Middle managers are the 'glue people'—the vital translators between executive vision and frontline reality. As companies look to AI to trim the fat, are they accidentally cutting the air cover that keeps teams productive? We explore why the 'middle' is the primary target for automation and why history proves these roles are harder to delete than they look.

The AI boom feels a lot like the telecom bubble of the early 2000s — a race to build infrastructure faster than anyone can figure out how to monetize it. Investors like Michael Burry and industry insiders aren’t betting against AI itself; they’re betting against the unsustainable hype cycle surrounding it. Just like fiber-optic cable once outpaced demand, today’s AI valuations are outpacing real business value. The tech is real, the promise is real, but the process behind it

Culture is how work really happens when nobody’s looking. You can ship with perfect swimlanes and still sink if the behaviors underneath reward speed over honesty, heroics over ownership, or silence over clarity. Cultural debt is the invisible interest on those choices, tiny tells like re-announced timelines, leaders taking credit, and teams getting quiet, until the bill arrives. The fix isn’t slogans; it’s visible habits, built-in checks, explicit assumptions, and stories te

Process debt doesn’t persist because no one knows what to fix, it persists because people don’t feel safe naming the real problems. Build alignment, protect deep work, ritualize proof, and watch improvements stick.

Most teams don’t lack delegation, they lack visible outcomes. Attach a simple “report” (what we’ll see, by when, and where) to every handoff, and watch accountability snap into place.