We need to divorce ourselves from the industrial, factory-floor approach to management that has dominated American office culture since the dawn of the 20th cet

We need to divorce ourselves from the industrial, factory-floor approach to management that has dominated American office culture since the dawn of the 20th cetury. Almost all of our long-held beliefs about management originated in theories developed to manage workers on an assembly line. And many (most?) of them no longer apply. For instance, the rigid belief in "butts in seats" and "face time" as reasonable proxies for productivity is grounded in the days when there really was a direct, perfect correlation between attendance at a set place and time and job performance. On a primitive factory floor, the worker who puts in the most time making widgets really is producing better results than the worker who appears on and off the floor sporadically. There's no way to produce results unless you're working X machine, and X machine is in a fixed location, and it operates between Y and Z hours of the day. And the end product doesn't differ per worker. Everything's deterministic and can be measured precisely. So, in this scenario, a worker is only as good as he is present and 100% utilized. Nothing else matters. Knowledge work doesn't function that way. And yet, we still have this desire to manage it as though it does. Kudos to someone like Sandberg for being able to point this out. Yeah, she's in a position to say it now. No, most of us aren't. But at least someone in her position is finally calling it out, and using the bully pulpit afforded to her by her high-status role to do so.