In this blog, I explore the emerging tension between traditional hierarchical management and a growing anti-authority sentiment grounded in care and humanness. I contrast my own Gundam-like view of organizations—structured, disciplined, and outcome-driven—with a rising discomfort toward hierarchy, particularly among younger leaders. As AI reshapes the economic landscape, eliminating vast swaths of white-collar work, I foresee a world where softer structures may become essential. The future may demand a social model that values people simply for existing, while high-performing hierarchies still operate where competition remains fierce. Two futures unfold simultaneously, each answering different demands of our changing world.
There’s a strong current flowing through modern management — I sometimes call it anti-authority managerialism. Its premise is simple: relationships at work should be based not on role, rank, or capacity, but on humanness. On sameness. On care.
The young woman who recently sent me a newsletter captured this perfectly when she asked how to talk about utilization rates “without your team feeling like a lump of meat.” Behind that phrase sits a whole worldview — one increasingly common in the new professional class, especially among younger women entering leadership: a deep discomfort with hierarchy itself.
Where I see a machine — a Gundam, each person playing their role in an integrated fighting unit — they see risk, imbalance, and coercion. To them, hierarchy implies subjugation, not coordination. Power must be constantly softened, diffused, and equalized. Authority is suspect unless it’s clothed in nurturing language.
In my business, I reject that softness inside my walls. Hierarchy works because the world demands outcomes. Leadership requires clarity. As long as humans are competing for prosperity — in markets, in industries, in nations — organizations must function like disciplined machines, or they will be crushed by those that do.
But as I widen my lens beyond my own enterprise, I also see something else coming — something harder to dismiss. The future we are entering is not simply one of business competition. It is one of civilizational restructuring. AI is not just automating jobs; it’s rewriting the fundamental nature of economic participation. Entire categories of white-collar work will collapse — jobs that once offered stable, respectable incomes for millions of educated workers. Legal research. Data analysis. Copywriting. Accounting. Entry-level software development. Even middle management.
The traditional path — university, career, advancement — is breaking down. And unlike past industrial disruptions, this one will leave very few alternatives for those displaced. Not everyone can pivot to hands-on trades or high-skill technical work. Not everyone can become a bot manager overseeing automated task clusters. There simply won’t be enough seats at the tables that remain.
In that world, something will have to give. And it’s possible — perhaps even likely — that the very instincts represented by that young woman’s email are quietly preparing us for that transition. A future of softer structures. A future where everyone gets enough. Where the measure of a person is not their capacity to compete, but their simple existence as a member of society. Where humanness, not merit, becomes the organizing principle of value.
Of course, this introduces a different kind of risk: stagnation, dependency, the erosion of personal agency. But it may be the unavoidable consequence of an economy that simply doesn’t require as many participants as before. The Gundam model may still dominate in companies that must win markets — but outside those battlefields, a new model of social organization may emerge, one that absorbs the surplus population into a softer, more universal safety net.
This is not a judgment. It is an observation. Inside my company, we will continue to build our Gundam. We will operate with hierarchy, clarity, and performance at the center. That is how one wins when competition still exists. But I am also aware that society may soon need something very different — and that voices like hers, uncomfortable as they may sound to my ears today, may hold clues to the social scaffolding we will all rely on tomorrow.
Two futures, running in parallel. Both necessary. Both unavoidable.
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