People are bad at passing information through a crowd. Once a group grows beyond a handful, messages slow down, get distorted or stop moving. That limit is why, for thousands of years, armies and companies have built ranks of officers and managers between leaders and workers. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, argues the limit is ending, because machines can carry information across a whole organization at once. A company would then need only three kinds of roles, he says.
Dorsey, who runs the payments company Block, made the case in an essay with Roelof Botha of the venture firm Sequoia Capital. Their clearest early example is the Roman army, which stacked units of roughly eight soldiers into ever larger groups, up to five thousand. Each rung existed because one leader can manage only three to eight people before instructions break down. Every added rung slowed the flow of information between the top and the bottom.
That slowdown has shaped every modern org chart, he says, and AI removes the limit behind it. A system can keep a constantly updated picture of the whole business and hand everyone the context a manager once passed down, rung by rung. People can then act the moment they need to, without a message traveling up the chain and back down. Ranks built only to move information by hand may have no job left.
In a conversation with Sequoia Capital, Dorsey described the three roles that remain. People who build and run the system itself are individual contributors. People who each own one specific problem or customer outcome are directly responsible individuals. Managers who build alongside the people they develop are player-coaches, a version of management under a new name.
Dorsey says the most about the builders. They run the AI underneath the business and the tools the rest of the company uses with it. Because the shared picture carries the context a manager used to supply, they can decide things in their own area without checking upward first. For most of the last two thousand years, a builder waited for approval to travel down through every rank above.
Block is testing the idea on itself. Its essay says the company has only begun the change and expects parts of it to break before they work.
