Insights
The Death of the Corporate Middleman
Every company has a human router.
The person whose entire job is to ask one group what’s happening, repackage it into a slightly different format, and tell another group what’s happening.
I was that person once. Project coordinator. Status report compiler. The living, breathing middleware between the people who do the work and the people who want to know about the work.
That function is already dead
Here’s what nobody wants to admit: that function is already dead. We just haven’t buried it yet.
Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index found that knowledge workers spend 58% of their time on “work about work” — coordination, status updates, searching for information someone else already has. Only 33% goes to skilled work. Nine percent to strategy.
Pure, mindless relay
Most of that 58% is relay. Pure, mindless relay. Zuckerberg figured this out in 2023 when he gutted Meta’s “managers managing managers” — entire layers whose primary contribution was moving information from Point A to Point B. Not lazy people. Just people filling a function that technology had already replaced.
AI doesn’t threaten the middleman. It exposes that the middleman was always a patch for bad systems.
When an AI can pull status from four project tools, synthesize it, and deliver a summary in 30 seconds… what exactly is the coordinator doing in between?
Productivity Theatre’s favourite character
The middleman role was Productivity Theatre’s favourite character. Always busy. Always “in the loop.” Always copying, forwarding, summarizing. Never creating. Never deciding.
If your entire value proposition is “I know what’s going on” — that’s not a career. That’s a search query.
The roles that survive aren’t the ones that move information.
They’re the ones that interpret it and make decisions nobody else will.