A few months ago I was walking through a refurbishment centre in the evening, after most of the floor had emptied out. One technician was still under a car on a lift, finishing a job another team could easily have picked up the next morning. His shift had ended. The car was scheduled for early delivery. I asked him why he was still there. He said the customer needed it early because there was a wedding in the family, and he had told the team he would close it.

I have thought about that sentence often. Not because it was dramatic. Because it was precise. He saw an open loop and closed it.

That is the role I increasingly believe matters most in the modern company. Builder. Not builder as a flattering word for founders. Not builder as a synonym for engineers. Builder as the person who can see what needs to happen and change reality directly. At Cars24 it is now the only title we have. I will come back to that. The argument comes first.

The old prestige system rewarded distance

For a long time companies rewarded a different kind of person: the one who stood further from the work, coordinated the people doing it, translated their status into the language of the next layer, and accumulated legitimacy through distance from execution. That did not happen because leaders were evil. It happened because context was expensive and coordination was scarce, so a scaled company needed translators, routers, reviewers, and summarizers to stay coherent. This is Jay Galbraith's old insight, that organization structure exists to process information under uncertainty. We turned distance from the problem into a ladder. The person closest to the customer sat below the person explaining the customer. The person writing the code sat below the person converting it into a roadmap update for someone who no longer needed to know the code at all. That ladder was never beautiful, but it was administratively useful. Now a meaningful part of that usefulness is eroding.

When context becomes cheaper to gather, move, and act on, the value of pure coordination falls. Not to zero, but enough to change the prestige system. If systems can make the state of a business visible, if messy reality can be summarized without three human relays, if the person nearest the problem can reach the context directly, then the premium shifts. The highest-value person is no longer automatically the one furthest from the work. Increasingly it is the one closest to it who can actually close the loop. The technician who finishes the car because the family needs it. The inside-sales operator who calls the customer back because the first answer did not solve the problem. The engineer who fixes the straining system before the outage becomes public. Different functions, same value: direct change to reality.

What management has to become

Any essay like this risks being read as anti-management. I do not mean it that way. Judgment, hiring, standards, coaching, conflict resolution, capital allocation, all still require real authority. What is weakening is not management. It is the prestige attached to coordination theater: chase emails, status decks, the update reformatted for the next layer up. That was never the highest form of management. It was overhead made respectable. The best managers are builders too. They build clarity, remove friction, make hard calls, and help people around them close more loops. Their contribution is not that they escaped the work. It is that they multiply it. The future is not anti-manager. It is anti-spectator.

This is also why titles matter less, and differently, than companies think. A title should be a coordinate in a system, not a coronation. It should tell people scope, responsibility, and decision rights. The day it starts deciding who gets context, who gets heard, and who is presumed intelligent regardless of proximity to the problem, it has stopped being useful and become a gate. Strong companies should grow less tolerant of gates, not because hierarchy is evil, but because unnecessary distance is expensive, on speed, accuracy, morale, learning, and truth. The customer does not care how elegant the escalation path looked. The customer cares whether the loop closed.

Agency without consequence is theater

There is another reason this matters. A company that says it values builders cannot keep pretending work becomes nobler as it moves farther from consequence. If two people are both closing loops that matter, the difference between them is domain, not dignity. Many companies claim that belief and violate it daily, praising ownership in theory while preserving status in practice. People doing indispensable work feel that lie long before leadership admits it.

And this is the part that sounds attractive until you live it. Real agency is expensive. It means there is no one to hide behind when the call was yours and the outcome was bad. It means the broken version belongs to you too, and the comfort of saying, accurately but uselessly, "it was not my job," starts to disappear. Carrying the cost is what makes it ownership. The rest is delegation. Many people say they want autonomy. Fewer want consequence. The two are inseparable. That is why builder is not a motivational label. It is a structural role with a psychological price: less permission, less ceremony, less positional status, more exposure, more responsibility, more days where the question is not your level but whether you closed what was yours to close. Some people find that exhilarating. Some find it exhausting. Both reactions are honest. The market is moving toward the first kind of person.

And this is where the argument becomes bigger than culture. In a world where coordination is cheaper, the person who can close the loop compounds faster than the person who mainly routes it. AI and cheaper context accelerate it. The strongest companies of the next decade will move dignity, context, and authority outward wherever the problem allows, while keeping hierarchy where it protects quality, safety, or coherence. They will stop pretending status should flow automatically to the people farthest from the work. The old company built prestige around commentary and distance from execution. The next strong company will build it around proximity to the problem.

What changed when the prefixes went

This is the part we made literal. We deleted every title except Builder. The old bands, grades, and designations, the vice president, the director, the manager, all went. And when the prefixes went, something important became easier to see: capability that had been waiting behind permission. The model we hold in our heads is a sports team. There is a captain, but every player has a part, and the job is to play your part, not to supervise someone else playing theirs. Fewer supervisors, more players. I say this as a reformed offender. I started this company to do things with my own hands, and as we scaled I became a master delegator, drifting further and further from the work, until my day was reviews and updates instead of building. AI handed the thing back. I can do things directly again, and so can everyone else, which is the entire point. A company no longer needs a layer of senior people whose job is to call the review and rally the troops. They do their part of the work. Everyone does.

That is what I mean by builder: the only role left that still compounds when context gets cheaper and reality gets harder to hide from.

Notes and Sources