their "excellent" companies include GE (Jack Welch) and IBM. I think in retrospect, these are examples of gutting companies in favor of financial manipulation. I don't remember what Boeing was doing at that point.
also note the authors' connection to McKinsey
This is a good article that answers this question: https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=473
> This is problematic, clearly. A company needs to be able to treat its employees as interchangeable and expendable, both individually and collectively. It needs to be able to periodically layoff 17% of its workforce to cut its margin overhead by 1% and temporarily boost its stock price by 5%, without having to endure existential upheaval to its ongoing business processes.
as for the solution: basically I think the people who CAN be better managers keep saying, "oh I hate working with people, I'd rather code" and hence you're left with a very specific subset of managers.
> everybody is better off if companies ignore this caution with the same exuberant disregard as people doing their jobs with inadvisable devotion. The most transformational human ideas begin in individual hearts, whatever gantlets of brainstorming and strategic opportunity-analysis they subsequently have to run. Spotify was more right, I think, to tolerate my curiosities and experiments for 10 years than they were to finally give up on them out of exasperation or ignorance.