I’m 59.
And I notice how strange it is that writing this can already feel like a statement.
I coach people my age. Older. People who have lived through restructurings, market collapses, political battles, burnout, reinvention. People who know what uncertainty feels like in the body - not just on a strategy slide.
And I coach young top talents. Brilliant people. Fast, sharp, ambitious. Many of them will absolutely make their way into the C-level.
I genuinely value that energy.
But I’m starting to question one of the biggest blind spots in organizations right now: the worship of youth.
Many companies talk endlessly about innovation, disruption and future readiness.
At the same time, they quietly marginalize the people carrying contextual intelligence, pattern recognition, emotional steadiness and crisis memory.
The irony is hard to miss.
The more volatile and unpredictable the environment becomes, the more valuable these capacities actually are.
I recently sat with an executive team under serious pressure. Highly intelligent people. Sharp analyses. Fast thinking.
And then one older executive spoke very calmly for about two minutes.
You could literally feel the room settle.
Not because he was louder.
Because he had already lived through something similar before.
That kind of groundedness is difficult to teach and impossible to download.
Not because younger leaders lack intelligence. But because some things only develop after certainty has already collapsed once.
What concerns me is this:
In some organizations, experienced people disappear from the relevance space long before they leave the payroll.
Not openly. More subtly.
Through pace.
Through language.
Through who gets invited into strategic conversations.
Through assumptions about who represents the future.
And maybe that is the deeper issue.
Many companies still behave as if experience and adaptability sit on opposite ends of the spectrum.
As if wisdom inevitably turns into rigidity.
Yet some of the most adaptive leaders I know are in their late 50s and 60s because life, markets and crises have forced them to reinvent themselves repeatedly.
Of course, age alone means nothing. I know 60-year-olds who stopped growing years ago. And 32-year-olds with remarkable depth.
But I wonder whether we are confusing novelty with capability.
Because when experienced people disengage, organizations do not just lose expertise.
They lose perspective.
They lose mentorship.
They lose institutional memory.
They lose people who know the difference between a genuine threat and a temporary panic.
And I’m not sure we fully understand the price of that until the next crisis arrives.