Management Is the Problem, Not Technology
January 22, 2026
Inc. said at the end of 2025 that “The Tech Industry Is Dying” and offered its opinions about how to fix it up the ageing buggy. One of its editorials says the tech industry is being demoted to a commodity like insurance and other and a doc in the box in a strip mall. The reason? Top talent isn’t being nurtured and desirable products aren’t being designed and built.
Now this premise strikes me as a management challenge. A worker has to know what the job or task is. If a manager cannot explain it, how can the technology worker know what to do? The answer seems to me that the employee has to figure that out alone. No wonder outfits like Amazon can bring down half of the US Web sites or Verizon outages leave people without mobile access or law enforcement without communications.
But let’s look at what Inc. thinks:
The editorial’s author Joe Procopio suggests five ways to save the industry are as common sense. For example, don’t wait for others to innovate and always meet shortsightedness with facts. Groupthink is another hurdle to jump that is worse to maneuver than meerkats over a cliff:
“Consensus rule is dominating the tech industry more than it ever has. I’ll explain why this happens. My wife brought home a game where everyone takes turns being the first to guess an answer to a question by placing their marker on one of a few hundred options. It sucks having to go first, because then you don’t have the luxury of being able to put your marker closer to the consensus of markers. Then, when the answer is revealed, everyone can see just how wrong you were. If you want to lead, you can’t just be right. You have to convince everyone that their marker should be near your marker. Techies are terrible at getting consensus. Hopefully that analogy I just gave you helps you understand what you’re dealing with, so you can fight groupthink in a way that doesn’t get you ostracized and fired.”
Procopio says assume control over AI and remember to take risks (within reason of course). These suggestions sound like a self-help motivational course, not just ways to improve the tech industry.
Let’s think about this “consensus.” An employee without an effective manager or even a coherent job description may talk with a colleague. The colleague’s views become the input the employee needs. Calling this “consensus” misses the point. Organizations with managers who are not able to perform the employee’s job cannot provide guidance. Therefore, non-management allows the manager to say, “You work it out with your team.”
The team may be clueless. The results of this approach are visible in many firms. How many Copilot features are available? How many different interfaces does Google present to its users? How many products on eBay are as described?
In my opinion, Inc. dodges the core issue: Management methods deliver cleverness, an individual’s idea of what must be done, and an ultimately unstable technical house of cards. Is 2026 providing examples of positive change? I can’t think of one, but it is early in the year. I am not optimistic. My Internet just went down… again.
Whitney Grace, January 22, 2026
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