Week 21, 2026–Issue #414
Management Isn’t Dying. Coordination Is Being Automated.
File this under #organization
Something interesting is happening. Two worlds that rarely see eye to eye are quietly converging on the same idea.
The first is the tech world: founder mode, venture capital, and hyperscale. The second is what some call Newwork, a looser movement built around self-management, collaboration, and purpose. On most things, they occupy opposite ends of the spectrum.
But not on managers. Tech finds them problematic; too many layers slow the organization down and dilute the founder’s vision. Newwork finds them superfluous; given the right conditions, people can manage themselves. Both worlds have been waiting for something to make managers optional.
They may have found it.
The Factory Problem
Research suggests that while enterprises are investing heavily in AI, few are seeing much return. “Individual AI” is a genuine boon to productivity, but those gains tend to get absorbed by the organization at large. We have yet to solve the “Enterprise AI” question.
The analogy to industrialization helps. Factories that introduced machinery quickly saw productivity spike in specific areas. But could not realize the full potential of their new tools until they redesigned the factory itself. The coordination layer in between was the bottleneck.
The same logic applies now. With AI serving as an intelligence and coordination layer, organizations could share information faster, push decisions to the front lines, and do much of what managers currently do, more consistently and at lower cost.
At which point the question becomes an uncomfortable one: what exactly are managers for?
Control or Liberation
This idea appeals to both worlds, albeit for different reasons.
In tech circles, fewer management layers means the founder, enabled by AI, can more easily enforce their vision throughout the organization. This is “Founder Mode” in practice: deeply involved leadership, with AI handling the coordination work that would otherwise require a management layer to execute.
In Newwork, the same intelligence layer looks entirely different.
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Here, it’s not a tool for top-down control. It’s a potential equalizer, one that ensures everyone has access to the same information at the same time. Rather than amplifying the founder’s reach, it could flatten hierarchy by removing the information asymmetry that hierarchies depend on and perpetuate. For Newwork proponents, this is the moment self-management has been waiting for.
The Work That Remains
Neither world is likely to get exactly what it wants.
For tech, AI will compress rather than eliminate management. Fewer layers, faster information flow, more direct alignment from the top. But even Founder Mode needs judgment and trust at the edges.
For Newwork, AI may remove some of the coordination burden that made self-management hard to scale. But self-organization still requires structure; someone still has to clarify expectations, resolve tensions, and help people make good decisions together.
What AI changes is not whether management exists, but what it is for.
If AI absorbs more of the reporting, reminders, documentation, handoffs, and information routing, management becomes less about keeping the machine running and more about improving the people and the system.
/Andreas
Sidenotes
💪 Paul Graham on Founder Mode
In a widely-read 2024 essay, Paul Graham argued that founders should run companies differently from professional managers. Where manager mode means hiring good people and stepping back, Founder Mode means staying deeply involved: skipping levels, talking directly to the people doing the work.
🦾 Brian Chesky on AI Founder Mode
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky is Founder Mode’s most cited practitioner. In a recent interview, he argued that AI makes the approach even more intense: fewer layers, a shift from meeting-based to asynchronous culture, and everyone expected to do work, not just manage it. His benchmark: the Catholic Church has run for 2,000 years on four layers.
🧠 Jack Dorsey on the Intelligence Layer
In a recent interview, Block’s Jack Dorsey named his biggest business regret: delegating too much. His answer is to rebuild around an intelligence layer that lets the founder’s intent flow directly through the organization, without holding company structures or management layers filtering the signal. AI, in his telling, makes Founder Mode scalable.
👍 Corporate Rebels on Role Clarity
Pim de Morree, co-founder of Corporate Rebels and a leading Newwork voice, recently connected Claude Code to Nestr.io, the platform his team uses to manage work roles, and handed his financial reporting role to AI entirely. The reason it worked: in self-managing organizations, roles are already clearly defined. That clarity is exactly what AI needs.
How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in an email newsletter called WorkMatters. Back issues are marinated for three months before being published to Medium. This article was originally published on May 22, 2026. If you are reading this your are missing out. Subscribe to email updates at www.workmatters.studio.
