No Country For (Perceived) Old Men

Well, a colleague did comment as it turned out, but by the cautious and conservative, old school method--- email (LOL)

And the question of interest was: AGE. Specifically, my experiences of ageism as the oldest member (I began when I was 53) of my “executive mba” class.

My sudden awareness of age did mark that transit. Some background: I completed my PhD and hospital training in my late 20’s, trained in psychoanalysis and organizational consultation in my 30’s, and worked clinically and organizationally, throughout. I decided upon b-school because it offered a broad curriculum focused upon business fundamentals- and many of my consulting clients spent their working time in business environments. I wanted to understand better the contents and models of thought that informed their lives. And learning finance, accounting, and formal courses in management strategy seemed the right direction. I even enjoyed refresher courses in statistics- hadn’t worked problems like that since my dissertation!

In terms of age perception, hailing originally from the world of psychotherapy, I felt myself just hitting my stride. A supervisor once called psychodynamic treatment, “an old man’s game”- and I certainly did not yet qualify. Neither did most of my colleagues- still juggling the high school and college admissions of their kids, coaching soccer, and searching for the recipes easiest to cook in the time-bind between work and home-- while keeping up to date on professional journal reading and writing after the kids were asleep. (Sometimes, literally, while on a treadmill! We are a fit generation…)

I’d elected a specific b-school program because of its diversity across gender, ethnicity and age. Early on, my classmates noticed a perfect correlation between our class composition and a Wall Street Journal report about the demographic composition of new urban centers in the US. And I felt little ageism relative to younger students: while their computer skills far outshone my own, my writing and research abilities were in high demand. We learned quickly how to maximize our assets. The workload demanded it.

Where I felt a virulent ageism was at the organizational level. It emerged as a sense of being “deskilled”, stripped of my valued capabilities and strengths, in different ways, by different instructors. Most were around my age; some held doctorates, some did not. Envy, then? Certainly. Abuse of power? Yes, but that interpretation is also too facile: there was something else. One Organizational Behavior instructor introduced himself to me by saying, “so you’re the competition!” While I was clearly not, at least not yet, the sense of shortage among these teachers in their late 40s and above, was palpable. I became better acquainted with it when I began to research available jobs and was advised to think about entrepreneurship and consultation projects. There seemed to be a desert out there: somewhere after the early 40’s, corporate opportunities, except for very defined skill sets , evaporate. No, the deskilling wasn’t really about me at all; but a reflection and projection of their anxieties—that our millennial world was a hard, cold, place: no country for (perceived) old men.