It was a night when thousands of 20-somethings were glued to their laptop screens for a battle whose stakes were both immediate and metaphorical, a contest between experience and youth, veteran versus vitality. Mike Tyson, a decorated, tested legend of boxing, was taking on Jake Paul. Mr. Paul, decades younger and with fewer fights under his belt, radiated energy, but his reputation was based more on social media videos than prowess in the ring. The newcomer triumphed.
Of course, in sports the advantages of being the scrappy, enthusiastic upstart in a fight with an old hand are obvious. There’s an energy that’s visible in quick leaps, fast punches, unflagging endurance. The same may be true in math, music or the arts. In politics, though, the fresh face is often written off. The median age of a U.S. senator is the age at which many American retire. The last two presidents were born before the invention of the transistor radio and the hula hoop.
But some political contests force voters to laser in on whether all that grizzled experience is really what they want.
New York’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday was one of those. The competition between the two front-runners, Zohran Mamdani, 33, and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, 67, played out not just on the plain of policy but also on the plain of experience versus enthusiasm: Did New Yorkers want a mayor who was relatively new to local politics, or someone whose record, scandals and all, was basically tattooed on the city’s brain? If New York is “a city for only the very young,” its politics don’t often seem so, shuffling well-known names around seats of power like musical chairs. What’s the value, some watching the mayor’s race wondered, in someone totally new?
That question feels urgent on a national level, too, not long after a presidential campaign that featured a septuagenarian and an octogenarian, and weeks after the exodus of a lightening rod Zoomer from the Democratic National Committee.
The dichotomy of wizened experience versus fresh-faced enthusiasm has played out many times in the business world, too — in corporate boardrooms, where silver-haired executives debated their firm’s succession; on startup teams, where founders scratched their heads over whether to bring in veterans or workers with fresh ideas.
‘The Quintessential Boomer Boss’
In many workplaces, leaders have found that there are risks in both categories. Choose an experienced leader and you get same old, same old: stale ideas and stale ways of operating. Inexperienced leaders might not be familiar with those stale norms — but that might allow them to remake toxic cultures. In the best of cases, some are able to blend their enthusiasm with their newly earned experience. Many American workplaces, in other words, offer their own rebuke to gerontocracy, or rule by old people.
This is borne out in leadership studies. Martin Reeves, who leads the research arm of Boston Consulting Group, recently looked at aging leadership’s effects on a company’s growth. The research measured companies not just by their past performance, but by their potential, a metric the researchers called “vitality.” Examining 1,000 publicly listed firms, the study found that the older the average age of leadership was, the lower the firm’s vitality. “There is this tendency for the top leaders to hang on,” Mr. Reeves said, sounding like someone just as apt to be looking at the Fortune 500 or Congress.
So fresh thinking can be what a workplace needs to stay vital. But many organizations are designed to drain it out, to minimize risk and focus on the familiar. This is what Sarah Kunst, who runs a venture capital fund, has come to believe: There are very few places that reward brash, novel thinking.
“If you step into, of all things, a hedge fund office, you’ll often find that people will have a contrarian trade and they can make a tremendous amount of money by looking at every other person in their office and saying, You guys are wrong,” Ms. Kunst said. “Whereas politics doesn’t work at that speed. Being at odds with everybody else in Albany or city hall or D.C. can be grating. You tend not to be rewarded for having that kind of energy.”
It’s that “kind of energy” that allowed Mr. Mamdani to pursue a campaign strategy, and political priorities, that the Democratic Party’s mainstream would most likely never have gotten behind. His approach underscores what Astra Taylor, a political organizer, sees as the advantage of youthful inexperience: Young people haven’t already tried and failed 100 times.
“They bring this kind of willingness to experiment that can come from naïveté,” Ms. Taylor said, adding that they also have a fundamental investment in how their experiments turn out. “Part of being young is that you have more life ahead of you.”
New leaders can bring energy or fresh thinking, but they can also reset norms. New York’s primary on Tuesday, to some, felt like a referendum on a particular old-school style of leadership. Amanda Litman, president of the Democratic group Run for Something, who last month published a book about millennial and Gen Z leadership called “When We’re in Charge,” saw the primary as “part of a larger changing of the guard.”
“You had Cuomo, the quintessential boomer boss who harassed his workers, veers from goal to goal with the only unifying ideology being his own political power,” Ms. Litman said. “Compared to Zohran’s millennial cringe, which was, in the best possible way, sincere, earnest.”
Other young people who have worked for stubborn older bosses felt that same glint of recognition in the victory of a newcomer over a boomer with a bad-boss record. As she watched the primary results on Tuesday, Ariella Steinhorn, who founded a firm called Lioness that gives young workers a platform to report accusations of abuse, thought about a former manager who threw his phone at the wall when he was upset. Natasha Anushri Anandaraja, a doctor who filed a federal complaint accusing her former employer of sex and age discrimination, recalled the old, male bosses who shouted over her and thumped their fists on the table during meetings.
“People are at this point where they’re willing to take a risk on people who are less experienced in the institutional way because the institutional way isn’t working for us,” Dr. Anandaraja said.
Experience Can Catch Up Quickly
Of course, no institutions can function without people who know how they work, who to call in a crisis and what it takes to get an idea from paper to practice. Mr. Reeves, the researcher at Boston Consulting Group, tells clients that teams have to balance people who are energized by the work with more seasoned players for whom certain routines are all but instinct. Howard Lerman, a tech founder, recalled leading his own team of around 500 people at the age of 33, and feeling that his youthful inexperience could be balanced with good advisers.
At his tech firm, Mr. Lerman recently hired a group of young employees who he calls “the Squad.” “They have zero sales experience,” he said. “Given their spunk, we felt they would be able to do something new.”
Some companies are now rethinking how they evaluate job candidates to account for qualities that go beyond experience. Kelly Monahan, who oversees research for the freelancing platform Upwork, has found that the degrees and credentials people have bear little correlation to what they’ll contribute on the job.
People have all kinds of qualities — agility, curiosity, a willingness to ask questions — that don’t come through in a traditional C.V., one of the reasons Google officials long talked about valuing a willingness to learn over credentials. Some workplaces are so invested in emboldening young, inexperienced voices that they’re doing reverse mentoring. This is something Warner Music Group tried a version of, with young employees coaching older ones (and vice versa).
Some political organizers and strategists believe that putting younger leaders in charge has ripple effects: Even younger people watch them and gain a new sense of what’s possible. It is no longer about a political moment, but rather a generation making sense of how power works. Ms. Taylor, the organizer, compared it to young people who were at a politically formative age in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, or in 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became a congresswoman.
“This kind of stuff can be incredibly contagious,” Ms. Taylor said. “Now they’re like, ‘Oh, the world is more malleable than I thought.’”
People are malleable, too. Even for the young and enthusiastic, experience can catch up quickly. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s career trajectory is a perfect distillation of this. “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” the congresswoman said in 2018, when she was launching her unlikely campaign. Seven years later, she has drawn progressive criticism for sometimes moderating her stances and collaborating with Democrats who are closer to the center. Some might say she is melding her youthful enthusiasm with experience.
She is also making herself available to Mr. Mamdani to help him do the same. A few hours before it became clear Mr. Mamdani would take a commanding lead in the primary, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez offered him advice on TikTok. “I know how it felt on that last day right before the results in my first race,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez told Mr. Mamdani knowingly.
He replied: “You’ve blazed the trail.”
Source photographs for illustration above: Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times; Alex Kent/Getty Images.
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
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