FROM THE FIELD

This isn’t a piece about football.
And it’s not really about management either.
It’s an observation from the field — the real one and the corporate one — about how systems choose what’s convenient today and lose what matters tomorrow.
Talent doesn’t disappear. It gets silenced.
And when no one emerges anymore, we find the most convenient explanation: “There’s just no talent out there anymore.”
Maybe the problem isn’t who’s missing.
It’s what the system is no longer willing to tolerate.

In large, complex industrial projects, design gets treated as the line item nobody defends: small share of CAPEX, no visible progress, easy to compress.
The risk doesn’t vanish. It relocates.
It returns as change orders, schedule slip, cost overruns—and, most critically, lost operating revenue.
This isn’t theory.
It’s pattern, observed consistently across industries and geographies.