In 1988, Peter Drucker wrote an essay in the Harvard Business Review called The Coming of the New Organization.
His prediction: information technology would let companies cut their management layers by half and their managers by two thirds. Because most of what middle managers did, he argued, was relay information. Once the information could move on its own, the relay wasn't needed.
He was early. But he wasn't wrong. Through the 1990s, companies "delayered" by the thousands. The word "flat" entered the vocabulary. And the managers who survived were the ones doing something a spreadsheet couldn't.
What's the pattern?
Every wave of information technology asks the same question of the middle: what are you for, if not for moving information?
The spreadsheet asked it. Email asked it. The dashboard asked it. Each time, the honest answer was that a lot of the job was relay, and a lot of the relay went away.
AI is asking it again, harder. Status reports write themselves. Summaries arrive before the meeting. The agent can tell the VP what the team did this week without anyone in between.
But here's what the 1990s also taught us. Companies that cut managers and kept the relay work, just spread across fewer people, burned out the survivors. The ones that came out ahead redefined the role first and cut second.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things.
Separate the relay from the role. List what your managers actually do. Circle everything that is passing information up or down. That's what AI takes. What's left is the job description you should have written years ago.
Redesign before you cut. A manager with twelve reports and no relay work has time to coach. A manager with twenty and the same relay work has a breakdown. The number matters less than what fills the day.
And invest in the human part. Judgment, feedback, the difficult conversation, the sentence "I don't think this is right." Nobody trained managers for this because the relay work filled the day. Now it doesn't.
Drucker saw this coming nearly forty years ago. The technology finally caught up. The question was never whether the middle survives. It's whether it gets to become what it should have been.
What do your managers do that a good summary couldn't?
Related: How do you get employees to adopt change they didn't ask for?
More like this on LinkedIn. Follow @samradofficial
