A History of Adult Supervision in Silicon Valley
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
One example I know personally is a company where the senior staff were all in their 60s but have been winging it since their late 30s and had very little documentation and no real method. They hired an operations manager in their 40s who managed to reduce the amount of overtime required to produce the same result by about 30%, purely by eliminating busywork and making sure everyone knew what they were doing. In this case, the operations manager was the "adult supervision" required.
In fact, it was Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page who popularized the concept in a 2001 interview with Charlie Rose. When Rose asked the pair, then still in their 20s, why they had brought in 46-year-old Sun Microsystems and Novell Networks veteran Eric Schmidt as CEO earlier that year, Brin responded, "Parental supervision, to be honest."
Effective startups focus their innovation on a limited number of things. If you're really innovating in areas A and B, you pick the safe, boring choices in C-Z. That means that in C-Z, you benefit a lot from experience. The people with lots of experience are older. It can feel weird to turn over a lot of power to people who are much older, especially when a) the nominal progression to adulthood involves getting away from that, and b) it involves admitting there are important things you don't really understand, which is a hard admission for founders who have spent their lives mainly distinguished for being super smart.
That has to be uncomfortable, and so I admire Page and Brin for using humor to deal with uncomfortable truth rather than sweeping it under the rug.
That resume would be much less impressive today.
Maybe because Eric Schmidt got taken away from them?
Sculley wasn't good at finding the next great thing, so he's a perfect example for most startups. Once the founders figure out what their real business is, the key is execution. If the founders can't do it, bring in someone experienced to do it.
For example, he didn't fire Steve Jobs, despite the popular myth.
The Board demoted Steve and he quit is how Sculley tells it.