Is Middle Management the Next To Be Disintermediated?

Occasionally, a story comes along leaving you with a sense the subject matter signals a primordial trend—like this post from the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge blog. It’s about Taco Bell eliminating a management layer out of necessity.

The Internet, technology and more recently, Web 2.0, have disintermediated a lot of businesses: travel agencies, bookstores, newspapers, the music business—the list is long. These changes haven’t totally eliminated the old traditional ways of doing business, but they have drastically altered the business landscape.

The Working Knowledge post portends an interesting alternative where self-managed teams disintermediate the need for at least some managers. As the competitive environment pressures businesses to produce more with fewer costs, the Taco Bell experiment may become a trend. It won’t work for all businesses. but there might be many categories of commerce that can benefit from this approach.  As the article points out, the key to enabling this process is to replace expensive command and control models with self-managed groups and sophisticated management information systems. That is going to require businesses to spend up front on the technology and information architecture that turn data into easy-to-use business tools. While those costs might initially be high, the payoff could be a flatter management hierarchy and increased productivity that is well worth the upfront investment.