Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein will be online Friday, August 8 at 11:00 a.m. ET to discuss why aging superstars -- like Brett Favre and Jay Leno -- just can't retire and the challenges management has in dealing with them at the ends of their careers.

Read today's column: To Successfully Manage an Aging Superstar, Don't Battle His Ego -- Co-Opt It.

A transcript follows.

About Pearlstein: Steven Pearlstein writes about business and the economy for The Washington Post. His journalism career includes editing roles at The Post and Inc. magazine. He was founding publisher and editor of The Boston Observer, a monthly journal of liberal opinion. He got his start in journalism reporting for two New Hampshire newspapers -- the Concord Monitor and the Foster's Daily Democrat. Pearlstein has also worked as a television news reporter and a congressional staffer.

Pearlstein was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his columns about mounting problems in the financial markets. His award was one of six Pulitzer Prizes won by The Washington Post this year.

Read Pearlstein's latest columns.

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New York, N.Y.: Steve, I didn't know you were a sports fan. Next thing I know you'll be on ESPN with Kornheiser.

I don't have a problem with aging superstars: as long as they remain superstars, or even good players. An aging Brett Favre is still much better than Kyle Boller. Maybe in some cases you want Favre to step aside to help bring up the next generation, but Favre almost got them to the Super Bowl last year.

In some respects sports is more of a meritocracy than the corporate world. In sports if you're good you'll be rewarded, if you're bad you'll be cut. My problem is with executives whose companies are doing horribly, but they continue to get paid well instead of getting cut. Just look at Rubin of Citibank. He fiddled while the company hemorrhaged billions but he's still collecting an eight figure paycheck (I don't buy his "I had nothing to do with the subprime stuff").

At least Brett Favre can still perform at a high level. The Pack will miss him, but we'll love him in New York. I might even watch some Jets games even though I'm not a Jets fan.

Steven Pearlstein: Good morning everyone. I should first make it clear that I know just about nothing about sports, as my son, the budding Kornheiser, keeps reminding me. He didn't even bother reading this morning's column, since it appeared in the Business section. So I think Tony is safe.

Actually, my colleague Mike Wise probably had the better column on the Favre situation, a day before mine posting. If you haven't read it, you should.

You are certainly righ that sports is an arena where the good and bad are sorted out much more quickly than business. But business, I'd suggest, is more like baseball and hiting -- things tend to be streaky, and people have slumps that you have to be patient with because they eventually get out of them and you don't want to cut people off too quickly.

Now, having said I know little about Favre and football, let me say the chances of him doing fabulous at the Jets, in my opinion, is pretty low. Football is still very much a team sports and over 17 years, there grew up around Favre a team and a set of plays and a way of doing business and an ability to communicate and a sense of comraderie that were all self-reinforcing. It was a total system or organism. And to take Favre (or any quarterback) out of that system and put him in a new system, at his age, is risky. In time, you could build a Jet's system around him. But at 39 he doesn't have much time, in all likelihood, and at 39 he's not as flexible adapting to a new sysytem.

By the way, there is some management literature on this, having to do with recruiting superstar executives to new companies. And the results are no encouraging.

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St. Mary's City, Md.: Aging superstars in sports would seem to be in a different category than their peers in entertainment. With the former, retirement is an inevitability that comes with the body's deterioration with age. I suspect the challenge for management is in dealing with athletes who are in denial about that inevitability.

But retirement for entertainment superstars has to do more with "relevancy," the industry's code word for appeal to younger fans. For every Johnny Cash who has a late-career renaissance, there are a hundred other entertainers who devolve into nostalgia acts, recycling or parodying their early careers. I suspect management often assumes that relevancy is for young entertainers, or pushes devolution in search of the easy money from nostalgia, or lets the entertainer cruise on autopilot for the same reason. How much should management push entertainers to innovate and experiment?

Steven Pearlstein: You raise a good point, and there are lots of examples of acors who age more gracefully and remain relevant and successful than sports figures, for the obvious reason. But I think you may not have identified the key characteristic that is important to remaining relevant, and that is an emotiona nd intellectual agility to keep learning and adapting. That's a psychological factor, and being 56, I can tell you that you start to get brittle. You think you know what you know and like what you like and do things the way you do things, and you have less patience and tolerance for changing those things. And that, more than how much you appeal to young people, is the big barrier.

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Ocena Pines, Md.: I can't be online for the discussion, which I will catch up on later, but I would like you to take up whether Steve Jobs can retire from Apple, or what happens if illness forces him to. Thanks. Are any other business superstars considered indispensable, notwithstanding DeGaulle's famous remark that cemeteries are full of indispensable men?

Steven Pearlstein: Had forgotten about that great DeGaulle quip!

Steve Jobs comes as close to being an indispensable executive as anyone I can think of in a big public company. I don't know the situation in any detail, but I doubt that one of Jobs' strengths has been preparing the organization to thrive without him. Certainly that is the way the investors view it, although that is hardly dispositive -- investors hate uncertainty of any sort. But it is the sort of question that Apple directors and large investors should have been asking for the last couple of years. Not that the Apple culture isn't a strong one, but there is something about Jobs, the brooding, demanding, hyper-competitive, insecure innovator, that seems central to the company's success.

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Dallas: That was a great article, however, way more people than "Superstars" have big egos. Try getting a group of engineers to agree on something intuitive! You get all right answers!

On an economic note, is there anything to read in the strengthening of the dollar and falling commodities in the last 5 days? Are they correlated? Thanks.

Steven Pearlstein: Thanks on the article. The dollar and commodities are correlated. The question is which way the causalities work, and the answer is they work in both directions. The dollar is strengthening in part because the European and Asian economies are weakening, and interest rates in those countries may not be rising in the future -- and a stronger dollar takes pressure off the price of commodities that are largely set in dollars. On the other hand, there was a commodities bubble and it is now bursting, irrespective of dollar movements, and the falling price of commodities is taking pressure off the dollar.

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New York: On to more pressing matters.

You've had several opportunities the past few weeks to correct a series of misstatements you have made concerning the federal government's "bailouts" in mortgages. These funds are going exclusively to large financial institutions that provided funds to mortgage bundlers which could not ultimately be repaid due to the growing rate of defaults. These funds are not providing direct assistance to any distressed homeowner. None of these bailouts will prevent any foreclosures from transpiring. But you continue to misrepresent otherwise, acting as a lackey for the financial institutions who are delighted average Americans are being told this is "relief" to homeowners and not multibillion-dollar investment funds.

Steven Pearlstein: Oh, where to begin? Look, housing finance is a system which channels the savings of people from all over the world into mortgages here in the U.S. And the continued operation of that system is rather vital to preventing an even deeper collapse of the real estate market -- no mortgages, no sales, its just that simple. And at the center of this system are intermediaries like Fannie, Freddie, investment banks, banks, some of them very large, with lots of financial relationships with each other. And if they go down, its possible the wholse system goes down. So its really not in anyone's interest for that to happen because a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt badly.

Now, in fact, there have been, so far, very little int he way of cash bailouts. It may turn out that there will be taxpayer cash out the door. But at this point, a lot of investors have lost a lot of money because the value of their stocks, bonds, derivatives, CDOs, etc have declined dramatically in price. Some mortgage holders have had to accept haircuts -- reduction in interest and principal payments -- to refinance loans that would otherwise go into default ( I suppose that would be considered by some as a bailout for homeowners, but it is not the government that is doing the bailing out). But so far, for you to suggest that there has been no relief to homeowners and that lots of big institutions have been bailed out -- that is factually inaccurate. You know it. And you need to apologize.

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Seattle: It seems to be that the problem with aging superstars is that there is no way to show that they are obsolete because they still have enough cache to be productive, but not as productive as a speculative replacement. Is that a good frame for the problem or is there something more?

Steven Pearlstein: This is one of the hardest things to do in business -- to give up something that you have (a customer, a product, a key employee) that is producing but at a declining rate, in order to get something (a customer, a product, a key employee) that may not be as good but is on an upward trajectory. It's the proverbial bird in the hand for two in the bush. You'd like to think you could time it just right, and where the two trend lines (the declining superstar and the rising new star) cross, you jump from the one to the other. But things are rarely that simple. Aaron Rodgers hasn't started in one game in four years since he was drafted, so how do you really know how good he is or can be. You don't. You just have to take what information you have, which comes from scrimmages and practices and conversations and observations, and make a judgment, which has to calculate in the fact that if you don't use him now, he's gonna leave.

Now, as I suggested, the right way to have done this would have been to have a couple of transition years in which both men played, but the team was gradually reoriented to being built around Favre to being built around Rodgers. It would require Rodgers to continue to be patient, but in a context where things were moving, from his perspective, in the right direction. And it would require Favre to be less focused on the "me" and more focused on the "we," where he gets his satisfaction as much from seeing the team thrive under a new quarterback as he does from winning games in which he is the quarterback. For a guy who's had the success he's had over the last 17 years, who is nearly 39 years old, that can be a nice emotional transition. He has admitted himself that he no longer enjoys the psychological pressure and physically demanding regimen of the six days between games -- that is why he wanted to retire. So here is a way to do something useful for a team he loves and has been good to him while still keeping a hand in the game and being part of the team. Its too bad that he and his family members didn't have the wisdom to see that.

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Madison, Wis.: Thanks again for an excellent article. Your recommendations for coaches, network executives, or business owners is practical and wise, but doesn't it also require that the managers moderate their own egos?

Steven Pearlstein: Very, very important point. And in the case of the managers, that ego manifests itself in the form of thinking that they need to control things, they need to be the ones setting the course. When you manager superstars, you have to realize that that's not always the case, and that your job is to provide them with the right environment so they can excel and raise the games of everyone around them as a result.

That's why I said that Mark Murphy's mistake was that he didn't, immediately, say, "Brett, we weren't expecting you to change your mind but now that you have, welcome back. Come on up. It will be great to work with you again." He and his team got all caught up with the fact that they had, in an emotional and strategic sense, "moved on" and they didn't like being forced to change that. No manager likes to put off course, but sometimes it happens, and you have to roll with it without letting your own ego or need to control get in the way.

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Re: Steve Jobs: Jobs isn't so indispensible now that Gates has retired. There's a truly indepensible CEO. However, in business, how have 'superstar' hired-gun CEOs actually fared?

Steven Pearlstein: Not well, the literature says. There was a recent study by some Harvard Business School progessors thatlooked at the "stars" who left GE's system to go run companies elsewhere. And the results were not that great.

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Arlington, Va.: What's wrong with them not retiring? What else are they going to do? This is all they know...

Steven Pearlstein: The problem is that this is a team sport (so is business, by the way) and the team needs a more gradual transition to get used to a new quarterback, particularly one who is still developing his game skills. So play till you drop isn't a good long term strategy for the organization.

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Reston, Va.: I'd say that it must be easier for an athlete to decide to retire -- their body has to tell them at some point that it hurts too much to do their job anymore.

But a comedian or actor? I think that's got to be harder. Is Jay Leno still funny? I can't answer that -- I never watched his show. But a forced retirement by the network has to sting!

Steven Pearlstein: In Leno's case, it wasn't exactly forced retirement. The good thing about Leno is that he's a mensch. The network went to him, explained that O'Brien was going to bolt if he didn't get a commitment that he could succeed Leno, and Leno, being a good team player, understood the difficulty and said to himself, "Look, 17 years is probably enough. You never want to overstay your welcome,. You want to go out at or near the top of your game and be remembered for that. Youth and hipness matter in this business and I'm not young and hip any more. So this seems like a good plan that still keeps me here for five more years. And after that, I can slow down, do some clubs, do some specials, do some volunteer work and enjoy my life and my family. I don't need the money certainly."

And that was right. But as Dr. Berlas points out, the psyche doesn't always cooperate. And the psyche is literally addicted to the nightly adulation. And the prospect of losing that is just too frightening, because what replaces it is still uncertain.

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Silver Spring, Md.: I liked the Favre column. U.S. industry certainly has its share of highly-paid stars and they face some of the same challenges as the Packers. Favre will soon be 39 and I think Green Bay will not regret this decision. There are some interesting angles to the story with the ownership of the Packers and the success that some teams have had in letting go of their star players. I'm thinking of the Red Sox and the decision to let Pedro Martinez go.

Steven Pearlstein: A good example. And there are probably lots of those. Here's what I'd say: In looking for superstars, you want a particular kind of superstar, the kind that knows how to sacrifice some of his own ego and interests to that of the team. Those are the ones worth keeping. The New York Yankees, it seems to me, have had a knack, particularly under Joe Torre, for attracting and retaining that kind of superstar.

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Chicago, Illinois: Why are Fannie and Freddie being allowed to keep paying out a dividend while the taxpayer is being asked to provide them an unlimited line of credit? Shouldn't they have to recapitalize with their own money before coming to the government?

Steven Pearlstein: Well, no credit or investment has been extended yet. But your point is correct, which is why Freddie announced it was cutting way, way back on its dividend, and why Fannie will have to do the same if it continues to post bigg losses in net income, which is likely. But you should understand one thing: these companies are nopt necessarily bleeding cash at this point. The "losses" are really forward looking in that they anticipate the possibility of big cash losses. It is prudent (and required) accounting that they do so, marking to market loans on their books and setting aside reserves for eventual losses. But the money isn't going out the door yet. So they need to weigh up the risk of continuing to pay dividends, and not using that money to build up their regulatory capital, and the risk of eliminating dividend and making it even harder or more expensive to raise new regulatory capital. And like a lot of situations these days, there are only bad choices. Pick your poison.

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Seattle: Interesting column today. As a 49ers fan, I remember how wrong it seemed to see Joe Montana in a Kansas City jersey (even though I thought then, and think now, that it was the right thing to do).

Secondly, congrats to the Jets, who get to have a quarterback who's just good enough to throw the game-killing interception in the playoffs.

Steven Pearlstein: I forgot about Montana. Another good example.

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Alexandria:"Now, as I suggested, the right way to have done this would have been to have a couple of transition years in which both men played, but the team was gradually reoriented to being built around Favre to being built around Rodgers."

Not going to happen, ever.

There can only be one starting quarterback, and he plays the entire game. Splitting time has been tried and it doesn't work. (Ask your son.) You end up with two annoyed players.

It can work at different positions, but it becomes apparent rather quickly who is best and then that player plays.

You see it all the time in basketball. Someone other than the starter is playing at the end of the game because they are better. The started complains. Coach says, "Fine, you don't start anymore."

Steven Pearlstein: Well, you're right about that: my son did tell me it doesn't work. And you know what: I reject that idea. It doesn't work because players have been allowed to think too much about the me and not enough about the we. And it is important for coaches to create a culture where that is not acceptable, not just to the coaching staff but to the other players. They need to learn to get over it.

Now if you were to say to me that having different quarterbacks makes things difficult for the rest of the team -0-0 for the line that needs to defend the quarterback, for the pass receivers, for the runnning backs getting handoffs from the quarterback, then I would agree that it is certainly better to have one quarterback. But if the tradeoffs is accepting a few fewer winning games during a couple of transition seasons, in order to develop a new superstar quarterback who is going to have 15 great winning seasons, then that seems to me like a good tradeoff.

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Fairfax: So, following the CEO line. What do you do with an aging CEO superstar? They are pretty terrible at bowing out gracefully!

Steven Pearlstein: Actually, they are a bit better at it than quarterbacks, as a rule. That may be because boards of directors generally make them retire at a certain age and make them come up with a transition plan. The danger is that, subconsciously, they want their successors to fail, to make themselves look good and seem indispensable. That is why it is important for the board to retain control of the selection of a successor, rather than letting the chief executive control it.

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Dead-Cat Bounces: Favre's performance last season was the last great gasp of a former superstar. The organization usually is stronger than the individual, as NBC will find in a couple of years. As long as the local affiliates keep performing well at 11, Conan will keep most of the audience of Leno and a lower cost.

Steven Pearlstein: That's the theory, anyway.

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Leadership vs Management: Nice article today. I agree with you that regardless of the "righteousness" of their argument, the Packers handled the return of Brett Favre ham-handedly, i.e. very poorly. If they had a contingency plan in place when he retired -- which they should have knowing his track record on "retiring" -- they could have come out of this situation looking good. Now there will always be a mark against them for treating an icon badly. Too bad.

Steven Pearlstein: Yes, that is the shame of it. I think this guy Mark Murphy sounds like a very smart guy. He'll learn from this one.

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Vienna, VA: What's with the move to Fridays? I always looked forward to your Wednesday chats; they gave me something to look forward to in the middle of the week!

Steven Pearlstein: Good news. The reason it moved was that this summer, I've only been writing one column a week, on Friday, so I could work on a project for washingtonpost.com -- anew website on leadership that should be launching soon. But a lot of the groundwork for that has now been laid and I think I'll soon be back to writing two columns a week, with the chat returning to Wednesday.

Thanks for noticing. Thanks for asking. And now, I've got to go to a meeting about that website. See you all next week.

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