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 revitalisation through new leadership.Write a response in which you discuss the extent

While I agree wholeheartedly that revitalisation is the key to success, I cannot say the same for the claim stated here. I believe that all enterprises pose a unique problem in terms of their definition and achievement of success. Simply enforcing a periodic change of leadership does not take into account whether an enterprise actually benefits from long term or short term leadership. I believe that the mid way path where the solution is adapted to the unique scenario posed by an enterprise, is the best way to tackle this issue.

Take the case of Steve Jobs and John Sculley as CEO at Apple. Apple was in a precarious situation when Steve Jobs was replaced by John Sculley. Many believed that John would save the company from bankruptcy and yet Apple did poorly under him. Here we find that the change of leadership had no effect on the success of the company. Yet, years later when Steve Jobs was reinstated as CEO, Apple’s stock price shot up and it went on to become the most profitable company in the world. Seems confusing doesn’t it? Well, this clearly goes to show that a change in leadership does not always ensure revitalisation and consequently success. Under Steve, Apple pivoted multiple times, completely changing their focus from personal computers to portable music players and subsequently smartphones and tablets. Steve Jobs was an experienced CEO and a genius marketer of products. One could say that it was his experience and marketing skills that made Apple successful. He also had the creative vision to revitalise the company when he saw that portable devices and later on smartphones would be the next big thing. From all this we can gather that experience and good judgement on part of the leader can be more effectual in terms of success than changing leadership altogether.

Organisations have to function like a well coordinated unit in order to achieve their goals. Leaders form the head of this unit and must establish mutual trust with their subordinates. This is a time taking process and is essential for a leader to be effective. Changing leaders every few years proves to be detrimental in this regard and results in massive overhead which could be better spent in pursuit of the organisation’s aspirations. Also consider that if a leader knows that regardless of his performance in an organisation he will be replaced after a certain amount of time due to company policy he might just grow complacent and not work to his fullest potential. Changing leaders based on their performance in the organisation however completely changes this dynamic. Now a leader must strive for the success of his organisation as it also guarantees his own success.

However, sometimes leadership may have nothing to do with the performance of an enterprise as the root cause of inefficiency may be systemic. For example a corrupt tax collection department might severely hamper the inflow of taxes to the government which might lead to insufficient funding for government projects which benefit the people. This problem will persist regardless of leadership changes and will continue to undermine the success of the government at it’s projects.

As it stands, I think that leadership and it’s affect on the performance of an enterprise is an extremely complex problem that due to it’s variability cannot be tackled by a single hard and fast rule such as the one proposed in the claim. I believe we must access the situation using some if not all the factors I have stated and then come to a conclusion whether a change of leadership is required periodically or not. In doing so we may also root out systemic problems which undermine the effectiveness of the leadership altogether.