Many of the baby boomers are hitting retirement age (just retired a few months ago myself) and leaving with a ton of knowledge about the inner workings of their organization.
I expect to see lots of “strange things” happen when the knowledge is lost.
Most senior managers (private or public sector) are amazingly clueless about how to make the trains run on time in their organization.
Details matter, and the worker bees that know those details really matter.
I’m watching that happen at my job (guys with decades of knowledge retiring), and honestly they’re replacing them 2-for-1 with either white women who are only slightly younger, or foreign women who are much younger - and neither pair comes close to the knowledge the retiring guy had - even combined. Another FReeper posted on a related thread a while ago about bank branch managers; our area (northeastern NJ) has been hit with a double whammy of retirements coupled with the flight of many Americans from this area, so people who barely qualified as admin assistants are being dressed up as managers. Most of the bank staff in my area are foreigners and female; the manager is just the oldest one.