The Wall and the Room

For most of the last twenty years, management was valuable because execution was expensive.

Getting something built took many people working together. So someone had to coordinate, assign, review, approve. The ability to direct other people's work was itself a scarce and valuable skill. We built whole layers of the organization around it — managers, coordinators, the people who moved work from one desk to the next.

AI has quietly removed the thing those layers were built on.

When one capable person, working with AI, can run the whole distance — understand the client's business, design the approach, write the working code — execution stops being the bottleneck. And once execution is no longer the bottleneck, the layers that existed to manage execution stop adding value. They start adding cost.

This leads to a blunt conclusion:

Directing other people's work is no longer scarce. Running a complete piece of work yourself is.

I want to be careful here, because this is easy to misread. I'm not saying management is worthless, or that organizations no longer need to cooperate. Client relationships, commercial structure, risk control, allocating resources — these still matter, and they always will.

But an organization has to rethink what it is for.

The wall and the room

An organization should not be a wall standing between effort and outcome. It should be the room that makes the outcome easier to reach.

A hierarchy — even one built with the best intentions — tends to grow on its own, harden on its own, and end up as a wall. The work is on one side, the result is on the other, and the layers in between slowly become the thing everyone has to get past. For years that wall was a necessary cost of coordination. It isn't anymore.

The part I find hopeful

There's a second half to this, and it's the part I find genuinely hopeful.

In a flat organization, no one follows your instructions because of your title. Whether your judgment carries weight depends on what you've actually done. That sounds harsh, but for most people it's the opposite of harsh — it's the first time their value is fully visible.

In the old structure, your contribution was buried inside a team's output, inside layers of reporting. When something succeeded, the credit belonged to the group. When it failed, the responsibility was spread so thin it landed on no one. How good you actually were reached the top distorted, after passing through several layers.

When you can run a complete piece of work — from business to code — your value is measured directly by the result. The client measures you by it. The company measures you by it. Nothing in between to dilute it.

That means you no longer have to be seen to be rewarded. You don't have to be good at reporting, at being in the right meeting at the right moment, at managing how your work is perceived. You just have to make a complete thing work. The result speaks for you.

What we're building

This is what we're building Core70 around. Small teams — often one to three people — with no project manager, no business analyst, no QA layer, almost no management overhead. One person who can carry an idea from a client's business problem all the way to working software. The client doesn't buy headcount. They buy outcomes. And the person who delivers the outcome keeps the largest share of the value they create.

We've been flattening this organization for many years — we removed sales and marketing departments long ago, and the salespeople have managed themselves ever since. AI didn't start this for us. It just removed the last reason to keep the wall standing.