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.

In every system, the leader has a great responsibility to carry and for this reason it is important to realize that whether a leader should stay in charge for a long time or he is better to be replaced every few years. Personally, I think replacing the leader every five years is a better choice and I would like to review some of my major reasons for holding this opinion.

First of all, if a person stays in power for a long time, dependencies on his existence would increase significantly. When a person manages everything, orders around and takes control, the system will rely on his role much more than it should. In this case if a problem happens for this number one person, for example he passes away, then the whole system will be damaged and might run to anarchy because no one else has learned to control the situations. For example, if the university president has been the one resolving all conflicts between the board members and giving them proper advices, without him the board will not be stable and everyone will take his own desired actions.

Second of all, the man in charge might be pursuing wrong and harmful policies. In such a situation, continuing these policies can only bring more troubles. Besides, all other officials won't complain about this because they probably lose their own positions. As an example one can mention big computer companies which lost millions of dollars because the president wanted to present an operating system to the market which in fact was not the need of market and customers. And in order to do this he forced the employees to obey his policies via threats such as firing or decreasing their salary.

However, still one might say that if someone is working properly they should stay in charge for as long as they keep good work. But I think even in this case, it is not needed that the same person leads the system for a long time. If the policies have been helpful, undoubtedly the others could have seen it and so the next leader can use the advices and experiences of the former leader to take proper actions. For example in many university departments we see that even when the chairman is replaced still the next chairman follows some of the old policies and the reason is that simply they have been successful before.

All in all, I believe that having an unqualified person in charge for a long time will only pose more danger and risk on a system. On the other hand, even if this person meritorious, after a while, other people should be given a chance to show their capabilities, as well.