In fact the prevailing political culture in Britain and in most developed countries is obsessively geared towards

In fact, the prevailing political culture in Britain and in most developed countries is obsessively geared towards keeping sharing to a minimum. It’s not as if any of the structures they’ll encounter as adults involve much sharing. On the contrary, most adults are deeply suspicious of the notion, and entirely against it when it extrudes beyond the realm of the immediate family or, at the most generous, a tightly proscribed community. Using your people well is the greatest competitive advantage of all, not just in economic terms, but in human terms too

More from Hamish McRae. Sometimes I wonder why we all make such a big deal out of teaching our children to share.

We are as a society groping our way towards the end of formal retirement but we need to be sure that we keep movement of talent. We don’t want to heave people out of jobs they are doing very well But we have to trust the young I cannot see the detail. All I know is that countries that figure out how best to marshal, develop and project their human capital will be the ones that do best. In the case of prime ministers there should be an overall presumption that they should not serve more than about eight years.

In the case of cabinet ministers, on the other hand, there should be a presumption that they serve three or four years at least, just to give continuity – unless they have some serious personal or professional lapse of conduct.So this is two-way: it is not just a question of people working for too long in a job, for working for too short a time can be just as damaging.All this matters enormously. That something will be the flexible application of term limits – the idea that there is a right time for people to be in particular jobs and if you are going to diverge from that practice you need to be pretty clear why This is not going to happen overnight. We need to develop a sort of case law, built on what seems to be effective and what does not.For example, the argument over Lord Browne should not be about his age but how long he has been doing the job – in his case already 11 years. On the other hand, for people on short-term contracts, there is a huge amount of churning going on. People are moving not because they or their employers want that to happen, or because their career is being developed. It is happening because there is no guaranteed funding of a post or as an unintended consequence of job-protection legislation.So what is to be done? Well it seems to me that we have to take the end of age limits as an opportunity to figure out something better. Good teachers sometimes make good administrators but sometimes they don’t Some actors are good directors but many are not.

There are no term limits if you work for yourself, though you do have to find the customers. We are moving to an economic society where more and more people work for themselves and more and more people are on temporary job contracts. And as we know in newspapers, good writers sometimes make good editors but sometimes make totally catastrophic ones.There is a further dimension. Big organisations in the public sector are good at career development, or rather they can be. I’m rather troubled by reports that promotion in the Treasury under Gordon Brown has become more to do with loyalty to the cause than competence.On the other hand, there are types of jobs where it is mad to move people about, particularly when the new job requires a different set of skills or (even more difficult) a different type of personality. There are some types of job where you do need to change the crew periodically and there are some where it is much better not to.For example, well-managed organisations put a huge amount of effort into developing the skills and experience of their people and that means moving them around.

As Lord Browne explained on Desert Island Discs the other day, he had spells all over the world, including one in Alaska, where in those early days of the oil boom he had to stay in a flop house. It creates clarity for the electorate of course but it also benefits the people who do the job.Had Tony Blair retired last year after two terms of office his reputation would have been much more secure than it is now. Furthermore, had he known back in 1997 that he would have eight years and no more he would have used those years much more effectively. He would have prioritised properly and focussed on the things that had to be fixed. He would also now be involved in a whole new career.In fact one of the huge challenges that will face our ageing societies will be how to develop and apply term limits not just in politics but generally throughout our societies.