Keeping the grey hair around

June 11, 2010

Although it is tempting to dismiss the grey hair in an organization as having out-dated ideas about how to do business - and little idea of radical changes brought about by social media, open innovation and other new ways of doing things - we should be warned. Research within chimpanzees

shows that they model the behavior of high-status chimps 9 times more frequently that low ranking ones - presumably because of the advantages for natural selection. It may well pay to keep the old guard around as long as possible - as long as they don’t maintain the organization’s ruling dogma too tightly, and are open to being challenged with new ideas and new ways of thinking about the market and the consumer.