Even the best-performing companies with strong HR practices find that they are not as lean as they'd like to be and need to reduce layers and increase spans. A few years ago, AT&T cut management layers by half to just seven. In 2006, Intel increased the span of managers from six or seven, to eight or nine. The reality is that, while spans narrow and layers build up insidiously over time-at all levels of the organization-it's very difficult to lose the bloat. In our experience, there are four potential objectives for tackling spans and layers (see Figure 1):