The Argument Starts 2,000 Years Ago
Jack Dorsey and Sequoia's Roelof Botha just published one of the most important business essays in years. If you haven't read it, stop here and read it first. Then come back.
Because the implications go well beyond Block. They apply to every business with a team, a process, and a gap between what they're capable of and what they're actually getting done.
The Roman Army solved the same problem every large organization still faces: how do you coordinate thousands of people across vast distances with limited communication?
Their answer was nested hierarchy. Eight soldiers to a tent. Ten tents to a century. Six centuries to a cohort. The structure existed for one reason: to route information up and down the chain. Every layer was a relay station. Every manager was a node in a communication network.
That logic became the blueprint for the Prussian military, the American railroads, Frederick Taylor's scientific management, and eventually every corporation on earth. The org chart wasn't a strategic choice. It was an engineering solution to a communication problem.
Middle management wasn't a strategy. It was a workaround for a world where humans were the only way to move information through a company.
What Dorsey and Botha Are Actually Arguing
Most coverage of Block's layoffs focused on the headcount. That's the wrong story.
The real argument in their essay is about the underlying assumption that has governed every organization for two thousand years: that coordination requires humans arranged in a hierarchy. Dorsey and Botha are challenging that assumption directly.
As they write, most companies using AI today are simply giving everyone a copilot. The existing structure works slightly better without fundamentally changing. Block is pursuing something different: a company built as an intelligence, not a hierarchy.
No predetermined roadmaps. No layers of coordination slowing information down. A system that maintains a continuously updated picture of the entire business and composes solutions before anyone has to ask.
Botha's framing from Sequoia is the sharpest version of why this matters: speed is the single best predictor of success, and hierarchy is structurally the enemy of speed. Every layer you add to route information also slows it down. That tradeoff has been unavoidable for two thousand years. It isn't anymore.
This Isn't a Story About Big Tech
Here's where most people check out. They read about Block cutting 4,000 jobs and rebuilding around AI and they think: that's a $30 billion fintech company. That has nothing to do with me.
They're wrong.
The underlying problem - coordination overhead eating into speed and profitability - doesn't only exist at scale. It exists anywhere a team is doing work that depends on information flowing between people. Which is every business.
If your team is maxed out, you already feel it. The bottleneck usually isn't the people. It's the layer between them. The manual reporting nobody has time to do well. The campaigns that need optimization but keep getting pushed. The leads that come in on Friday afternoon and don't get a real follow-up until Tuesday. The client who needed a proposal two weeks ago and is still waiting.
That layer is where revenue disappears. Not in dramatic failures. In the slow, constant drag of work that was almost done, almost followed up, almost optimized.
The Actual Opportunity for Your Business
Dorsey and Botha describe what Block is building in terms of a "company world model" - a system that knows what's happening across the entire organization in real time and uses that to coordinate work without requiring a management chain to relay it.
You don't need Block's infrastructure to apply the same logic.
What you need is an honest answer to one question: where in your business does work slow down because information has to travel through people before anything can happen?
That's the process you build a system around. Not to replace the people doing the work. To remove the coordination layer that was never adding value in the first place.
The businesses that get this right don't just become more efficient. They start compounding. Every month the system runs, it gets better. Every lead it follows up, every report it generates, every campaign it adjusts adds to the picture. The gap between a business running on systems like this and one still running on manual processes and email threads grows every single month.
What We're Doing at 561 Media
We've been building toward this model for two years. The Dorsey and Botha essay is the clearest articulation we've seen of the principle behind it.
We don't hand clients an AI tool and wish them luck. We build the system that does the work: campaign management that runs and optimizes continuously, lead follow-up that happens the moment someone raises their hand, reporting that exists without anyone having to pull it, content pipelines that stay consistent without a full-time team managing them.
The clients running on these systems aren't just saving time. They're capturing revenue they were previously losing to the gap between their team's capacity and their business's actual demand.
You don't need Block's budget to think like Block. The principle scales down just as well as it scales up.
The Question Worth Asking
Dorsey and Botha end their essay with a question every company should sit with:
What does your company understand that is genuinely hard to understand, and is that understanding getting deeper every day?
If the answer is nothing, AI is just a cost-cutting story. Trim some overhead, improve margins for a few quarters, and eventually get absorbed by something smarter.
If the answer is something real, AI doesn't just augment your company. It reveals what your company actually is.
For most businesses, the answer is in the work itself. The customer relationships. The market knowledge. The operational expertise built over years. The question is whether your systems are getting better at capturing and using that understanding, or whether it's still sitting in people's heads, waiting to be relayed up and down a chain that was invented two thousand years ago.
See what intelligence-native operations look like in practice: ai.561media.com
Source: "From Hierarchy to Intelligence" by Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha, Block, March 31, 2026