I Watched 3 Companies Lay Off Their Managers. All 3 Hit the Same Wall.

What's really happening inside the management layer your company just removed — and why it matters more than anyone is admitting?

The common story is that flatter is faster — but the reality is more complicated: companies are cutting load-bearing structure without understanding what they're actually removing.

In this video, I share the inside scoop on how to unbundle management in the age of AI:

• Why management breaks into three jobs AI handles very differently

• How Kimi, Block, and Meta are running three distinct real-world experiments

• What gets lost when you compress instead of decompose the management role

• Where human judgment stays irreplaceable even as LLMs scale

Operators and leaders who take the time to decompose what managers actually do — before automating or eliminating — will build more durable, higher-performing teams than those who simply cut and compress.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: The Management Removal Wave

01:30 What Do Managers Actually Do?

03:00 Bundle One: Information Routing

05:00 The Roman Legions to Railroads Through-Line

06:30 Where AI Takes Over Routing

08:00 Bundle Two: Sense Making

10:30 Why Sense Making Resists Automation

12:30 Bundle Three: Accountability and Feedback

14:30 What Happens If AI Gets 10x Better?

16:00 Case Study One: Kimi's Radical Flat Structure

19:00 Case Study Two: Jack Dorsey and Block's DRI Model

22:00 Case Study Three: Meta's Compression Play

25:30 What This Means for Managers and ICs

27:00 The Decomposition Playbook

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For deeper playbooks and analysis: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/

Full Story w/ Prompts: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/executive-briefing-44-of-companies

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