Veterans and Baby Boomers have spent their business lives forming relationships built of trust and respect.  Because they don't change jobs every often, they accumulate vast amounts of knowledge of how to most effectively use those relationships to get things done in your company.

Then a downturn hits.  And the company looks to save money by cutting staff.  Guess who usually gets pushed out first?  Well, they're mature and expensive and near retirement age anyway.  So they are retired early and replaced by whom?  Anyone who can assume those established peer relationships of trust or match the practical knowledge?

Actually, companies suffer a loss and, if enough mature people are pushed out, both the bottomline and shareholders may never recover.  Costs actually may go up.  Companies may lose customers, and productivity likely will drop.  Then its too late.

Keeping key Verterans and Boomers, extending their experience and communication skills to mentoring, retaining their proven management skills and putting in place an orderly development process for eventual successors is much smarter and, frankly, better business.

As human resource professionals, whether you are expert in age diversity or not, you can influence your mangement to rethink the staff-cutting techniques that used to work, but are no longer valid because Baby Boomers and Veterans, approaching social security age, still outnumber Generations X and Y by staggering numbers.