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I was talking to a friend who is an experienced, highly successful saleswoman describing the dysfunction at her current company. Why don’t you leave, I asked her? I’m 64, she replied. If I leave, who’s going to hire me?

Fortune 500 corporate re-engineering initiatives starting in the 1990s led to widespread layoffs of experienced employees, often with 20 or more years of experience with the companies that had hired them out of college.

For the first time in the post World War II era, people could no longer aim to spend their career with a single large employer. As long-term corporate employment became more volatile, media reports began to describe the challenges of job seekers over the age of 40, who were often avoided by hiring managers.

Age discrimination was illegal, but common. Fast-forward 25 years. The age at which professionals run into age discrimination has risen considerably.

My subjective opinion, which as an executive recruiter has a lot of data points, suggests that for professionals and executives with a high-value proposition, getting hired into small- to medium-size companies is still viable into their late 50s. Larger corporations are less likely to hire someone with 35 years’ experience.

Given our society’s fascination with youth has in no way abated, why has that age gone up?

1. Older people are relatively more youthful than before. The pressure of our youth-driven media has led many middle-aged and older people to exercise and eat healthier. With advances in health care, “50 is the new 40.”

2. As professional skill-sets have become more complex than before, and are subject to frequent obsolescence, companies are less able to discriminate on age when it is so difficult to find highly qualified employees.

3. Training programs aren’t what they used to be. It is striking, though a positive development, that organizations are willing to hire salespeople in their 50s. But older salespeople are more likely to have been trained more rigorously than younger ones.

Given that economic disruptions are likely to force many employees to work several years longer, the trend of companies being willing to hire older employees will likely continue to escalate.

Hiring patterns in professional sports offer some parallels in what to look for when scouting talent for the corporate world. A safe choice in professional sports is classically someone who has dominated at ever level of competition.

The corporate equivalent of “dominating at every level” is an executive consistently having a significant, positive impact in nearly every job she or he has had. Don’t expect to see success in every role; even superstars lose some games.

But if these executives have not dominated consistently, they are either sporadic performers or are lacking in their abilities to evaluate roles and choose the right employers. That’s a shortcoming in judgment that may also manifest itself on the job.

In the corporate world, “dominating,” or excelling at increasing levels of responsibility, has several benefits:

• Proving consistency – Even potential is of questionable value if it is not being fully realized in its current environment. Is this someone who exerts herself under all circumstances, or sporadically? If sporadically, does your organizational culture have the necessary elements that will bring out her best?

• Validating potential – are they good, or lucky? If you are extrapolating off a single job, there is no way to know.

A marketing vice president at a new-product division of a Fortune 50 company told me that he and his peers would sometimes spend hours debating whether a candidate’s success in a previous role signified that he could excel in their organization. The CEO would often play devil’s advocate by suggesting that the individual had simply been lucky, in the right place at the right time.

I suggested to him that the root cause of their dilemma was not negativity on the part of the CEO, but her sophistication. A single event does not constitute a statistical sample. The debates over the candidate’s single major success were an attempt to compensate for insufficient historical data with which to analyze under what conditions the individual was successful, and why.

Domination is fundamentally a quality of the mind; a self-fulfilling combination of ruthlessness and reliability. Some businesspeople are seemingly born with it, but most must be cultivated to dominate with roles that challenge them — but not so much that they cannot excel.

In the 1960s, Minnesota was a hotbed of computer innovation. In that mainframe era, dominated by “IBM and the seven dwarfs,” three of the top eight computing companies were located in Minnesota: Control Data, Univac and Honeywell. In the 70s and 80s, Cray Research was a dominant player in supercomputers.

With the advent of the personal computer in the early 80s, Unix workstations in the 90s and the internet, the Minnesota computer industry receded in importance. Silicon Valley became the center of innovation, with the giants that dominate today.

If Minnesota lost the war for modern systems software, it remains well-positioned to compete in the current “Software as a Service” (SaaS) era. As software functionality increasingly migrates to the “cloud,” great opportunities remain in digitizing the workflow of every industry, hosted on the cloud and accessed by customers on their web browser.

Minnesota ought to be well-positioned to succeed in this environment. For a variety of reasons, Minnesota has not become a first-tier entrepreneurial center in the SaaS era.

But 11 years ago, a local group of C-suite leaders organized to help the Twin Cities become a regional center. Six of the executives, including well-respected Jim Moar, formed Minnesota Emerging Software Advisory (MESA).

The nonprofit offers pro bono counseling and mentoring services to founders of early-stage SaaS startups.

The 32 mentors focus on what they call the “wildly important goal,” the critical success factor the new company needs to get to the next phase of growth and success. The goal is to help lift up companies that will bring new innovations to the field.

MESA has mentored more than 70 emerging growth software companies. I have volunteered my time as an executive recruiter, drawn by its forward-looking mission.

Of those 70 companies, well over half have had major capital funding and about one-third have been acquired. Thousands of jobs have been created.

“I am proud of our mentor group who volunteer their time and offer their ‘been there, done that’ experience to software entrepreneurs to speed growth,” Moar said. “Entrepreneurs appreciate the open, candid discussions and feel free to raise difficult questions and subjects as they know the mentors are only interested in their success.”

As an executive recruiter, I spend my time talking to business software executives. It is rare to see a résumé that is not competently written. And yet, I often suggest a rewrite.

Résumés should be considered marketing collateral, but many end up being a documentation of work history.

Think of your résumé as a series of “elevator speeches.” If you were in an elevator at a conference with a C-level executive in your industry who asked you what you do, you would not describe the granular aspects of your job. You would tell him or her concisely the essence of your role and the business problems you solve.

You would have a 30-second version for a trip to the 20th floor, a 90-second version for the 40th floor, and a five-minute version for the top of a skyscraper.

A person reading a résumé makes a series of decisions as to how much time to give to yours. The reader will scan the objective for 30 seconds to see if you are a broad fit. So your objective must clearly and energetically communicate what you do, like a 20-floor elevator speech.

If you pass that test, the reader will give another 90 seconds to scan your last couple of jobs. You must describe the company and responsibilities, leaving out tactical details that are implicit to your role.

If you pass the second test, the reader will take five minutes to read your résumé thoroughly and think about how you might fit into the organization. If you are a fit, this will hopefully result in a phone call or interview.

Let’s say you are a CFO. On your résumé, you could go into detail and write “responsible for accounts payable, accounts receivable, accounting, financial planning, etc.” Or you can assume that anyone hiring for a CFO knows the general responsibilities already and say “responsible for all finance and accounting functions. Accomplishments include …”

Treating a résumé as a marketing document with the substance of your work history embedded in it is much more powerful than elaborately documenting your job history.

Historically, striving to take on additional responsibilities was seen as a way for ambitious employees to demonstrate their fitness for promotion.

But in the past several months, “quiet quitting” has risen to prominence. The term describes the increasing trend of younger professional workers choosing not to exert themselves beyond their formal responsibilities and hours of work.

For one, not everyone is a workaholic striver, and over the past two decades more workers have not seen the connection between their own rewards and giving 70-hour weeks for their employers to meet their goals.

How bad is your job? Regardless of your answer, the question is a modern one. Only in contemporary affluent societies do individuals have “careers” and the luxury to seriously object to a monotonous or overwhelming job. Until less than 100 years ago, most people struggled to adequately feed and clothe their families.

Nothing captures the existential angst that accompanies unfulfilling knowledge work as well as “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a short story written by Herman Melville in 1853, 150 years before the internet economy. Melville, of course, is most famous as the author of Moby Dick, a tale of a sea captain’s deeply codependent relationship with a troubled white whale.

The story is told from the perspective of a New York attorney in the pre–Civil War era, as the Industrial Revolution is starting to boom. From our 21st century perspective, the attorney serves as a primitive “business process outsourcer” for clients’ financial and legal back-office duties.

The attorney employs several scriveners (copy clerks), who spend their days monotonously checking the accuracy of complex legal contracts. The contracts are handwritten; it is still several decades before the invention of the typewriter, and a century before the copying machine.

Though the attorney goes out of his way to avoid tension, he has managed to create a working environment in his law office that is profoundly stressful, albeit in a low-key fashion. Melville gleefully describes how the oppressive office space felt like it sat at the bottom of a dark well — a “cubicle farm” before its time.

The increased volume of work from his government appointment leads the attorney to hire a quiet new scrivener, Bartleby: “At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents.”

Bartleby soon loses his compulsion to proofread, though, and begins to refuse work. “I would prefer not to,” he responds to an increasing range of requests, confounding the attorney with his passive resistance. Bartleby refuses to work and refuses to leave, even making the office his residence.

The attorney isn’t a bad man, but he is ultimately projecting his own insecurities onto Bartleby. When he pleads with Bartleby to reciprocate and be a little reasonable, the scrivener marvelously replies: “At present, I would prefer not to be a little reasonable”.

In this respect, Bartleby resembles the central character in 1999’s “Office Space,” who goes through the movie in a carefree hypnotic trance, captivating the usually heartless efficiency experts and driving them to repeatedly promote him, in an effort to get him to care.

What meaning does Bartleby have for modern office workers? To some, it might speak of the potential for emotional burnout inherent in a corporate culture obsessed with continuous improvement and relentless growth. As the nature of work continues to change radically, employers and employees will renegotiate formal and informal expectations of each other.

Many believe one reason for the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago is that countries lacking freedom of speech are unable to compete in a knowledge-based global economy, where the speed of the flow of information is a major competitive advantage.

In its last years, the Soviet Union kept copy machines under lock and key, so fearful were they of citizens sharing nonapproved information. China, in contrast, attempted to build a world-class capitalist economy with Communist authority in the background.

From about 1990 to 2010, this worked well for Western corporations and China (though not so well for American workers who lost millions of manufacturing jobs). China monumentally expanded the quantity and quality of its manufacturing for global customers. Western corporate customers were happy with the results — inexpensive, moderately high-quality products to sell around the world.

The negatives were China’s consistent ignoring of Western companies’ intellectual property rights, and hampering foreign companies from entering the China market without domestic partners.

In 2023, we face a dilemma. Despite its economic success, China, for reasons difficult for Westerners to comprehend, has chosen to increasingly act oppressively to neighboring countries. It is clamping down internally as well, imprisoning high-tech billionaires; controlling citizens through its big data-based social credit system; and imprisoning, oppressing and even killing minority Muslims. The government has also massively increased the power of its armed forces, especially its Navy.

Can Chinese leaders simultaneously maintain a sophisticated capitalist economy and an oppressive regime domestically and internationally? If they can, we are in serious trouble.

But there are reasons to believe that they will be unable to. The distinction between speaking candidly in a business context, a necessity in a fact-based business environment and speaking truth to power in government is a negligible one. If you are unable to tell your political leaders they are wrong, what are the odds you can tell your bosses they are wrong, especially in a country where so many companies are owned by the People’s Liberation Army or the Communist Party?

The recent, brave “White Paper” protests in China also raise the question as to whether a society with hundreds of millions of knowledge workers can be asked to innovate from 9 to 5 and then turn their critical faculties off the rest of the time.

“Moneyball” is a 2004 book by Michael Lewis which described how the Oakland A’s used advanced analytics to find inefficiencies in baseball scouts evaluations of baseball prospects, reducing biases based in traditional heuristics. It also drove increases in home runs and strikeouts, based on their true statistical value in producing runs.

The Moneyball revolution also spread to the NBA, where statistical analysis drove teams to optimize shot efficiency, by taking as many three- pointers and shots at the rim as possible, and reducing midrange shots.

An October article in the Atlantic magazine by Derek Thompson explores the implications of the trend of rigorously quantifying decisions previously made substantially by gut feel. What has been the result of this optimization? Both games have arguably lost much of their aesthetic value.

In baseball, players are taught to swing on a high arc to maximize home runs. They also produce more strikeouts than hits. In the 1970s, Minnesota Twins star Rod Carew mesmerized baseball fans by several times coming close to hitting .400 in a season. But Carew was a singles and doubles hitter, who never had more than 14 homers in a season.

Baseball’s classic aesthetic was more about getting a man on base somehow, moving him to second with a sacrifice bunt, and getting him to score with a single up the middle. The game today is much less subtle.

In the NBA, advanced stats have helped players optimize play. But the subtleties of basketball have often been lost given the overwhelming percentage of plays that are either attempted three-pointers or “pick and rolls” — a classic, highly effective but incredibly boring play, especially when teams run it dozens of times a game.

In his Atlantic article, Thompson describes how this trend has spread to other sectors of the culture. When was the last major innovation in popular music? Rap, which is now over 30 years old. Rock ‘n’ roll stars of the 1960s, innovators then, now in their 80s, are still touring, After all, the numbers tell radio stations and streaming apps what is popular, so they play more of it.

This same dynamic is taking place in the movie industry, where historically it was difficult to predict what would be a hit. About 20 years ago, movie executives discovered that making superhero movies based on classic comic books was a far safer bet, since those had an existing, enthusiastic base of fans who would see the movie multiple time and evangelize for them online. So now we live in the Marvel Universe.

What does this have to do with business outside of entertainment? Actually a lot. In many ways, the past 75 years can be viewed as the Era of Statistical Optimization, first in manufacturing, then in services, now in online customer experience. But we must distinguish between optimizing design and production.

In production, we use statistical optimization to reduce the variance and raise the quality of products, physical or virtual. It is quite another to use algorithms to predict what consumers want. That inevitably results in the producer choosing which product from the present is most palatable to a consumer.

Even “long tail” marketing, which is much more tailored to matching individuals with products, still does not tell us anything about what new thing a customer might want. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, notoriously hated focus groups: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups,” he said. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Creativity is messy, and inherently does not lend itself to statistical optimization by algorithms, no matter the field.

Apple is taking rapid steps to move much of its iPhone manufacturing out of China, primarily to India and Vietnam. Apple had invested heavily in China for decades: for efficiencies of cost; to take advantage of China’s massive amount of engineering human capital; and as a way to penetrate the Chinese market.

The reasons for Apple’s moves to extract itself from China are various. A short list would include China’s handling of Hong Kong and Taiwan autonomy, China’s persecution of its Muslim Uyghur population, and China’s brutal “zero-COVID” policies. Some of these intertwine, as they did in the riots protesting zero-COVID policies at Apple’s Foxconn manufacturing plant in China.

In fairness to Western companies that gambled on China, it seemed like a smart bet at the time. For about 20 years, starting in 1990, China emphasized economic growth above all, and seemed to be slowly leaving its totalitarian past behind. It was also the prevailing opinion that only democracies could succeed in a global, knowledge-based economy, and that the desire for economic success would lead China incrementally to become a free society. But the past 10 years have shown China willing to risk economic gains for control of its citizens — and its neighbors.

This raises some critical questions for companies: In a global economy, what is the appropriate balance between efficiency and resiliency? How much should a firm offshore manufacturing to cheaper countries? How tightly should it pursue just-in-time supply chains? How many key component manufacturers should it use?

I believe it was Warren Buffett who suggested the following thought experiment: If you owned 100% of a company, and had no other sources of income, how would you make decisions regarding risk? The answer, obviously, is that you would be far more cautious than a publicly owned firm would be. 

So if you are Buffett’s hypothetical “only egg in the basket,” you wouldn’t have a single key-component manufacturer near a nuclear plant that is hit by a tsunami, like Toyota did; you wouldn’t move all your iPhone manufacturing to China, despite the incredible cost efficiencies.

A fun aspect of my job as an executive recruiter is talking to people who are changing society: C level executives at SAAS (software as a service) vendors, chief digital officers and chief data officers at Fortune 1000 firms. 

As I talk to people, I often bring up one of the nonprofits I volunteer with. One I wrote about last month — MESA — and the local software executives who volunteer their time mentoring SAAS entrepreneurs.

Another nonprofit is Driving Forward, which helps first generation and under-represented college students on their journey to a meaningful career.

Driving Forward was founded by Marv Richardson and several other Chicago-based technology executives. Richardson was a longtime Minneapolis resident, raised on a farm in Manitoba, educated in Winnipeg and recently CIO of Health Care Service Corp., one of the country’s largest health insurers.

Driving Forward came out of the pandemic, when there were widespread cancellations of college internships. It provides a series of internship opportunities, overseen by volunteer corporate mentors. Students participating are often the first in their families to attend college. Though the program has some large corporate partners, it particularly focuses on smaller companies that might not otherwise have organized internship programs.

Since it was founded three years ago, Driving Forward has rapidly expanded. Though the founders are information technology executives, the program is not limited to IT students or companies.

The nonprofit currently has three offerings: Flagship Case Study, an eight-week internship program rooted in business case competition and professional skills development; mentorship, including one-on-one coaching to develop soft skills, prep for interviews and build a network; and corporate internships, in which students are matched with partner companies.

“As a first-generation college student myself, I deeply understood the value of internships and corporate connections in landing that first good job,” Richardson said. “When my employer and others canceled hundreds of thousands of internships in 2020, Driving Forward was born and started making a difference for students immediately.”

For more information on how to participate as a student or a corporate sponsor, go to Driving Forward’s website, drivingforward.org. 

In the 1960s, Minnesota was a hotbed of computer innovation. In that mainframe era, dominated by “IBM and the seven dwarfs,” three of the top eight computing companies were located in Minnesota: Control Data, Univac and Honeywell. In the 70s and 80s, Cray Computer was a dominant player in supercomputers.

With the advent of the personal computer in the early 80s, Unix workstations in the 90s and the internet, the Minnesota computer industry receded in importance. Silicon Valley became the center of innovation, with the giants that dominate today.

If Minnesota lost the war for modern systems software, it remains well-positioned to compete in the current “Software as a Service” (SaaS) era. As software functionality increasingly migrates to the “cloud,” great opportunities remain in digitizing the workflow of every industry, hosted on the cloud and accessed by customers on their web browser.

Minnesota ought to be well-positioned to succeed in this environment. For a variety of reasons, Minnesota has not become a first-tier entrepreneurial center in the SaaS era.

But 11 years ago, a local group of C-suite leaders organized to help the Twin Cities become a regional center. Six of the executives, including well-respected Jim Moar, formed Minnesota Emerging Software Advisory (MESA).

The nonprofit offers pro bono counseling and mentoring services to founders of early-stage SaaS startups.

The 32 mentors focus on what they call the “wildly important goal,” the critical success factor the new company needs to get to the next phase of growth and success. The goal is to help lift up companies that will bring new innovations to the field.

MESA has mentored more than 70 emerging growth software companies. I have volunteered my time as an executive recruiter, drawn by its forward-looking mission.

Of those 70 companies, well over half have had major capital funding and about one-third have been acquired. Thousands of jobs have been created.

“I am proud of our mentor group who volunteer their time and offer their ‘been there, done that’ experience to software entrepreneurs to speed growth,” Moar said. “Entrepreneurs appreciate the open, candid discussions and feel free to raise difficult questions and subjects as they know the mentors are only interested in their success.”