Against the org chart
The chart is a map of salaries. The work is somewhere else. On drawing the other diagram, and on zero as a shape rather than a cut.
Look at an org chart long enough and you notice that it does not describe what a company does. It describes what a company pays for. Boxes are people, lines are reporting, and the whole diagram answers a single question: who is accountable to whom. That is useful in a payroll conversation. It is nearly useless for understanding how an order becomes a delivery.
Try drawing the other chart sometime. Not the boxes, the flows. Start at the moment money arrives and work backward through every hand it passed through, every check, every waiting period, every place where a thing sat in a queue because the person who moves it only looks on Thursdays. That drawing never resembles the org chart. It has loops the chart does not have. It has a step in the middle that three departments each believe belongs to one of the others. It is embarrassing, and it is the truth.
The two drawings differ because org charts are built from the outside in. You have a budget, so you have roles. You have roles, so you have titles. Titles need people beneath them, since that is what a title means, and within a few years the shape of the company is a fossil record of hiring decisions rather than a design for getting work done.
A chart of systems looks different. The boxes are not people. They are things that happen: intake, judgment, production, verification, the ledger where lessons go. Each box states what it takes in, what it puts out, how you know it worked, and what happens when it did not. A box can be run by a person, by software, or by an agent reading a document, and the chart does not care which, because the chart is about the work. It is also the only kind of chart you can hand to something that is not human and expect anything sensible back.
Once it is drawn, the headcount question changes. It stops being how many people do we need and becomes which of these boxes actually requires one. Some plainly do. Taste requires a person. Trust with another human being requires a person. Deciding what the company is for requires a person, and nothing about that looks likely to change. A good deal of the rest is procedure wearing a costume.
That is what zero means here, and it is worth being precise about it. Zero is not a cost cut. A cut is what happens when you take a company designed around people, remove some of them, and act surprised when the parts that were living inside them go missing too. Zero is what happens when you design the work first and never add the box that existed only to hold a title. One is a subtraction. The other is a starting shape.
Nobody has run a large company this way for long enough to know where the limits sit. That knowledge has not arrived. But the first move is available to anyone this afternoon: put away the chart of salaries and draw the chart of the work.
The rules this argument rests on are on the front page. On what the boxes are made of: A Company That Writes Everything Down.