Liang Rubo has launched a major reshuffle targeting ByteDance's middle management.

Amid the rapid advancement of AI, ByteDance is more resolutely directing its efforts towards the internal organizational barriers to innovation.

On June 29th, Liang Rubo, the CEO of ByteDance, sent an email to all employees, requiring middle and senior managers at ByteDance to not only focus on reports and briefings but also immerse themselves in the front - line of business, products, and users to face problems directly.

According to "China Entrepreneur", the biggest highlight of this open letter is three updates based on ByteDance's original "10 Leadership Principles":

First, on the basis of "Driven by mission and vision" and "Resilient and results - oriented", descriptions of "Doing things with high standards" and "Daring to set high goals" are added. Managers are required to focus on business strategies, be optimistic and imaginative, and dare to set challenging high goals.

Second, "Having a sense of crisis and maintaining an external perspective" and "Going deep into the front - line" are made into independent items. Managers are required to have an external perspective and directly experience and obtain first - hand information.

Third, "Context over Control" is emphasized again. "Managers need to fully share information and context, encourage different people to participate in discussions, pool ideas, and make decisions based on sufficient information."

01 Context over Control

This is not the first time Liang Rubo has addressed middle - level managers. In recent years, how to combat "organizational gravity" has become a concern for ByteDance.

The concept of "Context over Control" was proposed by Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, at the all - employee meeting in 2020. At that time, ByteDance had 100,000 employees, and Zhang Yiming realized that the biggest danger of a growing company was not chaos but rigidity.

Zhang Yiming gave an analogy: The Control model is like "the captain operating every button when flying a plane"; the Context model is like "the captain telling the co - pilot the target altitude and weather conditions and letting the co - pilot adjust independently" - the former relies on personal authority, while the latter relies on system capabilities.

He proposed that ByteDance could follow the example of Netflix and "avoid excessive chaos by increasing the talent density and providing sufficient context rather than adding rules and processes."

According to "China Entrepreneur", since last year, ByteDance has also been optimizing the performance system to widen the real gap in scores and promote practical talents; middle - level managers can get a promotion nomination once they get an "M+".

Liang Rubo's re - emphasis on "Context over Control" means that organizational efficiency has become even more crucial in ByteDance's AI competition. Large models and Agent products are creating digital "ten - fold efficiency" employees in batches, forcing technology companies to issue "AI penalties" to middle and senior leaders.

On the day when Liang Rubo's open letter was released, Tang Jie, the founder of Zhipu, posted on Weibo: "Many people think that the success of an enterprise depends on management, which was true in the past, but everything has changed in the AI era. Too many things have been AI - enabled, and engineers have suddenly gained more say. Technology outweighs management. Management is still useful, but if you don't understand technology or even go deep into it, you don't know how to manage - what to manage?"

According to "China Entrepreneur", in the first half of 2026, companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent have all adjusted their AI products and organizational structures, aiming to eliminate "old - fashioned" middle and senior executives and provide smoother promotion channels for new and young employees.

To some extent, this is related to the attractiveness of companies in the AI era and the ultimate success or failure of this battle.

02 Breaking the Innovation Resistance of Middle - Level Managers

On June 23rd, at the "2026 Volcengine FORCE Prime Conference", Liang Rubo delivered a video speech, saying that the company's keyword for ByteDance this year has become "Climbing the Peak", and "Climbing the AI Peak" is the most important thing at present.

"In the past few years, we have been narrowing the scope of our business and focusing our energy on AI, and in the AI field, we have focused on improving model capabilities. The Volc MaaS business is becoming the basic business of ByteDance, and our investment will be long - term and firm."

In this process, ByteDance is also struggling to combat the problem of "organizational entropy increase".

A former employee of ByteDance's game department told "China Entrepreneur" that a few years ago, a senior executive of the company expressed the intention of "seeking commercialization of a certain game". By the time this message reached the middle - level managers, it had become "the commercial value of this sector is not high, so just cut it off". A few years later, when the senior executive wanted to find this department again, he found that it no longer existed.

Photography: Wu Ying

How to break the "innovation resistance" of middle - level managers is the core problem of the "big - company disease". The power of middle - level managers comes from the monopoly of resources and information. They filter information upwards and convey instructions downwards - they are also the most stubborn "vested interests" under the Control model.

In the Context model, this kind of "filtering" itself is the enemy of organizational efficiency. In 2024, Liang Rubo criticized this phenomenon at the all - employee meeting of ByteDance: "Multi - level approval, repeated meetings, and ineffective reports."

In that year, Liang Rubo set the annual keyword for ByteDance as "Always be entrepreneurial and escape the gravity of mediocrity". At that time, Liang Rubo gave an example of a former ByteDance employee: this employee could advance in one month what used to take six months in a startup company. "In a mediocre and inefficient organization, people will feel more tired because even if they work hard, the final result is not ideal. This is what makes me most worried and gives me the greatest sense of crisis."

Although Doubao has 300 million monthly active users and the popularity of Seedance 2.0 is expected to bring annual revenue of tens of billions of yuan, ByteDance's AI is far from being worry - free. The huge computing power burden of Doubao has forced ByteDance to launch a paid professional version of Doubao.

However, in the more certain paid scenarios of office, coding, and enterprise services, Zhipu, Alibaba, and Tencent are seizing market shares, and in comparison, ByteDance still lags behind its competitors in terms of model and product capabilities.

03 Are Middle - Level Managers More Panicked Than Programmers?

In fact, after the popularity of AI Coding, startups have been trying to "de - middle - levelize", especially on the R & D and technology side.

An AI company founder told "China Entrepreneur" that the biggest move of his company in 2025 was to cancel the sales and product leaders, including the CTO. The number of employees in the company was reduced from more than 30 to 15. The reason was that he thought Claude Code could completely replace the R & D and technology departments.

The CTO of another SaaS company told "China Entrepreneur" that in recent years, the CTO of his company has been replaced twice. He is currently cooperating with the CEO's requirements to promote the full - stack development of R & D personnel and build a workflow based on tokens. He also has his own confusion. If he refuses some of the CEO's requirements, he may be regarded as conservative and marginalized.

Under the changing situation, in the first half of 2026, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba have all adjusted their organizational structures and all targeted middle - level leaders and departmental barriers.

Source: AI - generated

In the first half of this year, Tencent's WXG (WeChat Business Group) cancelled the team - leader responsibility system that had been in use for many years and started piloting the project - responsibility system. The former team leaders became project leaders.

In April this year, Baidu announced through an all - employee letter that starting from May 1st, 2026, it would fully open up the dual development channels of professional and management positions below the middle - level, cancel the T, P, E, M rank labels that had been in use for many years, and uniformly replace them with a digital rank system from level 5 to 12.

Tang Jie, the founder and chief scientist of Zhipu, finally said on Weibo: In fact, what may be completely subverted is our own knowledge system.

"This is why the seniority in CS (Computer Science) suddenly doesn't work anymore - all CS is flattened by AI. Only with forward - looking cognition can one survive in the AI era: quickly iterate knowledge and quickly improve cognition."

This article is from the WeChat official account "China Entrepreneur Magazine" (ID: iceo - com - cn), written by Yan Junwen and published by 36Kr with authorization.