The Manager to Come. Why hierarchy is an obsolete technology.

An Oped by Massimo Portincaso

*Translated with Claude – read the original article in Italian here

In March of this year, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and now at the helm of Block, published an essay in Sequoia Capital’s magazine with an observation that deserves attention in every Italian boardroom. Corporate hierarchy, Dorsey reminded readers, 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 concrete problem: how to coordinate thousands of people across enormous distances when information travels at the speed of a horse.

From the Prussian general staff of 1806, to the American railways of the nineteenth century and the first organisational chart, to the Taylorist manager of the twentieth century, the structure has evolved, but the function has stayed the same. Middle management exists to move information upward and decisions downward. It is a cognitive routing protocol, nothing more, nothing less. Dorsey’s thesis is that this technology has reached the end of its cycle. Not because it is wrong, but because another technology now performs the same function more efficiently. Artificial intelligence, applied to a company that produces data in every interaction, can hold continuously up to date the model of the business that until now lived distributed across the heads of hundreds of middle managers. If the model lives in the system, the middle manager is no longer needed.

This observation, true for any company, takes on particular weight when applied to what I call the Neo-Industrial company: the organisational form emerging at the boundary between deep tech and advanced manufacturing, and which, in my view, represents what truly comes after deep tech. And here it's worth introducing a distinction that seems crucial to me.

The Neo-Industrial Company

Two different species of industrial companies coexist in the world today. Not two strategies, not two business models: two ontologically different ways of existing. The first species, the dominant one, evolved to extract maximum value from existing assets: established technologies, known markets, proven processes, familiar supply chains. It is a predator perfectly adapted to its niche. The second species, the Neo-Industrial company, is configured for the opposite task: to generate new structures, new technologies, new markets, and new supply chains. It does not simply create new things. It organises itself to evolve its own capacity to create them.

The two species have profoundly different architectures, and that difference translates into incompatible managerial roles.

The Digital Original

The traditional company manages what exists. Its manager is, in the end, a sensor and an actuator: gathers information from the field, packages it for the level above, receives decisions, and translates them into operational instructions. It is a noble function, but a function of coordination, not of creation. When AI performs that function better and faster than any human hierarchy, the role hollows out from within.

The Neo-Industrial company operates by a different logic. Its most valuable asset is not the existing factory, but what I call the “Digital Original”: a comprehensive computational representation of the industrial plant, validated through simulation, that precedes physical construction. The traditional company builds first and models afterwards, creating a “digital twin” that mirrors physical reality. The Neo-Industrial company inverts the sequence: first, it builds digitally, iterates a thousand times at the cost of compute, and only when the design is validated does it move to steel and concrete. The physical plant becomes the execution of a design already proven, not the discovery of what works.

The Neo-Industrialmanager. This changes the very nature of managerial work. The manager of the traditional company optimises the existing. The manager of the Neo-Industrial company builds the possible. The first works with processes; the second works with models. The first manages variance; the second generates variants. The first chair's meetings; the second interrogates simulations.

The Organisational Consequences

Three organisational consequences follow 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. 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 gives everyone the same up-to-date context, strategic authority can stay concentrated at the centre while executive authority distributes to the edge. The centre decides faster because it sees more. The edge executes faster because it receives context, not orders.

The second is the disappearance of the middle layer. The middle manager who survives in the Neo-Industrial company is not the one who coordinates better than others. It is the one who turns into something else. Dorsey offers a useful taxonomy: the individual contributor who builds capability, the directly responsible individual who owns a problem end-to-end, the player-coach who develops people while continuing to build. None of the three is the traditional twentieth-century manager.

The third, and the most important for Italy, is the return of the builder-manager. For a century, managerial careers were conceived as a progressive distancing from matter. The manager who counted was the one closest to the number, furthest from the machine. The Neo-Industrial company reverses the direction. Value returns to those who know how to build, who know how to move from symbol to metal, who know how to validate a simulation against physical reality. It is a historic opportunity for a country that has always had this capacity in its DNA and has spent thirty years treating it as secondary.

The manager to come is not a better coordinator than the one leaving. This is a different figure: closer to the product, more responsible for matter, less hostage to the meeting. This is the manager of the Neo-Industrial company. Whoever understands this before others builds the competitive advantage of the next decade.

Whoever waits for the problem to solve itself will discover that the technology of coordination, the humankind, was a technology like any other. And like all technologies, it ends up being replaced.