Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha published something worth reading slowly this week.
The thesis: hierarchy has always been an information routing protocol, not a management philosophy. The Roman contubernium, the Prussian General Staff, McCallum's railroad org chart, and two thousand years of organizational innovation were an attempt to solve the same problem. A leader can effectively manage somewhere between three and eight people. So you add layers. Layers slow information. You optimize the layers. The information still slows.AI removes the constraint. Not by making the layers faster. By replacing what the layers do.
Most organizations are responding to this by giving everyone a copilot, making the existing structure work slightly better without changing it. Block is asking a different question: if AI handles information routing, what is the organization actually for?
I've spent 35 years in organizations ranging from startups to regulated financial institutions, and the most consistently effective leaders I've worked with or for were already operating this way instinctively, without the vocabulary for it. They were close to the work, close to their people, and allergic to the coordination theater that organizations build around information scarcity. The best engineering leaders I've known write code. The best design leaders I've known still design. The ones who stopped doing the work to manage the information flow were the ones who became the bottleneck they were hired to clear.
The Block model isn't radical if you've seen it work. What's radical is the scale at which it becomes viable.
The sentence that stayed with me: "The edge is where the intelligence makes contact with reality." The human role in this model is not coordination. It is judgment, intuition, cultural context, ethical decision-making, and the ability to sense things the model cannot perceive. That is a much harder job than managing information flow. It is also a much more honest description of what great leadership has always actually been.
The organizations that will struggle with this transition are the ones that built their authority structures around information control, knowing things others didn't, owning the context that made them necessary. That scarcity is ending. What replaces it is harder to fake and harder to automate: the quality of your judgment at the edge.
Block is in the early stages of this. So is every organization that's being honest about it. But the question they're asking is what your company understands that is genuinely hard to understand, and is that understanding getting deeper every day, the right one.
Block