[kbenson]

Congratulations, you've avoided providing any useful details about your suggestion again. I'll ask a different way. If your plan is to just add more managers in a single level above the bottom, how do you expect the CEO to deal with the hundreds of managers that would report directly to them, that they would need to relay the company direction to and get feedback from?

Very specifically, without a tree structure, how does this scale for those above this layer of hundreds of managers at the same level in your preferred solution presented here? Are you just assuming that it's not a problem and therefore doesn't need to be addressed?

[jncfhnb]

I’m not saying don’t use a tree structure. I’m saying only create vertical tree cuts at functional junctions were the type of work is different between boss and subordinate. Do not ever make vertical boss where your subordinates are just supposed to be shittier extensions of yourself. Only one person should be in charge of tactics. Only one person should be in charge of strategy.

Not every decision should roll up to the CEO. Not in terms of decision making (obviously) but honestly not even on the org chart.

If your job is assembling little PowerPoints to pitch decisions to your boss then you’re an impediment to getting things done. You should have the authority to do what you want without your boss’ approval.

This is the natural, shitty outcome when you made X and then made Y, and don’t have time to do both, so you think you should be promoted to manage a manager for X and Y each. No. Bad. That’s selfish prioritization and the cost of the org. You should pick one and do it well and accept that you do not have capacity to reap the rewards of both. When everybody plays the game, everyone loses. Prisoners dilemma of org design incentives.

> Are you just assuming that it's not a problem and therefore doesn't need to be addressed?

Fucking hell dude. Fuck off with this unnecessary passive aggressive bullshit

[kbenson]

> Fucking hell dude. Fuck off with this unnecessary passive aggressive bullshit

That wasn't meant to be passive aggressive, it was meant to solicit an answer to the specific question I was asking. I interpreted you point differently than what you apparently meant, either from a misunderstanding on my part, a poor explanation or your part, or some combination thereof.

I thought I was sufficiently clear a few replies back when asking how your solution scales to larger groups of people while I pointed out problems of scali g that I was looking for your thoughts on that, and then you proceeded to talk about entirely different things.

Honeatly, I'm aware my ostrich comment was a bit rude, and was trying to tone it down and honestly ask here. It's not that I think it's impossible or stupid that s along might hmbe ha fled a different way. "Flat" management strucutes claim to do so, and while I'm very sceptical of them in reality, I would love to hear from someone in the trenches about how they thought it worked or failed in practice, and so thought (along with interpreting your earlier comments as "extra levels are unneeded" instead of "they should provide different things") that you might actually go down that route and have a take on it.

For what it's worth, I don't think I actually disagree much with what you're advocating for, but I'm not sure it makes sense in the pure form you're describing in reality. It's great to want every level of.management to bring their own special bit to the picture, but sometimes when you have tens of thousands of employees, I think some levels will necessarily be present just to deal with the scale. Playing around with Dunbar's law and modern management studies means that for a large company you start getting quite a few management levels deep unless you expect people to be managing a hundred people under them each.

That in essence, is the main critique I have of what you've said and was trying to get you to address. Given a company of 20,000 people, explain how many levels of management you expect them to have and what special sauce each level could even theoretically bring and how many people on average each level would be directly responsible for managing. I suspect it will be hard to justify some levels other than the need to provide stable relationships between the people involved.

[jncfhnb]

You can have many vertical levels. It’s the role design that you want to solve for. The flattening is a side effect. Managers hiring more managers because they don’t have capacity to manage all of their subordinates is a cancer that grows. Do it two times and you now have three managers that all view themselves as managing the same individual contractor at different levels of specificity. And inevitably one guy in the middle becomes nothing but a gatekeeper for talking to the bigger boss. It’s countercultural but productive for people’s scope of work to go down every now and then.

The number of direct reports should scale with the level of tactical involvement. Call center employees -> huge team. Dev work -> small team.

Team of tech leads each running their own project and teams independently? Probably pretty darn big team. You can manage a lot of tech team leads so long as you do not go into the weeds.

As discussed elsewhere, the operational sides of the US military are a pretty good example of effective organization and delegation. This is in part because the critical real time, limited communication nature of military operations forcing the organization to adopt a structure that cuts out the wasteful managerial cruft you often see in the business world.

Russia operates its military more like a U.S. corporation and you can see how it fails them daily.