Every few years, Silicon Valley rediscovers an old temptation: to mistake inefficiency issues as a people problem.

The latest version is the argument that AI will wipe out middle management.

And to be fair, there is a real idea buried in there. Many companies have become too layered and too procedural by the rituals of coordination. Work has accumulated a kind of administrative plaque. Reports about reports. Meetings to prepare for other meetings. Whole systems designed to move information around because, for a long time, that was the only way large organizations could function.

But bureaucracy is not the same thing as human contribution. Process is not people.

That distinction matters, because once you start treating management as little more than overhead, you flatten some of the most important work inside an organization into a caricature. Good managers do not simply transmit updates between one layer and the next. They provide context when things are murky. They exercise judgment when the data points in three different directions. They keep things moving; they coach. They notice drift early. They help teams metabolize change. They translate strategy into reality, and reality back into strategy. They are ultimately accountable for impact.

In other words, the best of management was never the bureaucracy. It was the meaning-making.

That is why I think the real opportunity in this moment is more ambitious than simply removing layers.

It is to ask what work could look like if technology took care of more of the administrative drag, and people had more room to do what only people can do well: create, mentor, build trust, sharpen ideas, help each other grow.

I attended a talk by May Habib a couple weeks ago at HumanX, and she brought one point that resonated based on her experience at Writer helping companies level up in the AI space: when organizations try to rethink process, they often get too attached to the current shape of roles and the current ownership of process.

That feels exactly right. The challenge is not to defend every existing job as it is. It is to stop confusing today's org chart with the full range of what people and technology are capable of.

We should absolutely rethink how companies operate. We should absolutely question how much coordination work is real value and how much of it is residue from an older era. We should question a world divided into those who hold power and those who execute. Ideally, technology removes friction so that people can spend more of their time on insight, creativity, discernment, and growth.

That is a much more interesting future than one that simply declares the middle unnecessary.