I've been thinking about what happens when a Premier League club shuts its academy because the first team is winning. Nobody would notice for a season or two. Then injuries pile up, contracts run out, and the club has to buy its way out of trouble at whatever the market charges.
That's where I started when Mark Adamoulas joined us on The Next Thing Now. Mark started his career in professional sport and now works with senior leadership teams on performance and workforce planning. He's seen both sides, and his answer was blunt. Sport treats talent development as deliberate. A lot of business treats it as an afterthought.
I think quite a lot of companies are closing their academies right now. Graduate intakes are shrinking, junior roles are being handed to AI, and budgets are going to tools rather than people. It all looks sensible this quarter. The bill arrives later.
Mark used a phrase every football fan will recognise: the sloppy one-nil. You're not playing well, half the squad is injured, but the three points go on the board and the narrative stays positive. For a while.
Business works the same way. If revenue holds up, nobody asks hard questions about the people underneath it. Mark said he often sits with senior leaders who have every reason to think things are fine. They've been rewarded for the way they work for years, so a different point of view feels like an attack on a winning formula.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You're doing good, mate. Keep going."
That's Mark describing the look on a successful leader's face, and it's the most honest summary of the problem I've heard. People issues only surface in a crisis: when someone burns out, when a key person leaves, when there aren't enough people in the room. By then the academy has been empty for years.
AI raises the stakes here, because it speeds up whatever an organisation already is. When I asked Mark what has to be true for AI to make a business better, he kept it simple.
"If you've got rubbish, it amplifies rubbish. If you've got goodness, it amplifies goodness."
He's seen the good side. On one project, AI helped his team analyse fifteen thousand staff surveys in a day, linking absence to leadership scores across departments. Done by hand, that would have taken months.
He also told a story about a courtesy car. After twelve years of parking with a reversing camera and sensors, he took three minutes to get a little hatchback into a supermarket bay and had to get out and check. He still knew how to use his mirrors. The camera had been doing the work, and the skill had worn away.
Handing junior work to AI is the direction of travel, and that's the risk. Those tasks were how people learned the job. Take them away without replacing the learning, and in ten years you can imagine a leadership layer that never built the skills underneath it.
Elite athletes spend far more time training than competing. They protect their health, and when pressure rises they adapt. Most of us do the opposite. We're on the pitch fifty hours a week and train almost never.
Mark's pitch to senior leaders is a simple trade. Would you invest one percent of your time for a ten percent return? Everyone says yes. So take an hour out of a fifty-hour week, about two percent, and spend it on planning, reflecting or getting better at the job. If people genuinely believe that hour would make them ten or twenty percent better, there's no argument for skipping it.
The same logic applies to a whole organisation. Teams that never get time to learn will hit their numbers right up until they can't.
Keep going with AI, and put the same intent into people. Most companies are spending deliberately on technology and leaving their people strategy to whatever's left in the budget at year end. Mark compared some apprenticeship schemes to spare cash in the social fund: nice to have, nobody quite sure what it's for.
The clubs that last run their academy deliberately. They know who's coming through, what each player needs to develop, and who steps up when someone gets injured. Businesses can run the same plan. Keep hiring juniors. Give them real work and time to learn it. Protect the hours your senior people need to get better. And be honest about where AI is removing the practice that used to build your next leaders. Keeping the academy open is vital. It needs to be planned, funded and protected.
The full conversation with Mark covers a lot more, including why not everyone needs to be a cheerleader for your mission, and the Billions character he got compared to in his first week at a new client. Have a listen on The Next Thing Now.