The Computomatix Times

At Sequoia, we see that speed is the best predictor of start-up success. Most companies are focused on AI as a productivity enhancer. Few are focused on the potential of AI to change how we work together. Block is showing what it looks like to fundamentally rethink organization design, ultimately harnessing AI to increase speed as a compounding competitive advantage.
Two thousand years before the first corporate org chart, the Roman Army solved a problem that every large organization still faces: how do you coordinate thousands of people across vast distances with limited communication?
Their answer was a nested hierarchy with a consistent span of control at every level. The smallest unit was the contubernium, eight soldiers who shared a tent, equipment, and a mule, led by a decanus. Ten contubernia formed a century of eighty men under a centurion. Six centuries made a cohort. Ten cohorts made a legion of roughly 5,000. At each layer, a named commander held defined authority, aggregated information from below, and relayed decisions from above. The structure (8 → 80 → 480 → 5,000) was an information routing protocol built around a simple human limitation: a leader can effectively manage somewhere between three and eight people. The Romans discovered this through centuries of warfare. Even today, the US Army's hierarchical chain follows a similar pattern. We now call it "span of control," and it remains the governing constraint of every large organization on earth.
The next big change came from Prussia. After Napoleon's army destroyed the Prussian forces at the Battle of Jena in 1806, a group of reformers led by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau rebuilt the military around an uncomfortable truth: you cannot depend on individual genius at the top. You need a system. They created the General Staff, a dedicated class of trained officers whose job was not to fight but to plan operations, process information, and coordinate across units. Scharnhorst intended these staff officers to "support incompetent Generals, providing the talents that might otherwise be wanting among leaders and commanders." This was middle management before the term existed. Professionals whose purpose was to route information, pre-compute decisions, and maintain alignment across a complex organization. The military also formalized the distinction between "line" and "staff" functions. Line advances the core mission. Staff provides specialized support. Every corporation still uses this vocabulary today.
Military hierarchy entered the business world through the American railroads in the 1840s and 1850s. The U.S. Army lent West Point-trained engineers to private railroad companies, and these officers brought military organizational thinking with them. Staff and line hierarchies, divisional structure, bureaucratic systems of reporting and control: all of it was developed in the military before the railroads adopted it. In the mid-1850s, Daniel McCallum of the New York and Erie Railroad created the world's first organizational chart to manage a system stretching over 500 miles with thousands of workers. The informal management styles that worked for smaller railroads were failing. Train collisions were killing people. McCallum's chart formalized the same hierarchical logic the Romans had used: layers of authority, defined reporting lines, structured information flow. It became the blueprint for the modern corporation.
Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), often called the "Father of Scientific Management," optimized what happened within that hierarchy. Taylor broke work into specialized tasks, assigned them to trained experts, and managed through measurement rather than intuition. This produced the functional pyramid organization - a structure optimized for efficiency within the information routing system that the military had pioneered and the railroads had commercialized.
The first real stress test of functional hierarchy came during World War II. The Manhattan Project required physicists, chemists, engineers, metallurgists, and military officers to work across disciplinary boundaries toward a single objective under extreme secrecy and time pressure. Robert Oppenheimer organized Los Alamos into functional divisions but insisted on open collaboration across them, resisting the military's instinct to compartmentalize. When the implosion problem became critical in 1944, he reorganized the lab around it, creating cross-functional teams unlike anything in corporate America at the time. It worked, but it was a wartime exception led by a singular figure. The question the postwar business world faced was whether that kind of cross-functional coordination could be made routine.
With the growth and globalization of companies after World War II, the scale limitations of functional design became acute. In 1959, McKinsey's Gilbert Clee and Alfred di Scipio published "Creating a World Enterprise" in the Harvard Business Review, providing an intellectual framework for a matri… continue on X ↗

We've seen that most batters tend to hit a saturation or a dip around the age of 35. And honestly, that's not surprising as it happens with many cricketers. Some choose to retire because the game catches up with them, and some just settle into whatever's left.
As a Rohit Sharma fan for a long time, it was disappointing to see that there was always this expectation, created widely throughout the world, that the same thing would happen with him. And that expectation wasn't wrong either, because the problems were there. He was struggling in the powerplay, with left arm seamers, against slow left arm bowlers. After playing 200 T20s, there is also enough data, enough evidence in your technique and your methodology, for bowlers to finally start figuring you out really well.
And most of the time, players don't really evolve much at that point in their careers. Bowlers know what strategies work against them, the weaknesses become well established.
But what Rohit did was genuinely different.
He looked at that reality and found a way to flip the script in a way that very few batters have ever managed. What happened to Rohit between 2021-23 and 2024-26 is, for me, one of the most remarkable technical and psychological evolutions you'll ever see from a batter at the back end of a legendary career. And the numbers make it very clear.
The Obituary That Was Being Written
Think back to the years 2021-23, Rohit was still a formidable force on the field but behind the scenes, a strategy was developing in dressing rooms across the globe.
Using your slow left-arm orthodox bowlers attack him from around the wicket, keep it on the stumps, and deliver those good-length balls. Guess what? It actually worked.
During that period, Rohit faced left-arm fast bowlers in the powerplay with a strike rate of 103.02, but his Runs Above Average (RAA) was a concerning -7.85. That negative figure is crucial as it shows he was underperforming compared to the average batter against those bowlers. The plan was clearly effective.
Now, when it came to slow left-arm orthodox bowlers, he managed to score 95 runs off 77 balls, with a strike rate of 123. There were control issues, dot balls were piling up, and the bowlers had a clear idea of where to target him. The pitch maps from that time tell the whole story. Good length, right on the stumps. Four dismissals in that one area. Bowlers were lining up to exploit that corridor. When you can dismiss one of the best powerplay batters in the world by repeatedly bowling the same delivery, you keep doing that, right?

The Decision Most Champions Never Make
Most elite batters, when they sense vulnerability, retreat into their strengths. They tend to leave the problem areas alone and hope nobody exploits them.
Interestingly, Rohit made the difficult choice of outsmarting the bowlers, which would later prove to be crucial in India's World cup win in 2024.
The centrepiece of that rebuild? The sweep shot.
Against spin bowlers in 2021-23, Rohit’s sweep was a minor part (18% of runs) of his arsenal. By 2024-26, it accounts for 28.19% of all his runs against spin in the powerplay. That’s a 10% jump. But the biggest revamp was the control percentage: 83.33%, which was around 65% before.
You do not play an attacking shot that contributes nearly a third of your runs against quality spin bowling with 83% control by accident. That takes hours in the nets, tweaking the trigger movement, adjusting the head position, recalibrating the risk-reward every single time.
The SLA Problem and how Rohit solved it
Let’s zoom in on slow left-arm orthodox bowlers, because this is where the story gets genuinely interesting and worth studying.

Against slow left arm bowlers alone, the sweep shot has given him a huge boost. His SR of 167 is 44 points higher than an avg batter against these kinds of bowlers.

8.2% runs in the square leg region in 2021-23 and that number has skyrocketed to 28% of runs in 2024-26. His reverse sweep and late cuts using the pace of the ball also have increased the runs he scores against these bowlers in third man region.
Now add this: that good-length delivery on the stumps that used to be his weakness? The one where four dismissals were logged in that single grid?
Rohit against spin when the ball was bowled on a good length on stump line: He used to play 15% of those balls in the square leg region in 2021-23. During 2024-26 this number has risen to 21.3% which is 8.3% more than an average Right-handed batter against spin on that very line and length.

The 2 key variations of left arm orthodox are both taken to the cleaners now by him. His performance against those 2 types of deliveries has risen significantly.

In 2021-23, when Rohit faced left-arm spin deliveries, he scored 106 runs off 100 balls. Strike rate of 106. Dot ball percentage of 40%. Balls per boundary of 8.33.
By 2024-26: 70 runs off 38 balls. Strike rate of 184.21. Dot ball percentage collapsed to 15.79%. Balls per boundary down to 3.… continue on X ↗