If it feels like the winds of change are upon us, it’s because they are. After decades in leadership, high-profile leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted announced they’d be leaving behind their behemoth legacies. Their empty seats are waiting to be filled by a new wave of up-and-comers.
We saw this coming. The oldest baby boomers (of which there are 76.4 million) have been of retirement age since 2011, making this leadership vacuum inevitable. What was less anticipated is how long it would take for them to step down. The average age of CEOs in 2008 was 46 years old–today it’s 54. The Senate is the oldest it’s ever been with Congress dominated by the over-60 set. Two of our last three presidents were baby boomers.
