Agentic AI seems to make middle managers obsolete. A psychologist (Irene Kraegel), a comms researcher (Craig Mattson), and an HR professional (Rachel Hammond) make visible what managers do that agents can’t.

In March of this year, Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha made the case for eliminating middle management. Organizations, they said, need less hierarchy and more intelligence. And by intelligence, they meant faster flows of information. They noted that agentic AI will “coordinate work in ways that previously required humans relaying information through layers of management.”

Their argument’s become the conventional wisdom in the large corporations that employ most workers today—companies like Block, GitLab, Microsoft, and Meta.

But what about the many, many other companies (99.9% of businesses today) that have fewer than 500 employees? Should they imitate their larger cousins and get rid of hierarchy?

Should you at your company swap your managers for BoodleBox agents?

This week on Mode/Switch: Second Opinion, Irene Kraegel and I talk with Dr. Rachel Hammond, a management professor and an MBA director about the costs of eliminating the managers. Our discussion follows three movements:

• History: Eliminating management isn’t as fresh an idea as it sounds. (Rachel takes us back to Max Weber and forward to the business computers of the 1980s.)

• Process: Agentic AI liberates managers from hours of filling out forms. But is this tech freedom fostering human heedlessness? (Irene notes the neurological imperatives of human connection in the workplace.)

• Formation: If we cut the middle rungs of the workplace ladder, how do we grow our people into the leaders our organizations need?

But for me, the central question emerges in a recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Arvind Narayanan: is intelligence the same thing as power?

Sure, agentic AI can help us trade hierarchy for intelligence, bureaucracy for information. But are organizations more than the sum of their cybernetic flows? Are working communities more than the movement of information?

You might object that I’m leading the witness here with these questions. Objection sustained—if you hit play on the pod.

Cheers to all the humans, especially the manager ones!

Thanks for engaging Mode/Switch: Second Opinion with Craig Mattson & Irene Kraegel! Share this pod with 4 org leaders, 3 managers, 2 team members, 1 cat, and 0 bots.