The growing complexity of the workforce – the need to juggle a wide variety of individuals with diverse preferences and needs, and resultant dizzying array of relationships between businesses and those who perform work – drove Peter to predict that before long, line managers would turn over responsibility for long-term talent management to some type of central staff function. It would simply become too complicated, the arrangements too varied and difficult to track, and the entire process too time consuming for individual line managers to tackle….

…Meanwhile, traditional line managers would evolve to roles more similar to program managers or film directors – setting direction and running the team of employees who have been assigned to the task or division at that moment in time.

I don’t agree with this, but it is interesting. I think the systemic response to increasing complexity of arrangements is going to be more technology to manage the workforce, not more centralization. But I do agree that as managerial resources shrink, ‘program’ management type functions will get priority over ‘line.’ The latter will somehow shrink.