Sarah E. Needleman

Netflix notoriously downplayed the importance of managers and wanted people to be more autonomous.

And it's worked out for them, but they haven't gone to the extreme that Zappos did.

And so like with anything in life, if you...

The extreme ends usually don't work out.

Somewhere in the middle is often the better way.

But the general gist, as you said, was smaller teams are better at innovating.

There's nobody bossing everybody around.

Everybody has a say.

And when you're dealing with a new technology like AI, where we really don't know the true potential, working with small teams and having everybody sort of chime in and give their thoughts,

can help move the ball forward.

Whereas if you have a very rigid top-down structure, I'm told that stifles innovation.

Well, look, I mean, we all advance as we get older.

I mean, that's not going to change.

We all somehow naturally go from the junior to more senior person, and the responsibilities and the tasks reflect that.

I think a lot of this is a little bit of the lipstick, the naming of these creative titles and descriptions, but how they play out in practice, I mean, it just has to be seen.

But I think naturally we'll all sort of fall into these different buckets based on our experience and knowledge.

But like you said, also the lack of the uncertainty around accountability could end up being a problem.

So we'll have to see.

But this all ties down to, again, AI making things more efficient.

You don't need as many bodies per se to do certain things, or you can outflow the grunt work to AI and then take a more sophisticated project.