The Age of the Maker [038]

We have been told for a hundred years that leadership is management.

It isn't. It never was.

The greatest leaders of the modern era were makers. Not coordinators. Not reviewers. Not the people who forwarded someone else's thinking to someone else who would forward it again.

Henry Ford sketched the Model T before he built the factory to produce it. Thomas Edison ran Menlo Park as a laboratory, not an office. Masaru Ibuka co-founded Sony in a bombed-out radio repair shop and designed the products himself, which is either inspiring or simply what happens when you have no other choice, depending on how romantic you're feeling. Steve Jobs sat in industrial design reviews, edited the keynote slides, dictated the typography of the MAC, not because he was a control freak, which he was, but because the thing being made was the point. Sam Walton walked the stores. Elon Musk, whatever you might think about him, is on the factory floor and in the engineering reviews, and you can’t like him for a dozen reasons, but you can’t take that from him.

Each of them made the thing first. The company came second.

The 20th century taught us this was the exception. It wasn't. It was the rule. We simply stopped recognizing it because the management era lasted so long that most people now working can't remember, or never knew, what came before it, and have no reason to ask.

That is ending. AI is ending it. The competitive advantage in the next era of leadership belongs to the maker, not the manager.

We are entering the age of the maker

The 20th century professionalized management as a discipline separate from making. Drucker named it. The business schools institutionalized it, and bless them for the revenue that generated! The MBA became the credential, and a class of people emerged whose entire professional identity was defined by reviewing and approving the work of other people. This coordination became a profession. A whole ecosystem, conferences, management frameworks, certifications, an absolute avalanche of books,  was built around the idea that scale required somebody to coordinate the makers, and that this coordinator would be a different kind of person, with different training, working on a different schedule, and valued more.

That arrangement made a lot of sense at the time. Information was expensive. Coordination was hard. Companies had grown so large that no one person could know what everyone was making, and a manager class added real value by keeping the parts moving. For quite a while, this worked. American capitalism in the post-war era was built on it, and if the result was sometimes a grey, institutional dreariness, well, it produced refrigerators, the Interstate highway, and antibiotics.

Then the means became the end.

The manager class stopped being a tool for coordinating makers and became the destination. The career path became a thing, almost a parody: make something for a few years, stop making it, then manage the people who make it, then manage the people who manage the people who make it. By the time you were senior enough to influence what the company built, you hadn't built anything yourself in a decade. The “deck” became your work product. The status update became your craft. The review meeting became your day, and somehow, across the whole of the professional world, this was treated as development.

What AI Does to the  Manager Layer

Strip away the marketing language, and please, someone should, and AI does one thing exceptionally well: it takes information that was expensive to coordinate and makes it cheap. Synthesis, drafting, summarization, first-pass review: all free. Or close enough to free that the accounting is embarrassing, like $20 per month. The work that justified the manager class is the work AI does, and does faster, and does without needing a title or a parking space.

Rob Goldstein, the COO of BlackRock, discussed this on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast. BlackRock has a rule he calls the first draft principle: AI produces the first draft of everything the firm makes. A client presentation, an internal document, a prospectus. The first draft is fast and free. Then humans check it.

That is interesting in many ways. The point is what it implies about who actually needs to be in the building.

If the first draft is free, there is no longer value in producing drafts. The value moves. It moves to the person who frames what should be drafted. And it moves to the people whose judgment is rigorous enough to catch what the draft got wrong.

The first one is the maker. The second one is also the maker, operating at a different point in the process. What is conspicuously absent from that picture is the middle layer of people whose job was to commission, review, and forward documents they did not write and would not have caught problems in if they had read them.

Goldstein gave an example. A working group at BlackRock wanted to build a private-markets transparency tool. Portfolio managers, risk professionals, engineers, and product managers spent hours in a room discussing how it should work. The conversation was recorded. The recording became a document. The document went into the firm's AI. A working prototype existed a few days later. The unit of measurement was months. Now it’s days.

This is what the collapse of the manager layer looks like. The work that used to require an organization, all the translation between what a maker imagined and what an organization could build, can now be done by a small group with the right tools. The makers don’t need the manager anymore. They have leverage that did not exist before, and leverage has a way of reorganizing everything around it, whether or not the existing system likes it.

The Builder

What this produces is not the maker as a lone craftsman. Believe me, the cottage industry is not coming back. What is coming is the builder.

The builder is the maker who manages a product or a project, using AI as leverage to do the work an organization used to do.

The one-person company is the most discussed version; a founder using AI to design, code, market, and operate, which sounds like a Silicon Valley dream until you watch someone actually do it. The same pattern is moving up the org chart. The CEO who can sketch the strategy, draft the memo, model the financials, and prototype the product is operating in a profoundly different mode than the CEO who only reviews and approves what others do.

The technology has not changed who is best positioned to lead. It has changed how much one leader can make.

Goldstein, when asked who he wanted to hire, said English majors. The reasoning is the maker thesis: those who have imagination and can articulate it will find that the ability to implement that imagination has never been faster. Years have become days.

The bottleneck was implementation. The bottleneck is now imagination. Imagination is what makers have always had, and what the manager era selected against. We are now in the process of discovering how much that cost us. The hiring signal Goldstein is sending is that BlackRock doesn’t need more people to run processes. It needs more people who can imagine something and articulate it well enough that the system can build it.  Then the builder repeats this, iterating with the system.

That is the builder. The first draft principal: not the person who reviews other people's first drafts, but the person who works from first principles and produces the first version of the idea itself. The leverage goes to whoever can do that. AI now lets one person do that across more domains than was ever possible, which is either exhilarating or terrifying depending on where you sit in the system.

The Edge

The consequence. When AI handles synthesis and review, the human “edge” migrates to the edge, to direct contact with the customer, the floor, the problem. To the place where information has not yet been put into a model.

The point: nothing will replace being on the ground. When he talks to BlackRock's clients in the Gulf, he gets a materially different picture of what is actually happening than the one in the financial press or in a report that summarizes other reports. Those networks, he said, will become more important as a source of edge. The information that has not yet been digitized becomes gold as more information gets digitized. This should not surprise anyone, but here we are.

I learned a version of it at Best Buy. When I joined Best Buy as EVP, my first assignment was Best Buy University and eventually a stint at the Richfield, Minnesota, store as a trainee.  Every leader, regardless of seniority or function, went through Best Buy University, and part of that program meant working on the sales floor. Not for an afternoon as a photo-op, long enough to actually do the work. You stocked shelves. You helped customers find what they came for. You watched the moment when a parent realized the laptop they were considering didn't have what their child needed, and you watched what the associate (Blue Shirt) did about it.  The Blue Shirt is a badge of honor at Best Buy. It means that you have worked the floor, you have been where value is created, and earned the right to wear the shirt.

After that, every leader had stores. Stores you “adopted”. Stores you knew the team by name. During the holidays, leaders were in their stores, watching the rush, seeing what was working and what wasn't. That was the operating philosophy: the leader who lost contact with the floor had forfeited the right to lead the company.  Brad Anderson, the legendary CEO of Best Buy, famously would never call headquarters the store support center, because they hadn’t earned it!

It worked because everything important was on the floor. The deck would tell you conversion was up; the floor would tell you customers were buying because an associate had found a way to show the product that training hadn’t considered. The deck would tell you a category was down; the floor would tell you that a merchandising decision made months prior had moved the right product to the wrong end-cap. You didn't learn either of those things from the report. You learned them by standing there, watching, asking the associate what they were seeing. The decision quality of the leadership team was a direct function of how close that team stayed to the floor. 

The company that taught me to walk the floor was practicing a tradition that traced back to the original Sony. Ibuka built the products himself in that bombed-out repair shop. Morita took them to the world. The drift toward management as a separate function came later; in every one of these companies, it came later, and the healthy ones understood where they had come from and tried to keep the connection alive. The ones that forgot drifted into the manager interlude, and most of them paid for it, though the payment sometimes took longer to arrive than seemed just.

Goldstein is describing the same dynamic in a different industry, decades later. The leader who is three layers removed from the customer is now disabled from a value-creation perspective.  Before, the synthesis (management) layer added value. Now AI handles this, and what is left for the human is the inference that comes from direct contact, and, as it happens, that can’t be delegated. 

The builder-leader closes the distance to the edge. Rita McGrath has been writing about this for years. Leaders who don’t go to the edge and don’t have a process to see change coming are not just at risk of their business becoming irrelevant; they are becoming irrelevant.

What This Means if You Have Been A Manager

If you have been operating in manager mode for twenty years, this argument is uncomfortable.

You have worked hard. You have been promoted because you were good at coordinating, reviewing, and approving. The skills that brought you to the executive suite are the skills that are now being commoditized. The work that fills your week is becoming work that doesn’t require a human, and the work that does still need a human, imagining something specific and articulating it so an AI can build it, being close enough to the floor to know what is happening, is not on your calendar.

In many cases, it has not been on your calendar for years.

This is the question I get almost every day. How do leaders adapt to this new reality? How do they help their team adapt, and what is the outlook for their company in this new reality?

The honest answer is that you start over, but not from zero. The judgment you developed managing people is the asset. The pattern recognition, inference, you’ve developed is your unique value. What must change is what you spend your time on. You have to relearn how to make. You must be engaged in the work, as the person who frames the question and drafts the first answer.

This is a reorientation of what the executive job is. It means radically changing your scheduling priorities, spending less time in meetings and more time in the work.

It means owning your morning, taking your three things seriously, protecting the long uninterrupted blocks that real making requires.

It means going to the edge yourself instead of asking someone to prepare a deck about the edge, which is a sentence I am tired of saying.

It also means having the humility to learn the tools. The leaders who will matter through this transition are not the ones who can give speeches about AI. They are the ones who use it every day, and use it to leverage their work.

That is a different kind of executive than the one the last century produced; there is no credential for it, and no MBA program can help you.

The work is to become builders again.

To make the thing.

To know what is on the floor.

To produce the first version of the idea ourselves and then have the judgment to know what we got wrong. The leaders who do this will be the ones who matter in 2030.

The age of the maker is back.

It was always going to come back.

The question is whether you will be ready for it.

Be well,

Ron

(c) 2026, Ron Boire and The Upland Group LLC. Lead with Purpose and The 51% Rule are trademarks of Ron Boire.

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