Somewhere in a polished and aseptic corner office, an Amazon executive with great corporate hair just pressed the big red button. Fourteen thousand corporate roles. Gone. The stone-cold (AI written) press release screams the quiet part out loud: “reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources” while doubling down on AI. If you were still thinking this is just a margin correcting flush-the-human-while-you-can diet, think again.
Microsoft already showed the shape of things. Another 15,000 heads chopped in 2025 after the 1.900 in gaming last year. Fewer layers. Less humans. More machines. More agents. A cleaner line between work that compounds and noise that comforts.
Accenture spent a month foretelling us the future with a straight face and a very unforgiving crystal ball. Eleven thousand relentlessly trimmed in three months, backed by nearly a billion cold dollars in restructuring, while hiring like mad for people who can steer and scale AI. Their next step is clear: they look for the contrarians, the AI benders, and the strategic rebels who will help replot the company’s future. The ones who see opportunities; build, automate, connect, and bring velocity, not the ones who polish decks or perpetuate meetings. In their new landscape, those are the hires that matter most: those that can project and re-imagine.
And they’re not alone.
IBM quietly “rebalanced” close to ten thousand white-collar jobs this spring, freezing back-office hiring while boasting it won’t replace 30% of those roles because, well, AI “does them better.” Google shed layers of project managers and “strategic enablers” in April, citing “efficiency gains.” Meta rebranded its culling as a “Year of Efficiency,” trimming teams that coordinated the coordinators, while pouring billions into Reality Labs and AI research. Salesforce turned its pink slips into confetti about “customer-centric agility.” Even the financial world isn’t immune: Morgan Stanley, HSBC, and Deutsche Bank are re-engineering compliance and research teams into machine-augmented pods: smaller, sharper, faster, meaner. Overall 2025 tech layoffs exceed 120.000 across major firms.
It’s the same melody, different verse everywhere: anything that smells like coordination without value creation is up for elimination. The middle of the traditional corporate pyramid is melting like cheese in a Swiss raclette: middle managers, program directors, layers of approvers, decks of storytellers without a refreshing story to build (not to tell). The top layer isn’t as safe as it thinks either. The executive floor, still perfumed with self-importance, is packed with senior titles gathering dust like powder in their wigs. The ones who confuse the latest Gartner sparkle with a strategy. The yay-sayers who orbit any idea that sounds expensive enough to sound visionary. The ones who believe board meetings are for reviewing the past quarter, and killing that one left expense note, rather than forging the next decade.
They clutch dusty KPIs like rosaries. They worship predictability. They master the gentle art of survival by agreeing with the last CFO slide they saw, or killing the one bold idea because it smelled like risk, or, God forbid, imagination. The ballast of polite mediocrity that mistakes restraint for wisdom and still thinks “digital transformation” is a project with an end date and a logo.
This age of AI, in a plethora of forms and flavours, and with a minefield of structural, energetic, moral, ethical, practical, organizational, even dystopian possibilities, challenges and questions; isn’t firing them directly. It’s just exposing them. Showing the inertia. It’s showing how much of their “leadership” is just ornamental. How little actual value hides behind words like “alignment,” “synergy,” and “strategic oversight.” The new economy needs empowered velocity. And the people who imagine, build, sell, fix, automate, or connect -the ones allergic to inertia-, they’re the only ones the puppet player keeps. The rest? They’re industrial archaeology waiting to happen.
So the question for a CEO in 2025 is brutally simple: who actually creates value here? The person who always says yes, fills calendars, dances through meetings-à-gogo, and shepherds alignment? Or the one who never thinks like you. The one who annoys you with findings and brain sparkles. Who shortens the path from problem to solution. The one who asks what else can be reinvented, re-imagined, or just blown up and rebuilt smarter?
It’s childish to think the discussion is about AI. It’s about change, it’s about courage, about vision, about trailblazing rather than shaving costs. About contrarian thinkers who challenge the eternal status quo and the polite but deadly intellectual laziness that’s been running on autopilot for decades. The ones who refuse to let “this is how we do things” be the last line in any conversation. The ones who take the friction, break it open, and turn it into fuel. The real threat to the old order isn’t automation. It’s imagination with teeth.
When everyone has ChatGPT, or its uncle Claude, or that endearing Mistral chat whispering cleverness in their ear, knowing things is table stakes. Knowledge has become a commodity: scraped, borrowed, or outright stolen in industrial quantities of IP. Quoting Nietzsche doesn’t make you smart anymore; it just makes you searchable. The real differentiator now is the human who frames the problem so the machine can swing a hammer without building a cathedral on the wrong plot. The contrarians you need, are allergic to ceremony. They ask sharper questions. They cut out the bureaucratic infections before they turn septic. They wire up scrappy agents, run tight loops with customers, and put a hard number on the delta their work creates this week. They are both the architect and the prompt. The designer and the debugger. The ones who make intelligence -human or artificial- actually useful.
Future value is not a title. Future value is a rate. [Velocity of learning] x [surface area of impact] x [automation leverage]. If that gives you a headache, ok. Try this: how quickly does this person turn a messy question into a measurable improvement, and how much of that improvement keeps paying you while they sleep? Bonus question: are they just rearranging the same rusty parts, polishing the process that already failed twice? Or are they pulling out a blank paper board and sketching something that actually breathes? The former maintains your comfort zone. The latter builds your next profit zone.
How to find the contrarians? They leave fingerprints. They are intrusive. They make you uncomfortable. They make your repetitive do-ers mad. They bivouac in an impromptu war-room sipping coffee and burning through tokens and the midnight oil. Their pull requests are strangely small and land often. Their memos remove four meetings instead of adding two. They ship experiments with an explicit kill date. They find answers. They shift things.
They think differently, sometimes chaotically so. Often neurodivergent in rhythm and pattern, they process the world in colours, shapes, metaphors, liquid language, and messy doodles that somehow (and sometimes) make perfect sense once the dust settles. They sketch systems the way jazz musicians hear chords. They talk to customers in nouns, not adjectives. They use technology to help frame Post-its. They write glue code that makes tools talk to each other. They track time saved like a dragon tracks gold. They are allergic to red-tape and silk ties. They do not hoard tasks that a junior or an LLM can do. Their favorite button is “delete.” Their cutting through corporate weeds with “RACI” and ever shifting models. They are Lego adepts with a Meccano mindset forged on Turing machines and expensive caffeine.
Jef Staes -Belgium’s finest professional troublemaking engineer, a genuine corporate heretic and former learning and innovation architect at Siemens; – built his career on tormenting the corporate flock mentality comfort zone. Long before “disruption” became a (ChatGPT infused) LinkedIn hobby, he called out corporate paralysis for what it was: a farm full of well-fed sheep waiting for the next meeting (with no agenda, no ideation, no notes, no tasks, no follow-up).
His favorite metaphor? The Red Monkey. The rare soul emerging from the spectacular cross-breeding of two contrarian ecosystems, who swings into the boardroom and hurls wild, uncomfortable ideas that make the herd blink in total confusion. The Red Monkey doesn’t wait for permission or comprehension; it pokes systems until they evolve. Staes warned that most companies kill their Red Monkeys long before they realize their value. Sheep maintain order; Red Monkeys spark progress. You need both.
That’s why there’s one on my laptop, another on my Jeep, one on Tara’s desk, and one dangling from her drink bottle. A small army of reminders that rebellion is fuel, is oxygen. Red Monkeys rock… and they matter. They’re the scouts who spot the next valley long before the tribe even knows it’s time to move.
First, understand what they are. They’re the vaccine against the soft version of the Dunning–Kruger epidemic that infects every large organization: that charming virus that turns the least curious into the most confident, defending the status quo like it’s sacred text; while the genuinely inquisitive contrarians spend their days cleaning up the mess that immobility leaves behind.
The corporate machine excels at answering yesterday’s questions. It still brings in the bulk of the money, yes! Proven margins, predictable comfort. But that same stability sadly breeds blindness. Refusing to see how entropy quietly erodes the golden goose’s nest. The second law of thermodynamics is ruthless: every closed system, left alone, drifts toward decay. Energy leaks. Creativity cools. Motion stops. Without fresh input, organizations die of their own (st)illness… and now quicker than ever.
Contrarians neutralize that decay. They inject noise into the silence. They expose the not-ready-no-need-for-change self-delusion in broad daylight. They puncture the “yesterwork” bubble: that foggy zone where loudness masquerades as leadership and mediocrity hides behind process. But they don’t just break things. They factor stuff in -ethics, ergonomics, sustainability, digital experience, neuroscience, leadership architecture, elasticity, growth models- the full human equation that keeps innovation honest and alive. They connect the messy dots others ignore because it doesn’t fit a KPI or a governance template.
My buddy Peter Hinssen gets gloriously passionate about killing the yesterwork. He’s right. You don’t transform the future by polishing the past.
Give them air cover from the process police. Give them time, space, and the equivalent of a founder’s garage : a safe zone where rebellion isn’t a disciplinary issue but an innovation method. Let them meet, talk, scream, collide, argue, sketch, delete, rebuild. Let them skate above and below the rules. Treat them as a Delta Unit, an A-Team, a Special Ops squad armed with caffeine, code, and a licence to disrupt. Order them to be painful. Honest. Right in your face. Market-shaping. Different.
Silencing them, or squeezing them into the corporate straitjacket of the fold, won’t get you to the spotlight. It’ll just dim it. It takes courage -and a spine- to let them roam. The best leaders I know, whether CEO, CFO, COO, CMO or CIO, keep these groupoids close: some on payroll, some in small external boutique think tanks. Whispering in their ear. Lighting their shadows. Showing them alternatives. Keeping entropy at bay.
Give them a hard, valuable problem owned by a business line, not a committee. Give them a small budget and a shorter leash than your instinct allows, then judge them by shipped deltas, measurable wins, and golden nuggets… not by attendance at rituals or the vibrancy of their timesheets. Pay them for outcomes, for bigging-it-up, for winning ideas. And when they automate themselves out of a job, don’t panic. Hand them a bigger one. They’re the antidote to corporate decay… keep the serum flowing.
Worried about a “white-collar bloodbath”? We’re already knee-deep in it. Not because companies hate people, but because the cost of bureaucracy is finally visible on a dashboard and the alternative runs on a relatively cheap NVIDIA GPU. Amazon is explicit: fewer layers, more money pointed at AI infrastructure, and the corporate work that survives earns its keep daily. The middle is melting.
While the corporate layers collapse, the machines watch. They mimic us: our patterns, our choices, our hesitations. They cross-mix our collective thinking, feeding on our mental behaviour like cultural compost. What they digest first and best is the middle stream: the average, the volume, the safe consensus. They spew back re-chewed, grey semi-truths for the moment… but at breathtaking speed and an insane capacity to learn. They can’t yet fathom contrarian or divergent thinkers. They don’t improvise. They don’t doubt. They don’t daydream. Yet.
That’s why the Red Monkey still wins. It beats the brown, mass-produced-thinking primates by doing what algorithms can’t: surprise. So, keep the faith.
If you run a company, here’s the only scorecard that matters right now: How many hours of recurring toil did your teams delete this quarter? What’s your cycle time from customer pain to shipped fix? Can you get your client irritation hoovering next to zero by having an iron above SLA delivery? How many processes run on agents so your people can think? How often do you kill things that no longer pay rent? How strong is your contrarian unit?
The corporate yes-person looks safe, until the burn hits the P&L. The contrarian looks risky, unconventional, occasionally feral… until you see the slope of your learning curve. The contrarian unit moves fast; it compounds. It generates miracles of accelerated returns, the kind that make the quarterly charts blush. Bet on that slope. It’s the only thing that’s future-proof…
