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Everyone Is a Manager Now

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Everyone Is a Manager Now

Work, after AI

AI is not coming for your job — it is coming for the producing part of your job, and what remains is the part we have always called management. Deciding. Directing. Aligning. Judging.

Ebook and audiobook, no cost. The appendix worksheets are yours to copy. ISBN 979-8-234-18014-8

Praise For the book

Greater output of work is not the same as better performance.

“Erkang Zheng gets to the core of the future of work. Greater output of work is not the same as better performance. The advantage will not belong to whoever produces the most work with AI, but to whoever applies the best judgment to what gets produced!”
Tim Sackett Tim Sackett Author, TA and HR expert

Provocative, practical, and extremely timely.

“‘Everyone Is a Manager Now’ captures one of the most important shifts happening in work today: AI isn’t simply making us more productive — it is fundamentally changing what our jobs are. Erkang Zheng makes a compelling case that judgment and the ability to clearly direct both humans and AI agents will become the defining leadership skills. Provocative, practical, and extremely timely, this is a book every leader — and anyone who wants to stay relevant in the age of AI — should have on their bookshelf.”
Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy CEO & Co-Founder, SecurityScorecard

His message is infused with guidance — and, most importantly, hope.

“As the world wrestles with the future of AI, Erkang Zheng lays out a timely case for what it can and cannot do. His message is infused with guidance for the next generation of knowledge workers, leaders, and, most importantly, hope.”
Joel Szabat Joel Szabat Vice Chairman, Amtrak and Founder, International Leadership Foundation

I read the entire book yesterday on the flight. Incredibly good flow.

“I read the entire book yesterday on the flight. Incredibly easy to read, incredibly good flow. I actually highlighted a number of sections that stood out to me as things I would enjoy using going forward in my own meetings and discussions.”
Joe Aurilia Joe Aurilia COO, Peak Projects Contributed to chapters 7 and 17, and advises this site

The argument

Why this book exists

In 1811, English weavers smashed the machines taking their work. They were right about the looms. What they were wrong about was what came next.

The machines took the work of hands, and their grandchildren moved to the work of heads. The field emptied into the factory. The factory emptied into the office. Each time, the machine took the producing, and the people moved up — to planning, coordinating, deciding.

But notice what the machines have never taken. Not once, in two hundred years. They never took the deciding — what to make, whether it matters, who does it, and what happens next. Every wave has taken production and left judgment. And judgment, exercised over work, has a name we have been using all along.

For two centuries that word belonged to the few. AI just handed the job to everyone. Not by promotion. By revolution.

A horse that runs twice as fast is still not a car.

If you’re an individual contributor
You direct agents now, and nobody taught you to manage. Chapters 10–13 are the apprenticeship you didn’t get.
If you’re a manager
Half your job is relay work, and it is being automated on schedule. Chapter 17 is about the half that isn’t.
If you’re a leader
The pyramid was a coordination workaround, and the workaround is ending. Movement IV is your rebuild.

Read some of it

Two pages, verbatim

Front matterp. 1

Why I wrote this

I have watched two revolutions from the inside. The first moved me across an ocean. The second is moving all of us, right now, whether we booked the ticket or not.

This is a small book on purpose. You can finish it on a flight. It makes one argument: AI is not coming for your job — it is coming for the producing part of your job, and what remains is the part we have always called management. Deciding. Directing. Aligning. Judging.

Most people haven’t grasped this yet. They are using AI to produce more, faster, and wondering why nothing feels better. The unlock is not volume. It never was.

The stories here are mine — some polished by memory, a few sharpened for the telling, and some identifying details changed to protect people who never asked to be in a book. The lessons are as true as I know how to make them.

The tools at the back are real; you can skip every story and go straight to them. I won’t be offended. That would be very good management.

— EZ

Chapter Fourp. 14

Everyone Is a Manager Now

The best engineer at my company barely types anymore. I noticed it a few months ago, walking past his desk — or the video-call version of walking past a desk, which is joining a working session uninvited. His screen wasn’t an editor full of code. It was five terminal windows, each running an AI agent, each mid-task. One writing a migration. One fixing a flaky test. One drafting documentation. He sat there like a conductor in front of an orchestra pit, reading, redirecting, rejecting.

I asked him what his day looked like now. He thought about it and said: “I read a lot of pull requests. I write a lot of specs. I kill a lot of bad work before it spreads.” He paused, slightly horrified at himself. “I think I’ve become a manager.”

He said it the way you’d confess to a crime.

I understand the horror. For an entire generation of individual contributors, manager has been a dirty word — the person who lost their craft, who traded making things for meetings about things, who ascended into PowerPoint and was never seen compiling again. They built an identity on the opposite: I make. I ship. My output is my worth.

That identity is now a liability. Not because making things stopped mattering — but because the making is exactly what the machines learned to do.

Then, in the space of about three years, every knowledge worker on earth acquired a workforce.

Nobody asked if they wanted the promotion. And I know the objection, because I hear it weekly: “I didn’t sign up for this. I’m uncomfortable managing. I just want to build.” I say this with all the love of someone who has made every version of this mistake: your comfort was never part of the deal. The weavers were uncomfortable. Inevitable does not consult.

The winners of the AI era will not be the people who produce the most with it. They will be the people who manage the best through it — smarter, more coordinated, more focused. The rest will be very fast horses.

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Contents

19 chapters · four movements · one coda

Movement I

The Shift

What is actually happening, and why volume was never the answer.

  1. 1 The Horse Doesn’t Get a Vote Two hundred years of machines taking the producing — and never once the deciding. The horse didn’t get a vote. You do.
  2. 2 The Notes Got Better. The Work Didn’t. Forty-seven perfect meeting summaries and nobody followed up. The bottleneck was never production. It was coordination.
  3. 3 The Machine Doesn’t Get Tired. You Do. Three fatigues nobody warned you about: the creator’s, the audience’s, and the one where your org re-derives its own work daily at token prices.
  4. 4 Everyone Is a Manager Now Management is four questions, not an org chart. Every knowledge worker on earth just acquired a workforce — and the questions came with it.

Movement II

The Journey

What it cost the author to learn what the word manager means.

  1. 5 Hard, Harder A list from the founder years. Not one of the “harder” items is a production problem. Your career lives on the second list.
  2. 6 Tell People TRAM — track, report, align, measure. The drivetrain between effort and outcome, and the one habit worth more than talent.
  3. 7 The Trillion-Dollar Tax Three teams rowing hard in three directions, every dashboard green. Misalignment doesn’t live in the teams. It lives in the seams.
  4. 8 Straddling Paradoxes Confident at nine, humble at eleven, urgent at two, patient at four. A machine optimizes. A manager straddles.
  5. 9 When There Is Doubt, There Is No Doubt Deciding is the last thing that cannot be delegated. An agent cannot be accountable — accountability is not information, it is skin.

Movement III

The Playbook

The mechanics. Start Monday.

  1. 10 Not a Tool The $449 scam the author personally forwarded, and the agent that caught it unasked. Stop treating AI as a tool. Treat it as a new hire.
  2. 11 Your First Direct Report Isn’t Human Six habits: staff, specify, delegate, review, calibrate, cadence. Every individual contributor who says “faster to do it myself” is a first-time manager grabbing the keyboard.
  3. 12 No Tickets Standups with no yesterday. A ticket is a memo about work that begins lying the moment it’s written. Automate the memory; keep the steering.
  4. 13 Manage Yourself First The prior report on your org chart is you. Reinvent every two years, show up prepared, and run a fifteen-minute honest loop.

Movement IV

For the Leaders

What happens to the org, the metrics, and the middle.

  1. 14 The New Org The pyramid was a coordination workaround, and the workaround is ending. Stop counting what your people produce. Count what they decide.
  2. 15 The Trellis Problem Two tomato plants, same sun, same rain. One got a trellis. Drift is not an event — it’s a rate, and you’ve been sampling it quarterly.
  3. 16 The Annual Everything Is Dead The performance review is a compliance audit of a human being. It proves what audits prove: that someone prepared for it.
  4. 17 So What Happens to the Managers? The job is splitting in half. The relay half is being automated. The coaching half just became the whole job.

Coda

The argument, stress-tested — and the reason for all of it.

  1. 18 What If I’m Wrong? The strongest objections, stated as well as the author can state them, plus three of his most expensive failures told plainly.
  2. 19 Impossible Until It’s Done Management used to be a private condition. It is becoming a shared one, and people who share a condition find it very hard to stay strangers.
  3. — Afterword: Empower, Don’t Replace Two futures are being built with this technology. They do not differ in their models. They differ in their verb.

Back matter

The pages you’ll actually use

Six working tools, complete enough to use with nothing but a pen. Photocopy freely — a tool that stays in the book is a tool that failed.

  1. A1 The Agent Brief One page per task. Assignment, staffing and budget, intent, context, constraints, definition of done, review depth.
  2. A2 The Manager-of-One Weekly Review Fifteen minutes, same time every week. Close last week’s loop, then Feel, Inventory, Target.
  3. A3 The Org Health Scorecard Seven domains, three questions each, scored out of 21 — clarity, ownership, cadence, velocity, load, feedback, growth.
  4. A4 Build Your Own Chief of Staff One folder, one journal file, seven commands: capture, prep, prioritize, report, align, reflect, weekly.
  5. A5 Three Plays — one per seat The leader’s three meetings, the manager’s shift, and the individual contributor’s ninety days to unmistakable.
  6. A6 Your User Manual One honest page about how you work, how you decide, how you take bad news, and what your silence means.
  7. — The Lessons Twenty-one things the journey taught me, one line each.

The lessons

Twenty-one, one line each
  1. Getting laid off is not the end of the world. (Ask me how I know.)
  2. Every yes is a no to something else. Choose your no’s on purpose.
  3. Run toward what excites you. Never just away from what scares you.
  4. Tell people what you’ll do. Do it. Tell them you did it.
  5. Reinvent yourself every two years — even if that means working yourself out of your job.
  6. Surround yourself with people stronger than you. A-players attract A-players; B-players attract C-players.
  7. Founding is harder than it looks, lonelier than it looks, and better than it looks. All three at once.
  8. Spin-offs from private companies almost never happen. When one does, someone refused to let it stay pending.
  9. Crossing the chasm is not a one-time event. There are always more chasms.
  10. When there is doubt, there is no doubt.
  11. Stand out by being different, not just better.
  12. It’s okay that some people don’t get you. Proceed.
  13. Intuition is not a gut feeling. It is compressed experience.
  14. Keep a notepad. The best ideas don’t make appointments.
  15. People outgrow companies. Companies outgrow people. Neither is a betrayal.
  16. Building and scaling are different sports. Check which one you’re dressed for.
  17. Two people who disagree can both be right — they’re usually answering different questions.
  18. You can hire help. But you have to fix it. You.
  19. Alignment is everything: right people, right seats, right customers, right time, one direction.
  20. Say the whole thing, early. Softened truth hurts and costs more, later.
  21. You hire everyone at least twice. The second hire is the silent one.

And the one that holds the rest: it always seems impossible until it’s done.

The Resources

Skip the stories, take the tools

Everything the book points you to, free. The appendix versions are complete enough to use with a pen; these add automation, updates and the full build guides.

Nº 1 Build Your Own Chief of Staff The TRAM loop as working software you assemble yourself with an AI coding agent: seven commands, folder scaffolding, templates, automation. chs. 6, 10–11
Nº 2 The TRAM Spec The full product blueprint behind Nº 1 — data model, build phases, prompts, acceptance tests. For the reader who just became an architect and wants a first system to direct. chs. 6, 11
Nº 3 The Org Health Assessment Seven domains, twenty-one points, full scoring prompt included. Measure your alignment tax before you pay another quarter of it. chs. 7, 14, 16
Template The Agent Briefing Template The one-page brief: intent, context, constraints, definition of done. Brief a machine the way you would brief a new hire. ch. 11
Template The Manager-of-One Weekly Review The fifteen-minute Feel–Inventory–Target loop, as a printable weekly template. ch. 13
Soon Write Your User Manual One honest page about how to work with you — template, prompts, and the habit of actually reading each other’s. ch. 6 · in the book for now
Soon Managing Up Through the Transition The field guide for the manager whose boss still wants the deck: selling the record upward, scripts included. ch. 17 · in the book for now

Dispatches

From the people living it

The essays behind chapters 12, 13, 15 and 17, written by the colleagues whose practice those chapters describe.

About the author

Who wrote it
Erkang Zheng
Erkang Zheng

“I have watched two revolutions from the inside. The first moved me across an ocean. The second is moving all of us, right now, whether we booked the ticket or not.”

Erkang Zheng is the founder and CEO of Ariso and previously founded JupiterOne, a cybersecurity company that reached unicorn status. An engineer by training and an entrepreneur at heart, he has spent more than two decades building enterprise software and leading engineering organizations at IBM, Fidelity Investments, and Cisco.

He reinvents himself roughly every two years — engineer to consultant, consultant to security leader, CISO to founder — a habit he has kept since arriving in the United States from Beijing as a teenager. He works by a philosophy he calls #KnowMoreFearLess: decisions from facts, not fear. He holds five patents, was named Triangle Business Journal’s 2022 CEO of the Year, and still keeps a notepad on the nightstand.

Correspondence

Questions
What is “Everyone Is a Manager Now” about?
It makes one argument in 100 pages: AI is not coming for your job — it is coming for the producing part of your job, and what remains is the part we have always called management. Deciding. Directing. Aligning. Judging. Most people are still using AI to produce more, faster, and wondering why nothing feels better. The unlock is not volume. It never was.
Who is the book for?
Individual contributors who now direct agents and were never taught to manage; managers watching the relay half of their job get automated; and leaders rebuilding organizations whose coordination layers no longer have a reason to exist. It is deliberately short — you can finish it on a flight.
Is the book free?
Yes. The ebook and audiobook are free. The appendix worksheets are explicitly free to copy — a tool that stays in the book is a tool that failed. Expanded versions of every tool live free at everyone-is-a-manager.com.
Who wrote it?
Erkang Zheng, founder and CEO of Ariso and previously founder of JupiterOne, a cybersecurity company that reached unicorn status. He has spent more than two decades building enterprise software and leading engineering organizations at IBM, Fidelity Investments, and Cisco.
Do I need to care about AI to get anything out of it?
A friend proposed a test the author kept: delete AI from the book and see what still stands. The middle — tell people, the seams, the paradoxes, the doubt rule — was true years before machines could write a sentence, and will be true after. The playbook chapters will date. Playbooks always do.
How long is it?
100 pages, 19 chapters across four movements and a coda, plus six appendix tools you can use with nothing but a pen. Small on purpose.

The book has a show and a practice — the podcast and the consulting practice at work-afterai.com.