It could also be a bit ageist, indirectly. By qualifying older hires as adult supervision, companies might unconsciously avoid hiring older employees for positions where there is not a perceived lack of maturity, or hire workers only for the purpose of addressing deficiencies in maturity.
"Adult supervision" refers (at least in my experience) more to guidance from people who are focused, results-oriented, practical, and experienced in using process and procedure to drive quality and efficiency.
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.
> Even if the people being supervised might often be a bit immature, the term "adult supervision" seems to me very condescending.
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."
I think what it changes is that it isn't necessarily condescending. It can also be an ironic recognition of a real dynamic.
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.
Well, today he also has a decade of being a CEO of Google, and a bunch of more years being Alphabet's executive chairman. Is that more impressive today?
His tenure was hugely successful, especially at the beginning. Apple was in lots of trouble, Mac sales way missed forecast, and Sculley turned the entire company around after firing Jobs and Apple was very profitable for most of his tenure.
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.
I met John on the Summit at Sea last year and the way he described his tenure it does seem he had some successes. It might make you realize that a lot of unfair media coverage is out there about him.
For example, he didn't fire Steve Jobs, despite the popular myth.
I think that's more of a reflection of the fact at the time people who are currently old enough to be considered old were developing their careers the C-level exec path was only really open to white men so right the current supply of old people fit to manage big companies is all white men.
