Middle Managers

“Top executives are often the last to recognize the fundamental shifts because they're insulated from market realities and emotionally invested in the status quo. Middle managers, by contrast, operate at the intersection of the company and the outside world. Th…”

“At Intel, Grove created forums where middle managers' voices could be heard and respected regardless of hierarchy.”

“Post-internet where we are today. All of a sudden it's pretty easy to crack open all these things and say, look, it's all government dollars. Like we probably should have a holistic sense of what is going on and where money is flowing and some sort of like ove…”

“It's customization features requested by middle managers in order to make reporting a little bit easier. At the cost of making IC workflows worse, right? Like, it's like, if it fits that description, we're just saying no. There's no debate because we've alread…”

“I've seen it run by a lot of middle managers, like a transformation run by tons of middle managers. And those are the jobs that are usually in most jeopardy when you start transforming and you have to reskill and you have to figure out what to do. And they don…”

“This is the real story of AI, right? Which is middle managers are screwed, right? That's not a job anymore, right? In technology, right? Everyone's recognizing that it was kind of la la funny land when everyone's profitability was infinite and growing. And lik…”

“What's going to happen that I'm very worried about is when you realize as a middle manager that AI does your work and nobody cares like, what does that mean for the nature of work? Like, how does that matter if people don't care? Like, if AI subs in and does s…”

“What middle manager is going to give out their personal cell phone number when trying to win a customer's business? Like nobody's going to. And so if you make people feel like you care about them and you're going to stop at nothing and your personal career dep…”

“So it's actually be really easy, you know, not in the not too distant future. It'd be very easy for someone to just be like, summarize for me, everything my company is doing. And You won't need, like, tons of middle managers to do that for you or just, you'll …”

“I think it's actually the same you see inside companies. Stressed out middle managers are kind of the most destructive force inside companies. And by the way, they're stressed out because they are being stressed out by other people. I'm not saying, you know, a…”

“That's the layer of the working world, at least, that's increasingly being automated. We no longer go through like four layers of approvals to get like a travel expense form reimbursed. We go to a piece of software, enter some details, maybe one person takes a…”

“Perhaps the biggest flip is that the defining archetype of the new world of organizations is no longer the middle manager, but in fact the free agent. So people like you and me, the people who don't actually live in organizations at all, but live in the ecosys…”