Jack Dorsey is waging a war on middle managers. His goal: a total wipeout.
After laying off a large chunk of Block's staff, Dorsey outlined a new AI-forward vision for his payments processing company. Large language models will switch up the company's org chart, he wrote in a blog post published Tuesday.
On Sequoia Capital's "Long Strange Trip" podcast, Dorsey further laid out his goal to create a "mini-AGI." One way to measure Block's progress, he said, was to measure the distance from Dorsey to any other employee.
"In the most ideal case, there is no layer," Dorsey said. "Everyone in the company reports to me. That would be all 6,000."
The scale of Dorsey's ambition is extreme, even if much of tech has been trending toward fewer layers of management. He said that it sounds "ridiculous" — but only in the context of the old, hierarchical structure.
"When you consider that the majority of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it's a lot more manageable," he said.
No management sounds good in theory, but others have found it challenging. Zappos tried to make a manager-free "Holacracy" in 2013, and more than 10% of employees quit. One Match Group employee recently told Business Insider that she went from managing three employees to 24 and that she has to manage her time "much more rigidly."
While Block may have cut a large number of employees — over 4,000, or about 40% of its staff — it still has managers in the mix. The maximum distance between Dorsey and a Block employee, he said, was now five layers.
Within the year, Dorsey is aiming to narrow that distance to "two to three" layers, he said.
Ironically, Dorsey's desire for flatness most directly mirrors that of his on-again-off-again friend, Elon Musk. It's how employees have described xAI, which now houses X — Twitter's renaming, which Dorsey cofounded.
Personally managing 6,000 employees would change Dorsey's job. On the podcast, he said that the flattening — and his change to make Block "an intelligence" — would make one skill more important: judgment.
"It is judgment against what we intend to build in this world," he said. "I'm the extra checkpoint."
Are you a current or former Block employee? Contact the reporter from a non-work email and device at hchandonnet@bjinnox.com, or on Signal at henrychand.30
