They're cutting layers to move faster

Now bear with me on this one.

If you've travelled by train in Britain, you've passed plenty of them. A small brick building by the track. A row of levers. One person at the window.

The signaller knew their stretch of line better than anyone alive. Which services always ran late. Which points stuck in a cold snap. When to hold a freight train so the commuter service could get through.

Network Rail is consolidating more than 800 of those boxes into large regional rail operating centres (Network Rail).

The signallers were good at the job. What changed is that most of the job was passing information from one end of the line to the other. And the information can now travel without them.

2 stories this week describe the same thing happening inside companies. One layer higher than most people expect.

Let's dive in.

At the end of September, Bloomberg reported that Apple's new chief executive, John Ternus, has started reshaping the company to release products more often and cut layers of management. The first people out were engineering program managers in the hardware engineering group (Bloomberg, 29 September 2026).

Program managers are the people who keep a hardware project moving. They chase the dates, run the status meetings, and make sure engineering, supply chain and design all know what the others are doing.

On Bloomberg's tech podcast, the reporter behind the story put the intent in 2 short sentences: "They want fewer people. They want fewer layers."

A week later, the Financial Times reported that HSBC plans to cut around half of the management and specialist roles in its UK wealth business, as part of a push to use AI to serve wealthy clients more efficiently. The relationship managers who face the clients are being given AI tools (Financial Times, via ITV News, 7 October 2026).

Bernard Marr, who writes about technology and business, described the mechanism behind both. Agents that track deadlines, chase actions, prepare status reports and only escalate the decisions that need a person. In his view, one manager can oversee more work, teams get smaller, and structures get flatter.

Put those side by side.

The roles going first are those whose job is to keep information moving between other people. The program manager between engineering and supply chain. The management layer between the client-facing team and the head office.

The signal boxes.

I'd expect 2 reassurances from a Director reading this. Both are reasonable. Both are worth testing.

The first is that AI creates jobs. That case was made well this week too. Alexandra Mousavizadeh, who runs Evident, the firm that benchmarks how banks use AI, told Bloomberg that the banks investing heavily in AI are growing their headcount. Her estimate: for every job that's changing, 4 new ones are appearing (Bloomberg Tech: Europe, 9 October 2026).

She may well be right. Look at where she says the growth is. AI specialists. Relationship managers. New monitoring teams. The people building the system, and the people the client sees.

Then read the HSBC story again. More people at both ends. Fewer people in between.

Both stories are true. They describe the same industry from different angles.

The second reassurance is closer to home. Cuts follow bad numbers, and your company is having a good year.

That's why the Apple story worth reading again too. The reporter's point was that Apple doesn't need to do this financially, and that this is exactly why he expects it to continue: smaller rounds, team by team, without a big announcement.

Cutting for cost is linked to a run of bad quarters. Cutting for speed only needs someone at the top who thinks the company is too slow. A new chief executive usually does.

So a strong year protects your budget. It does very little for a layer whose main job is moving information, once something else can move it faster...

Back to the signal box.

The signaller's skill was real. Years of knowing one stretch of line. But a lot of the job existed because a message couldn't get from one box to the next without a person in between.

Plenty of senior roles were built the same way. Mine were. The weekly/monthly/quartely roll-ups. The status calls. Translating what sales wanted into something operations would act on, then translating the answer back. Sitting in the meetings so you could direct and then brief the people who weren't there.

All of it needed doing. A lot of it felt like leadership. And a good share of it was routing.

So split your week. This week:

1) Mark your last 2 weeks. Go through your calendar and label every block R or D.

R for routing: gathering, chasing, summarising, passing on, attending so you can report back.

D for decision: something changed because you were there and chose.

2) Add up the D hours. If the number is smaller than you expected, that's fine. It's the honest starting point, and most of us have never measured it.

3) Find a buyer for each D. For every decision on the list, write who else would pay for that judgement. A smaller company that can't afford it full time. A board. A fractional seat. A consultancy.

None of this means leaving. It means knowing which part of your experience travels, while you're still employed and the choice is yours.

This is the work Zelova is built for. The guide looks at your actual role, separates the routing from the judgement, and works out who else would pay for the judgement. Then it turns that into a plan with multiple potential outcomes in it. Built while you're employed, so the choice of terms stays with you.

It's a career strategy service, still being built. If any of this feels close to home, the waitlist is open at zelova.ai.

If the updates could get from your team to your boss without you this week, what would you still spend your week doing?

Reply and tell me. I'd like to hear your thoughts.

David