The pendulum swings, and middle management once again finds itself scapegoated in the grand flattening experiment. Elon Musk rails against “managers managing managers”; Mark Zuckerberg dismisses them as bureaucratic bloat; even Satya Nadella tips his hat to “leaner” teams. The message is straightforward: snip the middle, slash the overhead, and efficiency will set you free. It’s a catchy mantra, but history—being the patient teacher it is—reminds us that the middle doesn’t just vanish; it bounces back. Far from being mere bloat, middle management is the organizational ballast that keeps a company from capsizing under its own ambitions.
The Recurrent Cycle of Trimming and Regrowing
This cycle is hardly new. In the 1980s, the rallying cry was globalization, and CEOs played at corporate minimalism, slashing mid-level roles with righteous zeal. Efficiency soared, shareholders cheered—until the mid-90s, when the foundation started cracking. Without the connective tissue of middle managers, companies got brittle, silos hardened into miniature fiefdoms, and workloads clogged at the top. By the early 2000s, the same organizations realized they desperately needed those middle ranks back to mediate complexity. Talk about déjà vu. These “flattening revolutions” are corporate fads, cyclical in nature, built on the fiction that the middle is expendable. In truth, it’s essential.
Efficiency as a Means, Not an End
At the crux of these misguided culls is a basic confusion: people treat efficiency like the Holy Grail when it’s merely a tool, not the ultimate prize. Aristotle would talk about telos—a system’s higher purpose. Whether it’s driving innovation, fostering stability, or simply surviving, a business has loftier goals than just speed or cost cuts. Leaders like Musk or Zuckerberg conflate efficiency with moral or strategic righteousness, reducing complex human systems to metrics on a spreadsheet. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han warns us about the pitfalls of this endless drive for optimization. When humans are treated purely as performance units, creativity and resilience go out the window. What’s left is a machine that runs fast but is brittle, prone to cracking under real-world pressures.
Lessons from Rome and the Industrial Revolution
If you want a history lesson on bureaucracy done (mostly) right, look no further than the Roman Empire. Its elaborate layers of prefects, procurators, and centurions weren’t mere pencil-pushers—they were cultural and administrative linchpins that kept a sprawling territory cohesive. Strip them away too suddenly, and you get chaos and fragmentation. Same story during the Industrial Revolution: factory foremen weren’t just clock-punchers but orchestrators of human-and-machine interplay. When it’s done well, bureaucracy and middle management prevent organizational meltdown. Prune too aggressively, and what you cut might just be the very root system your future growth depends on.
Controlled Wildfires and Corporate Hubris
The modern obsession with flattening is idealism dressed up as hard-nosed pragmatism. Musk and company claim to detest bureaucracy, but what they’re really doing is setting off controlled wildfires—torch some layers, watch the embers burn, and call it “streamlining.” It’s a classic disruption move, designed to shake up entrenched power systems. And you know what? Sometimes that’s not a bad idea—pockets of stagnation might need a good scorched-earth reboot. But let’s not kid ourselves: after the smoke clears, these same leaders rebuild the structures they tried to blow up, just arranged differently. Because even the “leanest” chaos needs some kind of structure to function.
Bureaucracy Is Inevitable—But It Can Be Smarter
Anyone who believes in “eliminating bureaucracy” might as well believe in perfect social equality. Neither is happening anytime soon. Bureaucracy, in its various forms, is the scaffolding of institutions—corporate or otherwise. Economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue in Why Nations Fail that robust institutions are the cornerstone of prosperity. Good institutions provide order, accountability, and stability, all of which depend on a balance of structure and flexibility. The trick isn’t to annihilate bureaucracy but to prune it wisely and avoid letting it go stale. Occasionally trimming back overgrowth might let new ideas flourish—so long as you’re not ripping out the trellis that supports them.
Middle Management as the Bridging Coalition
To dismiss middle management as dead weight is to ignore a basic rule of power structures. In The Dictator’s Handbook, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith show how power is never held by one person alone but by coalitions. Middle managers form that critical coalition, translating the C-suite’s grand schemes into real-world action. They bridge silos, coach junior staff, and keep the wheels from falling off. Without them, lofty ideals remain just that—lofty, unreachable.
Inevitable Resurrection of the Middle
So, if you’re out there cheering the “death of middle management,” don’t mistake a bonfire for a permanent revolution. Efficiency isn’t what keeps organizations alive in the long haul; resilience, culture, and human capital do. Middle management is not the “bloated middle”—it’s the backbone. The pages of corporate history will remind us, yet again, that what gets flattened must rise. Organizations, like societies, don’t ever truly become pancake-flat; they crease and fold back onto themselves, reconfiguring old layers into new ones. And so, the cycle of culling and regrowth continues, as inevitable as the sunrise.