Welcome to a new episode of Business Lunch!In this episode, Roland Frasier and Ryan Deiss dive into “the great flattening”—the radical shift where AI enables entire departments, and even companies, to be run by a single person. They explore real-world examples from tech and traditional industries, discuss the risks and rewards of this new model, and offer practical advice for leaders and entrepreneurs. If you’re a business owner, manager, or anyone interested in the future of work, this episode is for you!
Highlights:
“What if the highest performing marketing team at your company was actually just one person?”
“AI is compressing entire departments into individual ‘departments of one.'”
“The coordination tax is the overhead of meetings, getting along, and not getting along.”
“This may be the end of the middle manager and the rise of the player-coach.”
Timestamps:
- 01:41 – Introducing “The Great Flattening” Concept
- 02:30 – WhatsApp: $345M Value Per Employee
- 03:30 – Midjourney & Cursor: Creative and Dev Pancakes
- 07:21 – The Coordination Tax Explained
- 11:18 – Team Size, Efficiency, and the Two Pizza Rule
- 14:25 – AI Agents Replacing Marketing Teams
- 22:35 – Risks of Single-Person Departments
- 26:53 – The End of Middle Management?
- 37:19 – The Pancake Test: Is Your Department “Pancakeable”?
- 54:20 – Digital Marketer’s Department of One Beta Program
