I think the point was that he was emphasizing the bosses bosses bosses boss. Many levels of nonsense, leading to politics. Managers do need to exist, and I agree they have a purpose, but often times, even in the company I work for currently. There is more management than there is workers.
The whole flat org with minimal managers "ideal" has been tried lots of places and always failed. I think even Google tried it at some point. Let me tell you a few things that happen when your org gets flatter:
1. Decisions get bottlenecked
Typically, the "flat org" thing gets tried without empowering the rank-and-file to make big decisions. So decisions that would normally get resolved one or two levels up the chain all get bottlenecked at the GM or CEO, who (now having 100 reports) does not have the knowledge or context to always make the right call.
2. Extreme micromanagement
A counter to #1 is if those decisions actually DON'T get bottlenecked: If you think it sucks to have your manager nit-picking over every little engineering decision you make, imagine how bad it is having the CEO do it, and feel he has to because he has no other managers to make those decisions. Let me tell you from experience: It sucks.
3. You get less time with your boss
When your boss has 4-5 direct reports, they can spend time with you weekly to chat about current challenges, help you with career development, give you pointers on things, etc. When he/she has 20-30 directs, good luck getting any airtime at all.
4. Shit rains down on you
A great manager shields his reports from 95% of the shit that gets rained down on him by the higher-ups. Uninformed complaints, decision churn and flip-flopping, "strategic enterprise synergy workshops", requests for perpetual motion machines and features that defy mathematics: If your boss is good, he doesn't let any of this crap get down to you. Without management, you as 3rd engineer from the left on WhatsitApp Project, get a firehouse of this in your face every day.
5. No career advancement
Granted, this is not important to everyone, but if your boss is the CEO or if his/her boss is the CEO, you're unlikely to get promoted at all during your tenure at that company, or you're going to have to wait for one of them to quit. Whereas if you're manager #6 down, there will be plenty of opportunities to find a #5 level manager position to move up to at some point.
I have been thinking about how to solve this problem and have been wondering what AI can do to help. There must be a way of using AI to help empower workers to act in a co-ordinated way to run the business effectively.
Most of the "sharing" or "on-demand" economy is based on this value proposition. Replace a manager's job with software and suddenly your taxi drivers, hotel workers, cooks, delivery drivers, administrative assistants, artists, visual designers, computer programmers, etc. can report to software instead of a person.
You could argue that the reason Uber etc. have found success recruiting workers for pretty shitty wages is because people are willing to give up that much money to not have to deal with a boss.
This trend also has a long way to go: for one, wearables will open up electronic coordination to people whose jobs normally require having their hands full, and two, improved AI will allow the automation of increasingly complex managerial tasks.
There's a balance to how flat an org can be. One can still have a 100,000 person organization that is only 7-8 levels deep. e.g. Starbucks has ~120k US employees and is about 8 levels from a barista to CEO. My organization is about 3k people and is about ~5 levels to the CEO.
I really really hate having weekly meetings with my manager (or any other manager that I had) I don't see a point, it is stressful and takes me away from my job.
More over I don't know any other developer that likes those 1 on 1 meetings with their manager.
I would love a manager that doesn't have time for them, if I would want something from him I would go to his desk and say to him, why meet?
And don't get me even started on the career development, the biggest bull*t is the whole carreer development process and how I have to write what I will do this year, what I did etc.
Are you by any chance a manager, because you sound like one :)
I had a coworker that used to say that when you have more managers than toilets, something's wrong.. To be honest the company we were working on has now laid off more than half the team!
