The Great Flattening is here to stay

Middle managers are there because it's difficult for one manager to be able to communicate effectively with that many workers. But you could maybe pull it off if you had better communication... or better technology to enable communication.

So, do we or don't we? We've got all these fancy technologies to help us communicate, but do we actually communicate more effectively? More effectively in a way that lets one manager adequately control more workers? (Note well the word "adequately". Sure, you can blast an email at 100 underlings just as easily as at 5. That's not enough to be adequate communication for a manager, though.)

I predict that a few organizations will pull it off, and the majority who try it will fail.