There are companies, organizations, that are youthful, but not wise. It can be a costly oversight when assets of maturity and wisdom are neither recognized nor honored, and not just because of the potential for age-bias lawsuits.

During the 'technology era', from the explosion of dot-com companies in the late Nineties through to the tech-phenoms of the present, there is an emphasis on youthfulness, both literal and metaphorical.

Remember the stories of the earliest wave of dot-coms? The frat-house environment with futons and foosball tables and youngstah twenty-somethings padding barefooted to the office bathrooms in the morning bleary-eyed, burning through resources without any forethought?

We saw the same type of young, frat-esque (or frat-envy-esque) male-oriented, seemingly sociopathic culture depicted in The Social Network, the 2010 film about Facebook's earliest days.

These types of organizations are heavy with the Ares-Mars archetype: young, fiery, initiating, energetic, creative, and entrepreneurial. Those are valuable traits.

But because wisdom and fore-thought aren't really Ares-Mars traits, there can be a sort of cluelessness about the Ares-Mars shadow side: brash, impetuous, bridge-burning, steamrolling, arrogant, immature, and thus unwise.

In these Ares-Mars organizations, the population of employees is often overwhelmingly young, and male. Data and technology are the deities worshipped, with a troublesome lack of respect for 'the people stuff', including things like empathy or even integrity (we learn a lot about that as we get a bit more life lived!).

In these organizations, there is often a focus on status as motivator -- salaries, titles, the public cache of the company name, the percentage of Ivy League universities represented -- even though research has consistently shown that those things are not reliable motivators or effective retainers.

This miscalculation becomes a problem when a competing company begins to actively lure employees away -- as Facebook has reportedly been doing with Google -- because employees so-trained are mercenaries rather than employees who are attracted and loyal to a unique organizational cultural experience and community.

But perhaps one of the biggest problems is the failure to attract and retain an employee base that is diverse of education (socioeconomic background and experience) and age.

In such youthful cultures, where the majority of employees are in their twenties or early thirties, there is often a judgement -- by people who are (sorry to say) often not old enough to have the wisdom to know better -- that older employees "don't fit the culture" and those very employees are neglected or edged out of the company in favor of younger 'talent'.

This is an enormous miscalculation, and ultimately a huge deficit, not only because it decreases the 'creative gene pool', which thrives on diverse perspectives and experiences, but also leaves the company with a very serious Wisdom Deficit.

Though age doesn't guarantee either wisdom or maturity, wisdom and maturity require a certain amount of living that exceeds what we collect into our twenties and early thirties.

It's only when we've hit that late-thirties wave of transformation, and surf a few of those waves through our forties, that we really have a chance to get a clue. Like a fine wine, the nuance and complexity become highly valued assets.

This maturity and wisdom potential of employees in their forties and beyond offers a company with a crucial balancing factor and leadership cache.

This would be the archetype of the Wise Man or Wise Woman, as exemplified by the more mature Gods and Goddesses of the archetypal world -- the same Gods and Goddesses that were always called upon to smooth over the havoc wreaked by Ares-Mars and figure out wise ways to undue the damage that Ares-Mars brashness had caused.

Though it's something repeatedly overlooked in companies, it's a whole lot easier to cultivate prevention than it is to fix it after it's broken.

The more mature perspective and experience, and the wisdom that comes from living beyond the experiences of your twenties and thirties, lends itself to a greater consciousness of potentials and consequences.

There may also be a greater skillfulness in maintaining relationships -- key for any companies with employees, customers, and other stakeholders! -- and providing a pool from which to draw mature leadership, whether by title or example (and ideally anyone who has a 'leader' title needs to model it in his or her example!).

There is also growing evidence that many younger and/or tech-addicted employees -- though valued for their tech-savvy, energy, enthusiasm to leap into the workforce (particularly in this economy), and brashness -- might be so indoctrinated into technology-facilitated communication that they have a deficit of emotional intelligence and interpersonal skillfulness, just by virtue of coming up in the technology age.

I've seen more than a few examples of companies -- both the small, fast-growing entrepreneurial tech companies and the more mature, well-known 'brand name' technology companies -- that haven't yet matured enough to truly value the wisdom in their midst, or their deficit of it.

It's not a matter of 'one or the other' -- either/or -- but more a matter of healthy balance and a diversity that fosters the creativity and facileness that are prized assets in a quickly changing culture and economy.

This is a great topic for reflection and discussion within these companies. Here are a few dialogue-starters:

How might we be overlooking the value of mature, wise perspectives?

Are we edging our or under-valuing more mature employees because of a literal age-bias?

How might we be coming up short because of this bias?

What are some of the ways we would be better served by respecting and incorporating a new value for wisdom and maturity of experience?

How could a more age- and education-diverse employee culture allow for a 'cross-fertilization' that supported greater creativity, innovation, community, and more nuanced interpersonal relationships within the organization and with customers, etc.?

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