Leadership Quote by Larry Page

Larry Page’s line reads like a tidy bit of operational wisdom, but it’s also a cultural manifesto for the version of Silicon Valley Google helped popularize: flat-ish hierarchies, engineer-led decision-making, and an allergy to bureaucracy dressed up as efficiency.

The intent is pragmatic on the surface. “Too few” managers implies some pain is acceptable: overloaded leads, slower feedback loops, more ambiguity. Page is signaling that those costs are preferable to the hidden tax he thinks management can impose - meetings that multiply, incentives that drift toward self-preservation, and a layer of “process” that starts substituting for judgment. The phrasing matters: “as many as we should” acknowledges a baseline need for coordination, but “rather” turns it into a values choice, not a staffing oversight.

The subtext is a quiet status hierarchy. In a company where product and engineering are sacred, management is tolerated as infrastructure, not celebrated as craft. That’s motivating if you’re an individual contributor who wants autonomy and speed. It’s also a warning shot to aspiring middle managers: you’ll have to justify your existence in measurable leverage, not headcount.

Contextually, this fits Page’s era of scaling Google while trying to preserve startup velocity. It’s an argument against the corporate default that growth requires layers. Yet it also smuggles in a risk: understaffed management can mean uneven mentorship, invisible burnout, and decisions made by whoever has the loudest voice or the most time. The quote works because it frames bureaucracy as a reversible sin and scarcity as a discipline - a simple preference statement that doubles as an identity.