Speech

The Manager of the Future: Why Hierarchy is an Obsolete Technology

In the new neo-industrial business model, artificial intelligence transcends the traditional corporate hierarchy, replacing the role of the middle manager with digital models updated in real time

by Massimo Portincaso*

17 June 2026

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

In March this year Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and now at the helm of Block, has published an essay in Sequoia Capital’s magazine containing an observation that deserves the attention of every Italian board of directors. Corporate hierarchy, said Dorsey, is a technology. Not a law of nature, not an organisational necessity. A technology, invented two thousand years ago by the Roman army to solve a practical problem: how to coordinate thousands of people over vast distances when information travelled at the speed of a horse.

From the Prussian army of 1806 to the general staff, from the American railways of the nineteenth century to the first organisational chart, right through to the twentieth-century Taylorist manager, the structure has evolved but the function has remained the same. Middle management exists to channel information upwards and decisions downwards. It is a cognitive routing protocol – nothing more, nothing less.

Dorsey’s argument is that this technology has reached the end of its life cycle. Not because it is flawed, but because it has been superseded by another technology that performs the same function more efficiently. Artificial intelligence, when applied to a business that generates data through every interaction, can maintain a continuously updated model of the business – a model that until now was spread across the minds of hundreds of middle managers. If the model resides within the system, there is no longer any need for middle managers.

This observation, which holds true for any enterprise, takes on particular significance when applied to what I call the ‘Neo-Industrial’ enterprise: the organisational form that is emerging at the intersection of deep tech and advanced manufacturing, and which, in my view, represents the true ‘post-Deep Tech’ era. And here it is worth introducing a distinction that I believe to be crucial.

The Neo-Industrial Enterprise

Today, two distinct types of industrial enterprise coexist in the world. Not two strategies, not two business models: two ontologically different ways of existing. The first type – the dominant one – has evolved to extract maximum value from existing assets: established technologies, familiar markets, tried-and-tested processes, and well-known supply chains. It is a predator perfectly adapted to its niche.

The second type, the Neo-Industrial enterprise, is designed for the opposite task: to generate new structures, new technologies, new markets and new supply chains. It does not merely create new things; it organises itself to develop its capacity to create them.

The two species have profoundly different organisational structures, and this difference results in incompatible managerial roles.

The Digital Original

The traditional business manages what already exists. Its manager is, ultimately, a sensor and an actuator: they gather information from the field, package it for the next level up, receive decisions and translate them into operational instructions. It is a noble role, but it is one of coordination, not of creation. When AI performs that function better and faster than any human hierarchy, the role is hollowed out from within.

The Neo-Industrial enterprise operates according to a different logic. Its most valuable asset is not the existing factory, but the ‘Digital Original’: a complete computational representation of the industrial plant, validated through simulation, which precedes its physical construction.

Traditional companies build first and model later, creating a ‘digital twin’ that mirrors physical reality. Neo-Industrial companies reverse this sequence: they build digitally first, iterate a thousand times at the cost of computing power, and only move on to steel and concrete once the design has been validated. The physical plant becomes the realisation of a project that has already been proven, rather than a process of discovering what works.

All this changes the very nature of managerial work. The manager of a traditional company optimises what already exists. The manager of a neo-industrial company builds what is possible. The former works with processes; the latter works with models. The former manages variance; the latter generates variants. The former chairs meetings; the latter analyses simulations.

The organisational implications

This gives rise to three organisational implications that Italian managers would do well to consider.

The first is the concentration of strategic authority. The most successful neo-industrial companies, from NVIDIA to SpaceX, share a counterintuitive characteristic: they are more centralised at the top, not less so. Jensen Huang runs NVIDIA with a span of control that would have been considered unmanageable in the twentieth century. The reason is mechanical: when a digital model of the company provides everyone with the same up-to-date context, strategic authority can remain concentrated at the top whilst executive authority is distributed to the periphery. The centre makes decisions more quickly because it sees more. The periphery acts more swiftly because it receives context, not orders.

The second is the disappearance of the middle management layer. The middle manager who survives in the Neo-Industrial enterprise is not the one who coordinates better than the others, but the one who transforms into something else. Dorsey proposes a useful classification: the individual contributor who builds capabilities; the directly responsible individual who takes end-to-end ownership of a problem; and the player-coach who develops people whilst continuing to build. None of these three is the traditional 20th-century manager.

The third, and most important for Italia, is the return of the ‘manager-builder’. For a century, a managerial career was seen as a gradual distancing from the material world. The manager who mattered was the one closest to the figures, furthest from the machine. The Neo-Industrial enterprise reverses this trend. Value once again lies with those who know how to build, those who can translate a design into metal, and those who can validate a simulation against physical reality. It is a historic opportunity for a country that has always had this ability in its DNA, yet has spent thirty years treating it as secondary.

The manager of the future is not a better coordinator than the one who is stepping down. He is a different kind of figure: closer to the product, more accountable for the subject matter, less at the mercy of meetings. He is the manager of the Neo-Industrial enterprise. Those who understand this before others will build the competitive advantage of the coming decade. Those who wait for the problem to resolve itself will discover that the technology of coordination – the human one – was a technology like any other. And like all technologies, it ends up being replaced.

*Founder & CEO of Arsenale Bioyards