Earlier this year, financial technology company Block laid off 4,000 employees—around half the company’s workforce—in its push to embrace AI. Based on a recent interview, it seems like CEO Jack Dorsey has some more major changes in store for the company. And if true . . . he’ll have quite a few more performance reviews to fill out this year.
In a recent episode of the Long Strange Trip podcast, Dorsey said he wants to cut middle management layers from five managers down to two or three this year. “In the most ideal case, you know, there is no layer,” he said in the podcast episode. “Everyone in the company reports to me, and that would be all 6,000 of the company. And that feels somewhat ridiculous when you consider the old structure, but when you consider that the majority of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it’s a lot more manageable.”
The thousands of proposed direct reports aside—that would be a lot of one-on-one check-ins—Dorsey describes a desire to “normalize down to just three [types of] roles.”
First in Dorsey’s envisioned replacement structure are the “Builders”—those who work on the tools to build or operate the company. “They’re augmented, because they have access to agents, so one person can potentially do the work or explore the breadth that it would take a team or 10 people to do in the past,” he said. Then come the “Directly Responsible Individuals,” or employees who can strategize and understand customer outcomes. The last role would be what Dorsey calls a “Player-Coach”—basically what we consider managers today.
He hopes all of these roles will one day be able to report directly to him.
Social media users were not exactly thrilled by Dorsey’s proposal that artificial intelligence could outright replace middle managers.
“So, the managers only exist to give employees someone to ‘report to’? That’s their only function?” one BlueSky user said. “They don’t actually DO anything, they’re just a big email in-box? Why even have a CEO, why not just let a bot run the whole shebang? Maybe the AI will decide to save costs by sacking all the employees.”
“I know it wouldn’t ever happen in this scenario, but god would it be funny to have Jack Dorsey write 6,000 performance reviews,” another user commented in the same thread. “Or deal with basic day-to-day employee relations issues. This is 100% a recipe for failure.”
Others were less surprised by Dorsey’s statements but similarly unenthused. “Basically, the only role that is indispensable is him,” a third person said. “This isn’t as innovative as he seems to think it is. It’s actually pretty standard tech CEO thinking.”
After Block’s pandemic surge and before this year’s mass layoffs, the company’s stock has experienced a fair share of volatility. Last year, Block reported $24 billion revenue after its revenues missed Wall Street’s third-quarter expectations, resulting in company shares falling by as much as 14%. Earlier this year, Block stock surged by 20% following news of the company’s mass layoffs.
Middle managers are already increasingly more burned out these days, due to AI-related layoffs that gut organizational structure and lead them to have even more direct reports. But it sounds like Dorsey wants to do away with them altogether.
In the same podcast episode, the billionaire Twitter cofounder admitted that he experienced “existential dread and also hope and optimism” in the last year. Under that pressure, Dorsey has taken extreme approaches to give the company “the only durable structure” that he imagines could last “for quite some time.”
And it doesn’t seem like the pace or scale of change will slow down anytime this year.