Some of the world’s largest companies are flattening their org charts and cutting management layers by the thousands. The same forces that have declared middle management obsolete before — new technology, shareholder pressure, and a belief that hierarchy is friction — are back, but this time they’re moving faster and cutting deeper.
In this episode, Emma Rose is joined by Katie Mingo, who leads Conversant’s Emerging Leader program along with client work across industries, to examine this moment through a historical lens. We unpack what’s driving today’s cuts, what history teaches about what gets lost when the middle disappears too fast, and what leaders at every level can do about it.
Listen on your preferred platform.
Episode sources:
The current wave
- Why Companies Are Cutting Middle Managers in the AI Era — Bloomberg
- Amazon to Cut 14,000 Jobs Across Corporate Workforce — Bloomberg
- Amazon CEO Jassy: Cutting Bureaucracy to Operate Like a Startup — CNBC
- Amazon Laying Off Another 16,000 Staffers — Deadline
- The Great Flattening: Bayer CEO’s Experiment With No Bosses — CNBC
- Bayer’s Middle Management Cuts: One Year Later — Forbes
- Leadership Crisis Looms as Middle Management Cuts Deepen — Gartner — IndexBox
- Is Big Tech’s $725B AI Splurge Being Funded by Mass Layoffs? — Invezz
History of middle management
- Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Harvard University Press, 1977) — Pulitzer Prize, History
- Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management — Cambridge Core / Business History Review
- The Hawthorne Studies — Historical Collections — Harvard Business School Baker Library (primary archive)
- William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Simon & Schuster, 1956)
- Michael Hammer, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate” — Harvard Business Review, 1990
- Revisiting Reengineering — Strategy+Business (on the 70%+ failure rate)
- Investing in Middle Managers Pays Off — Literally — McKinsey
- Power to the Middle — McKinsey
- The Vital Role Middle Managers Play in Organizational Success — Wharton
- The Middle Manager of the Future: More Coaching, Less Commanding — Harvard Business School
AI and the future of work
- Assessing the Real Impact of Automation on Jobs — Stanford HAI
- Stanford Study: AI’s Significant Impact on Entry-Level Workers — Fortune / Erik Brynjolfsson
- MIT Report: AI Can Already Replace Nearly 12% of the US Workforce — Fortune
- The Jobs AI Is Likely to Boost — and Those It May Disrupt — Goldman Sachs
- AI Is More Likely to Complement, Not Replace, Human Workers — MIT Sloan
- AI Is Increasing Demand for Managers — and Changing Their Skill Sets — IESE Business School
- Why AI Empathy Won’t Replace Human Leaders (Yet) — Forbes
Manager quality
