Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt, made headlines (at Fortune and beyond) recently when he eliminated his entire people function. His explanation at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit: it was “creating problems that didn’t exist.”
He told Fortune editorial director Kristin Stoller that his people team was manufacturing problems rather than solving real ones. And that once they were gone, those problems vanished with them.
Here’s the thing: Breslow isn’t wrong that something was broken. He’s wrong about what broke it.
I’ve spent my career building people functions, and I’ve also watched them get built to fail. What Breslow describes – reactive, process-heavy, better at documenting problems than solving them – is a real pattern. The instinct to blow it up is understandable. But the that misses the diagnosis entirely.
How people functions get built to fail
