...well, my "System 1" [1] judgment of this person is that he's a bit full of himself, so I thought I'd quickly jot down some impressions. Looking at it from t

...well, my "System 1" [1] judgment of this person is that he's a bit full of himself, so I thought I'd quickly jot down some impressions. Looking at it from this angle offers up a lot of interesting bullshit filter transforms of what he writes. Maybe it's taking too many liberties as an attempt to know this person's actual personality and/or the management philosophy he's trying to impart through this writing. But some of these thoughts are interesting in their own right and hagiography is boring. So, here are two more thoughts in a similar vein: The "umbrellas, not funnels" idea: I agree that, at the higher levels of management, there's a lot of politics and other crap where it would be nice if employees could be shielded from it. But how do you actually make assessments in individual cases? For example, when some order comes down from above and is countermanded the next day due to corporate politics, how do you decide which order is irrelevant noise that your subordinates need to be "shielded from", and which order to pass along? You can only make that determination if you assume you know the higher-up bosses' jobs better than they do. You're also withholding vital information from your subordinates that would empower them to become political entities in their own right. Or the "merchandize good work" idea: Let's use the word "credit grabbing" as a less flattering near synonym. Doing a lot of credit grabbing on behalf of your subordinates only sounds like a good idea in the head of a manager who assumes they can competently play the role of "assigner of credit" because they don't themselves suffer from the same blind spot problem. Say you're a middle manager and you delegate a task to an IC you manage. Unbeknownst to you, this is a task that requires coordination with another department, so your IC reaches out to an IC in that other department, and that latter person ends up having to do most of the work. You have a blind spot there: You can't see the work done by this other person who you don't manage, in a department you're not in, in relation to a task you may not know the particular mechanics of. Maybe your report even neglected to tell you about the contribution of this other person willfully, playing some politics of their own, and making you the instrument of their politics. Now you run around upper management doing credit grabbing on behalf of your report, and alienating the person who actually did most of the work. Maybe it would be better to institute a culture of no credit grabbing and no assigning blame? ...and maybe such a culture would have positive outcomes, even without making the assumption that managers are infallible (or need to be infallible to do their jobs)? ...just a thought. When I try to picture the specific behaviours of someone who acts on that advice, I can't help but see the pattern of behaviour of someone who engages in power struggle selfishly. And all the reasoning he offers up, surrounding that behaviour, just sounds like a rationalization of that behaviour as noble and power-to-the-people-esque. ...a "righteous crusader" narrative to provide the ends that justify the means. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow