The Last Days of the Managerial Class

For decades, American ambition followed a well-worn script. The protagonists were bright, driven young people who understood that success meant climbing a particular ladder: elite college, prestigious entry-level job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, MBA from Wharton or Stanford, then a steady ascent through the corporate ranks toward the corner office. This was the royal road to joining what sociologists call the professional-managerial class: The stratum of society that wielded influence not through ownership of capital, but through the application of credentials and the management of others.

That script is being rewritten, and not by choice.

The signs are unmistakable and increasingly urgent. Management consulting firms, once shaped like pyramids with broad bases of junior analysts, increasingly resemble obelisks, narrow at both top and bottom. Big Tech companies, previously reliable sources of management roles for MBA graduates, have begun cutting these positions en masse. Even Harvard Business School graduates, long considered management royalty, are struggling to find the kinds of roles their predecessors took for granted.

The culprit, predictably, is artificial intelligence. But the story is more complex than simple automation displacing human workers. AI is revealing something uncomfortable about the professional-managerial class: much of what it does can be done better by machines, or turns out to be less essential than previously thought..

Consider the traditional consulting analyst, whose job involves gathering information, creating PowerPoint presentations, and synthesizing insights for clients. These tasks, research, analysis, and communication, are precisely where large language models excel. Meanwhile, a single expert with deep domain knowledge can now leverage AI tools to produce output that previously required entire teams, without the coordination costs and information loss that come with managing multiple people.

This shift exposes a fundamental tension that has long existed in American professional culture. A comprehensive 2024 study by Hughes et al. observed that prestige in corporate America is inversely correlated with tangible output. The higher you climbed, the further you moved from actually making or doing anything concrete. This wasn’t a bug in the system, it was a feature. Management roles offered what career theorists call “high optionality”: the ability to pivot between industries and functions without deep specialization.

But artificial intelligence doesn’t care about optionality. It rewards specificity, domain expertise, and the ability to produce measurable results. The very qualities that made someone an attractive management candidate — analytical skills, communication abilities, project coordination — are either readily replicated by AI or become less valuable when machines can handle the information gathering and synthesis work that managers traditionally performed.

This creates a profound identity crisis for a generation that built their sense of self around being “leaders” and “strategic thinkers.” The new economy increasingly rewards people who build things, like write code, design products, analyze data, and conduct research, rather than those who manage the people who build things. It’s not just a career change; it’s asking people to fundamentally reconstruct their relationship to status and meaning.

The irony is that this shift may actually represent a return to first principles of leadership. Steve Jobs, explaining his approach to leadership at Apple, dismissed professional managers who “knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to do anything.” Research consistently shows that organizations perform better when led by people with deep technical expertise in their fields rather than general management skills.

Yet for all its dysfunction, the professional-managerial system proved remarkably durable. It persisted because it solved a different problem than organizational effectiveness: it provided a way to allocate status and opportunity that appeared meritocratic while actually favoring those who could navigate institutional prestige hierarchies. Hiring for expertise requires actually measuring expertise, which is difficult and politically fraught. It’s much easier to rely on credentials from known institutions as proxies for competence.

The question now is what comes next. History suggests that elite hierarchies don’t disappear, they transform. During Britain’s Industrial Revolution, the merchant class gradually displaced the landed gentry, purchasing country estates, joining their clubs, and reshaping aristocratic culture from within. The transition took generations, with old and new elites coexisting uneasily before new forms of status stabilized.

We may be witnessing something similar today. Silicon Valley has already produced alternative institutions that serve many of the same functions as traditional business schools. Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, offers networking opportunities, credential signaling, access to capital, and practical education, but with a crucial difference. It rewards people who can build things, not just manage them.

This suggests we’re entering a period where two elite classes will coexist: the legacy professional-managerial class, still holding institutional power but increasingly marginalized, and an emerging elite defined by technical competence and measurable output. The transition will likely take decades, with established managers maintaining their positions even as the pathways that created them disappear.

For young people watching this unfold, the implications are stark. The old ladder is burning, rung by rung. Those who would have become management consultants may need to become applied data scientists; those who would have been people managers may need to become product builders. The new elite pathways are still being forged, but they share a characteristic the old system often lacked: they reward people who can actually do the work, not just coordinate it.

Whether this represents progress depends partly on whether the new system will be more just than the old one. Technical expertise, unlike management credentials, can be more directly measured and verified. But expertise also tends to be narrower and less transferable than general management skills. The merchant class may have displaced the aristocracy, but it created its own forms of exclusion and hierarchy.

What seems certain is that American professional culture is undergoing its most significant transformation in generations. The age of the generalist manager is ending. What emerges in its place will shape not just individual careers, but the broader question of who gets to hold power in American society, and why.