Call in the Gray Beards
Ford un-fired the engineers AI couldn't replace. Also: who keeps getting talked over...sorry, you were saying?
We’re back from an early Summer break. Nothing like oppressive record temps and a different culture to help with a full reset.
Here’s what you might have missed the last week:
Ford just quietly rehired 350 of the engineers it had laid off. Internally, they’re called the “gray beards.” (Textbook ADEA violation, BTW). The reason, more or less: AI didn’t have the institutional knowledge they did, so it wasn’t effective.
This is interesting because a company had the courage to say out loud that experience is worth paying for. The routine work automates fine. The judgment call, the one where the situation isn’t in the manual, still lives in people who’ve seen it before. We’re watching that get re-priced into AI adoption strategies, and it’s good news for anyone who’s spent twenty years getting good at something.
There’s a quieter version of the same idea, and this one’s personal for us. New research in HBR this week looked at who actually gets to finish a sentence in meetings. Interruptions aren’t random. To no surprise, the research showed that women and people from underrepresented groups get cut off more, and earlier. The encouraging part is how fixable it is. Just notice who never lands a point in your next meeting, and give them the floor. Or you can use one of Chad’s tried-and-true interruption responses, “If you could let me finish…”
That’s our throughline this week: judgment is incredibly valuable and needs to be a part of the future workplace strategy discussion.
LINKS:
Ford rehired its “gray beards” after AI couldn’t replace them: Fortune The most quietly optimistic AI story of the year. Experience got re-priced, and it went up.
The five kinds of people you’re rolling AI out to: World Economic Forum A high level overview of what we are seeing. The teams that adopt AI well aren’t the ones with the best tools. They’re the ones who matched the rollout to the actual humans.
Gallup: engagement at a decade low, and managers feel it first: Fortune Fair warning: the data’s from the spring, not this week. Still worth sitting with. If you invest in one thing this year, the manager layer is where it pays back.
Pay transparency is exposing a fixable problem: Fortune The issue was never sharing the numbers. It’s that few companies could explain them. The fix is communicating a pay philosophy people can understand.
Burnout is a design problem, not a willpower problem: SHRM A good reframe. The solution isn’t another wellness app, it’s how the work itself is built.
SHRM mapped global culture into eight types: SHRM 27,000 workers, 25 countries, eight archetypes. The naming is a little much (”Resolute Maverick”?), but it’s a useful mirror for where your org actually sits.