THE PULSE
The corporate world spent 2026 tearing the org chart apart.
Citigroup cut its structure from 13 management layers down to 8.
Company after company is "flattening" deleting the middle boxes to shorten decision chains and get leaders closer to the work. But Fortune's own framing is the part to sit with: the great flattening doesn't automatically work. Removing boxes isn't the same as fixing who decides.
Source: Fortune - "Jane Fraser cut Citi's management layers from 13 to 8. But the 'great flattening' doesn't always work as intended" https://fortune.com/2026/05/30/jane-fraser-citi-flat-management-leadership/
What it means for you: If billion-dollar companies are ripping the layers out, why are you at nine people so eager to draw them in?
MY TAKE: The org chart is ego. Ownership is operations.
Let me say the quiet part: in a small business, the org chart usually isn't an operations tool. It's a status object.
You drew it the week you started feeling like a "real company." It felt like a milestone. Be honest about what it actually did for the following Tuesday: nothing. A chart tells you who has the title. It says nothing about who carries the outcome. And those two things have almost nothing to do with each other.
I made one of these once. Color-coded, boxes and lines, the whole thing. I was proud of it. And it changed exactly nothing about how we actually ran it was a portrait of the company I wanted to look like, not a map of how mine worked.
Here's the honest part, because I'm not just here to dunk on charts: the chart isn't the crime. The motive is. Drew it because handoffs kept dropping and you needed ownership to be explicit? Useful. Drew it because it made you feel like a CEO or to look legit to a bank? That's ego in a nice font. One test settles it: does anyone's actual daily decision change because that chart exists? If not, it's a trophy.
And a verdict on the flattening crowd, while we're here: right instinct, usually wrong reason. The big companies finally noticed the boxes had become bloated. Target's CEO openly admitted they'd built too many layers that slowed decisions down. Good. But watch them, because plenty are now making the opposite version of your mistake: they think deleting boxes is the fix. It isn't. You can run 13 layers or zero and still have every real call route straight to the top. (You met that person last issue; they were the bottleneck.) Flattening without reassigning ownership just buys you a faster-looking chart and the exact same clog.
So the real work isn't drawing the chart, It's naming the owner:
- Replace titles with outcomes. Next to each person, don't write their title; write the number they own. "Owns: collections (DSO)." "Owns: on-time delivery %." A title is a costume. An outcome is a job.
- One throat to choke per outcome. If two people own it, nobody owns it. If you own it, it isn't delegated. Every outcome gets exactly one name, and it shouldn't always be yours.
- Kill the dotted line. The "we all kind of share this one" arrangements are where accountability quietly dies. Solid line or no line. A dotted line is a decision you're refusing to make.
An ego org chart is just decision debt with boxes drawn around it. You made the picture instead of making the call.
THIS WEEK'S MOVE
Pull up your org chart or the one living in your head. Next to every name, write the single outcome and number that person owns. Not their title. The outcome.
Any name you can't attach an outcome to, any outcome with two names on it, and any outcome sitting under your name that shouldn't be there is your real work this week. No chart at all? Even better. Skip the boxes and just write the list.