Block Is Right. Now What About the Rest of Us?
When I was COO at TravelPerk, we spent two months building a new annual strategy. Three geographies, dozens of stakeholders, a properly good kick-off with a clear direction and a plan that everyone believed in.The next day, everyone went back to their inboxes. The old projects hadn't paused. The Slack messages hadn't stopped. The commitments from before the strategy shift were still sitting there, demanding attention. Within a week, the new plan was a document nobody opened. Within a month, we were running another town hall to repeat the same message.The strategy wasn't the problem. The communication wasn't the problem. The problem was that nothing in the daily reality of work had actually changed. The strategy was a broadcast. Work is a stream. And the stream always wins.I've been thinking about this a lot since reading Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha's essay, "From Hierarchy to Intelligence." They trace 2,000 years of organisational design and make a provocative argument: hierarchy exists because humans were the only available coordination mechanism. Every layer of management exists to route information, aggregate context, and relay decisions. My kick-off at TravelPerk didn't fail because the strategy was wrong. It failed because it relied on a broadcast to override a coordination system that runs 24/7. AI, they argue, can replace that system entirely.I think they're right about the diagnosis. But I think they're wrong about the prescription.Right diagnosis. Wrong prescription.
Block cut 4,000 people and restructured around the idea that the coordination layer should be automated away, along with the people doing it.But those managers weren't hired to be a coordination layer. Nobody puts "status chasing and follow-through" on a job description. They were hired for their judgement, their experience, their ability to develop people. Somewhere along the way, the coordination ate everything.I've watched this happen my entire career. The sales rep who exceeds quota by 300% gets promoted to sales manager. Overnight, the quota disappears. Their superpower goes dormant. Instead, they spend their weeks building reports in Salesforce, creating forecasts, chasing pipeline updates. The 300% performer becomes a mediocre administrator. It's the same in engineering. The 10x engineer becomes a 1x engineering manager. Everyone loses.Block sees this and says: eliminate the coordination layer, eliminate the people stuck in it. I see the same thing and arrive somewhere different. Eliminate the coordination layer and unlock the people stuck in it.Unlock, don't eliminate.
AI can handle the coordination. The context-gathering, the follow-through, the status tracking, the information routing. When that work disappears, the manager doesn't need to be eliminated. They need to be liberated. The 10x engineer can keep writing code AND lead the team. The 300% sales rep can keep closing deals AND coach the reps around them. Their superpower stays active. The leadership actually happens.This is already how every great small team works. The founding engineer who reviews code, mentors juniors, and sets technical direction... all while still shipping. The problem is that it breaks at scale. As companies grow, the coordination overhead forces a choice: stay in the craft, or manage the machine. Nobody gets to do both.AI breaks that constraint. For the first time, someone can lead a team without being consumed by the logistics of leading a team.The bigger prize.
Some companies will treat this purely as a cost-saving exercise. Cut managers, add AI, save payroll. And yes, some of that will happen... organisations carry coordination overhead that simply won't need to exist in the same way. But if that's all you do, you've missed the bigger prize.Our research shows 77% of managers spend three to ten hours a week on status chasing and follow-up alone. Redirect that attention toward judgement, coaching, craft, and leadership... the things that actually determine whether a company wins... and you're not saving money. You're compounding talent.The path, not the manifesto.
Block can write their vision because they're Block. They're remote-first, so everything is already machine-readable. They have proprietary data to build their world model from. They can afford a massive structural bet because they have the resources to absorb the mistakes. The head of engineering at a 200-person SaaS company doesn't have any of that. She knows the future looks different. She just doesn't have a path to get there.I couldn't stop thinking about that gap. It's why I'm building readywhen... an intelligence layer for organisations that closes the distance between what a company intends and what actually happens. Not by asking companies to restructure overnight, but by taking the coordination tax off their managers one workflow at a time. Learning how each specific company actually works. Compounding that intelligence until the gap starts to close for real.The way companies work is going to change. I don't think that's debatable anymore. Block has shown us what it looks like when a company with enormous resources rebuilds itself around AI. The question for everyone else isn't whether, it's how.If I could go back to that kick-off at TravelPerk... two months of work, three geographies, a strategy that evaporated in a week... I know exactly what was missing. Not a better presentation. Not a louder message. An intelligence that could take that strategy and weave it into the daily reality of how work actually got done, for every person, every day, without anyone having to remember or chase or repeat.Nothing between great people and great work. That's the future. The question worth sitting with is: how are you going to make sure your company gets there quickly enough to make the most of it?