The Baton
12 Leadership Principles for the Next Generation’s Leg of the Race
In recent years, older leaders have risen to and remained at the top of institutions, creating what many are now calling a “gerontocracy,” stifling the advancement of younger generations of leaders. At 90, Rupert Murdoch remains atop Fox Corporation, at 71 Bob Iger was called out of retirement to lead Disney once again, and at 81 Mike Bloomberg was still the chief executive of his financial data company.
When President Joe Biden, at 81, resisted immense pressure to allow a successor to run as the Democratic candidate during the 2024 election cycle, it sparked national debate about the merits of younger leaders carrying the baton forward. Once President Biden acquiesced, in just one week, Vice President Kamala Harris (who is 22 years younger) raised more than $200 million, 66% of which came from first-time contributors in the 2024 election cycle, and signed-up more than 170,000 new volunteers.
The Biden/Harris example is one of many that demonstrates how much positive energy and economic value is created when younger leaders are empowered to lead and seize a cultural moment, as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates did when they were both 19, and Steve Jobs did when he was 21, bringing fresh perspectives that take into account but are unconstrained by the hard-learned lessons of prior generations’ leaders.
The Baton is a call to action for young leaders everywhere to step up, to take action, and to assume our rightful place in leadership roles across industries and markets, religions and institutions, politics and nonprofits.
Drawing on 20 years of experience consulting with Fortune 500 executives to tackle some of their biggest challenges and his own experience as one of the advertising industry’s youngest CEOs, author W. Joe DeMiero offers 12 modern principles of leadership that will inspire, challenge, and provoke a new generation of leaders to pick up their leadership batons and run as fast and as far as possible.
Anticipated publication: 2025
Refounders
How Organizations Thrive Across Generations of Leaders
Much has been written about founders of American business — twentieth-century tycoons of oil and banking and entertainment, and black t-shirt-wearing Silicon Valley savants who turned ones and zeros into trillions of dollars of value.
We tend to deify these founders as cowboy entrepreneurs, singularly responsible for their companies' success. In reality, companies with long-term success endure and thrive through cycles of new leaders — “refounders” — who must find the balance of honoring their companies' heritage while reinventing and reimagining their companies to stay relevant.
As we enter an era where most of the world's most valuable companies will have to pass the baton to a new generation of leaders, the study of refounders and refounding is now more important than ever.
What makes a successful refounder? Why do certain refounders fail, and what can we learn to avoid the pitfalls they encountered?
Author W. Joe DeMiero brings his own experience, where he took over from a 20-year advertising agency founder, and discovered there was no playbook for this kind of transition. So he wrote one.
Anticipated publication: 2026