Independent Business, Technology & Culture
Sunday, August 16th, 2026 105 stories Independent & Reader-Supported
Leadership
Companies spend heavily to source candidates externally while making internal movement quietly difficult. The organizations fixing the second are finding they need less of the first.
After several years of celebrated flattening, organizations are rediscovering what middle management was for, and rebuilding it under new names.
An improvised job created for trusted individuals is acquiring job descriptions, levels and career paths. What it is becoming depends heavily on what problem it was created to solve.
Companies that once waited for a crisis to bring in operational leadership are now hiring chief operating officers years earlier, and the founders pushing hardest for it are the experienced ones.
Board seats at small and mid-sized companies were long treated as honors. Rising liability, activist attention and operational complexity are turning them back into jobs.
Disclosure laws were written to affect job postings. Their most significant effect has been inside the building, on conversations managers were never trained to have.
A planned executive absence used to read as weakness or exit. Boards are learning to treat it as a stress test the organization is supposed to pass.
