The Beer-Belly Organization

Why companies accumulate strategic weight in the middle — and what to do about it.

Every organization, given enough time and success, develops a beer belly. Not literally, of course — but structurally. Layers of middle management accumulate. Processes designed for coordination become ends in themselves. The distance between the people making decisions and the people doing the work grows wider, and the midsection of the org chart expands to fill it.

I call this the Beer-Belly Organization, and if you’ve worked in any company north of 500 people, you’ve seen it.

How the belly grows

It starts innocently enough. A team ships something important. The company grows. New people join, and the original team can’t manage everything directly anymore. So you add a layer — a director here, a program manager there. Perfectly reasonable.

But then that layer needs coordination too. And the people doing the coordination need their own meetings, their own status updates, their own frameworks for prioritization. Before long, you have an entire stratum of the organization whose primary job is to manage the complexity created by… the previous stratum.

The most dangerous kind of organizational debt isn’t technical — it’s structural. It compounds silently, and by the time you notice, the interest payments are enormous.

The symptoms

You can diagnose a beer-belly organization by a few reliable signals:

  1. Meeting-to-making ratio skews heavily toward meetings. Individual contributors spend more time reporting on work than doing it.
  2. Decisions travel upward, then sideways, then back down. What should be a direct conversation between two teams becomes a multi-week escalation chain.
  3. Strategy becomes indistinguishable from planning. The organization produces beautiful decks about what it intends to do, but the gap between intention and execution grows every quarter.
  4. New hires in the middle outnumber new hires at the edges. You’re adding program managers faster than you’re adding engineers, designers, or customer-facing staff.
  5. “Alignment” becomes a full-time job. When getting people on the same page requires dedicated headcount, something has gone wrong.

Why it’s hard to fix

The beer-belly organization is resilient because the people in the middle are often talented, well-intentioned, and genuinely busy. They’re not dead weight — they’re load-bearing walls in a building that was designed wrong. Removing them without redesigning the structure just makes things collapse faster.

This is why reorganizations so often fail. They move boxes on an org chart without addressing the underlying dynamics that created the bloat. Six months later, the belly grows back.

A different approach

The alternative isn’t to eliminate middle management. It’s to change what middle management does. The best organizations I’ve seen treat the middle layer not as a coordination layer but as a context layer. Their job isn’t to pass information up and down — it’s to ensure that the people doing the work have enough context to make good decisions on their own.

This requires three things:

The fitness test

Here’s a simple diagnostic: pick any important initiative in your company. Count the number of people involved who neither created the strategy nor will execute the work. That number is your organizational BMI. If it’s higher than the number of people actually doing the thing, you have a beer belly.

The good news is that organizational fitness, like physical fitness, is recoverable. It just requires honesty about the current state, willingness to make uncomfortable changes, and the discipline to maintain them over time.

The bad news is that most organizations would rather buy a bigger belt.