Claim: In any field—business, politics, education, government—those in power should step down after five years.
Reason: The surest path to success for any enterprise is revitalization through new leadership.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on which that claim is based.
Proponents of the idea that those in a position of power should change every five years, regardless of the field, have made the case that this is the most fluid path to success for any organization. However, a close examination of the issue reveals that doing so would actually hinder the future success of many fields. Some fields require someone in power for decades. Also, there is strong evidence that as leadership positions change often, the organization becomes weaker over time. While corrupt dictators who have been in a position of power for decades may provide some evidence to the claim, these reasons are the exception, not the rule.
First, some fields, such as science, may require decades of strong and consistent leaders before success in the task is achieved. For instance, while the particle accelerator in Sweden was being built, it took over 25 years before the first sketch was started to when the last screw was screwed in. The president of the program remained the leader during the entire endeavor. In such daunting and challenging tasks, imagine if a new leader was swapped out every five years. The results would have pushed the entire project back and increased the one billion dollar budget because the amount of information required for a leader in this position would be insurmountably steep.
Second, with a high turnover rate of people in power, the organization becomes unorganized because with each leader comes a reformation of rules and the way projects and tasks should be achieved. A statistic from the the think-tank Mind, showed that company profits were inversely correlated with CEOs turnover rates within a ten year period between 2000 and 2010. As the claim states that new leadership will revitalize a company, the statistics show the opposite.
In a final analysis, while some who have been in power for decades have caused damage to whatever organization they were in, these seem to be the exceptions because these come from those in dictator positions. Stating that every field should replace management or people of power every five years neglects the fact that the diversity of fields is quick strong.
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 15 15
No. of Words: 357 350
No. of Characters: 1759 1500
No. of Different Words: 193 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.347 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.927 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.476 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 128 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 89 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 53 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 31 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 23.8 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 8.424 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.533 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.323 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.531 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.041 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5