In 2012 movie Battleship, Lt. Alex Hopper, who assumed the command of the destroyer USS John Paul Jones, with help of Japanese captain Yugi Nagata, for the final battle with hostile alien invaders, called upon the old-Navy crew of the WWII-era battleship USS Missouri (BB-63). At the moment of critical need, gray-haired and bald people came to the rescue.
Fast-forward to modern corporate life…
The world of professional consulting and coaching has changed. Dramatically, and not exactly in a good way. Companies now proudly rely on guidance from:
- Young, overly ambitious representatives of large consultancies in very expensive suits
- Internal, locally optimized structures like PMOs and Centers of Excellence
- Fresh out-of-college hires with zero field scars but excellent PowerPoint skills
- AI-powered “coaching tools” that have never coached anyone through a real mess
On the surface, it all looks modern, progressive, trendy, and… extremely confident. Dashboards sparkle. Acronyms multiply: KPIs, OKRs, velocities, hypersonic delivery, AI-AI-AI… and everyone shouts out with impressive enthusiasm. It’s beautiful. It’s energetic. It’s… slightly unhinged.
But sooner or later, reality has a funny way of showing up uninvited. And when it does, lack of deep experience, pattern recognition, and hard-earned wisdom starts sending invoices.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the background — usually quiet and sometimes ignored — stand the gray-haired and bald people.
- The ones who’ve seen five “once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
- The ones who remember what failed, why it failed, and who paid for it.
- The ones who don’t shout buzzwords — because they already know how the movie ends.
Companies sometimes forget where true expertise comes from — and where it still lives.
It’s not always loud. It’s not always trendy. It doesn’t always wear the newest suit.
But when the ship is on fire and the dashboard stops helping… guess who gets the call?
Yep. The gray-haired. The bald. The “old crew.”
Turns out, wisdom doesn’t get outdated — it just, sometimes, gets ignored (hopefully, temporarily)… until it’s urgently needed again.