Number of words: 115

Knowledge is a difficult asset to measure. But I wonder, how many millions of dollars of value walk out the door everyday because American business culture is so obsessed with youth that it thinks little of pushing its veterans out. Paying attention to youth is not bad in itself, of course. Hiring for the future is one of the most important challenges in the modern workplace. You want to collect the best battalions of employees, train them better than workers have ever been trained before, and free them so they make good productive decisions. But the new hires don’t learn everything they need to know in the first three weeks or even the first three years on the job. The idea is to have a good mix. A company needs mentors as much as it needs aggressive, smart young people. 

Excerpted from Pg 220 of ‘Lessons from the heartland of American Business’ by Gerald Greenwald