There’s one more thing about aging CEOs that I’d like to ask you about and that is, again, looking deeper into the org chart.

At the top of the show, you heard me say that for Fortune 500 companies, we’re literally only talking about 500 people in America. And so it’s a fraction of a percent, but they’re indicative of something else. And I think one of you said this earlier, and that is the workforce overall is aging.

I think right now something like a quarter of the American workforce is 55 and above, and that’s a new thing in America. And it’s for a bunch of reasons, right? As you said, people are living longer. People are living healthier. Some people have to continue to work. But that also means, as I said earlier in the show, that younger people below them are having a tougher time having that typical advancement through the ranks of the careers that they’re in.

And here’s one outcome of that. There was a 2024, I believe, study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it found that the pay gap between those over 55 and those under 35 has been growing. Now, that gap is going to always exist because older people, having been in the workforce longer, will have higher paying jobs.

But it’s the gap that’s been growing, so the pay divide’s getting larger. And it’s been growing by, it grew 60% between 1979 and 2018, meaning people over the age of 55 are making relatively much more money than they were before, and people under the age of 35 aren’t. Chip, I think that’s a long-term problem, that kind of generational, and I’m wondering what you think about that.

CONLEY: Welcome to America in 2026. Yeah. We have both an income and a wealth gap that is only getting greater, and I think it’s part of the reason younger people are questioning what they call later stage capitalism. And so this is a bigger problem than just the age gap and it speaks to this idea of the disparity.

And I think it’s a really important issue, and frankly, I think it’ll be a bigger issue in the 2028 presidential election than people are giving it credit for.

CHAKRABARTI: Damien, do you have any thoughts about that?

Absolutely. I can’t add anything more other than, these massive pay packages are rewarding sometimes the wrong behavior.

They’re rewarding tenure. And that gap, that wealth and income gap is going to be a huge problem in the future.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, and this is where I see the problem going far beyond the C-suite. Talking about senior or middle management as well in many corporations. So let’s get to then some solutions.

First and foremost Damien, is there evidence that when you have leadership teams, there’s not always going to just be one CEO, but when you have C-suite teams that are more age diverse, that better business is done better? Is there evidence for that?

FAUGHNAN: Offhand, I can only give you anecdotal evidence. In the executive meetings, you need people with diverse points of view, and when you have a CEO who doesn’t foster that kind of environment, it’s inevitable that your engagement drops, your performance drops, your commitment to new ideas, to doing things differently change, and that ultimately impacts performance.

I don’t have any compelling data other than experience. And people leave. People will leave if they feel that they don’t have a voice at the table.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Chip do you have thoughts?

CONLEY: Yeah. I think one of the most important things for us to focus on is how do we help senior leaders realize that the old form of retirement, which was you work 100% on a Friday and you move to 0% on a Monday, is old-school thinking.

That we have to actually focus on, and Damien and I know each other through the Modern Elder Academy, and he’s one of our purpose fellows the idea of a portfolio career is something that we should be aspiring to, which means that you don’t have a singular job, but you actually have a portfolio of purposes that you have.

And I think, looking at how do we help people to see at senior levels, not just CEOs, but others, how do we help them to see that it’s not about holding on to what you’ve been doing? It’s actually to curate a portfolio of activities in your life that give you the space to actually feel like you still matter.

CHAKRABARTI: What do you think about this? Damien, I’ll turn to you, because Chip earlier had said that boards play an important role here. What if a board said, “As a term of your employment, new CEO,” who’s 55, let’s say, “one of the things we’re gonna want you to do is, from the beginning, actually, plan your not necessarily your exit, but put a succession place model in place. Look around you and start cultivating the younger people who you think could be the next generation of leaders. Bring them to the table such that when the time does come for you to step down, the company can do it, smoothly and effectively.”

That being a requirement of a CEO’s contract.

FAUGHNAN: So I quite often that is a requirement and an expectation that they don’t meet. But I’ll tell you what the conversation that the board doesn’t have with the CEO. They will often all get comfortable and not ask the CEO about a timeframe for when they’re thinking about their exit.

So there isn’t real kind of juice in the succession conversations around the CEO’s exit. And what that doesn’t permit is what Chip talked about, is it doesn’t allow a CEO to get excited and plan for their future. And when you don’t have a plan for your future and supports from places like Modern Elder Academy, a coach, whatever, you’re inclined to stay there, and you’re less inclined to say that somebody who’s an up-and-coming leader is ready to take your job.

So there’s some complex dynamics here. Some companies do it well. I think the data would suggest that a lot of companies do not do it well. But boards do have a big role in having that conversation with a CEO, supporting them in thinking about their future.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Chip, can we go back to what you did when you were at Airbnb?

Because when you started talking about it, it seemed like there was a really good model there in terms of almost two-way age-based mentorship.

CONLEY: Yeah I think more and more companies, especially tech companies that have younger CEOs, need to consider that there are people out there who might be former CEOs, or like I was, who could come in and be that, they would call it the gray hair thing, and some people call it the adult in the room. It’s not that. Brian Chesky was an adult, and a very smart one. But it is, how do you match the wisdom of someone who’s got 20 years of experience beyond Brian with someone who’s got the dynamism and vision that Brian had?

And that’s what worked there, which is I wrote a book called Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, and in the process of writing that book, that’s how the Modern Elder Academy came about, was saying, “We need to mint modern elders. We need to have a place where people can come later in their career, not to hold on to power, but instead to ask, how can I matter in a new way in the workplace?”

And it’s not necessarily gonna be holding on to being a CEO.

CHAKRABARTI: I wanna have the boards keep coming up, and I’m really glad that they do because they are literally in charge of the wellbeing of the company longterm. There was a study for, that looked at some 356 businesses in the United States and China for a period of 10 years and the study concluded that the ideal tenure for a CEO was something like 4.8 years.

Let’s call it five years. Now, we could debate that, but there’s a number. What I’m curious about Damien, is that over the course of this hour, we’ve heard many CEOs who when they do exit, they don’t actually fully exit the company because they stay on the board. And Michael McMullen earlier said that’s not necessarily the best idea.

I’m just wondering what you think about that.

FAUGHNAN: Look, I think it’s a terrible idea because it creates the possibility of a shadow leadership, where it can be an insurance policy for a board to keep around a seasoned CEO. But you have to really ask, where is that person adding the value?

And I think it’s up to a former CEO to actually define what their value is in terms of mentoring but it can be a big mistake to keep a former CEO around in not a clear role.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.