In this model, and again I'm absolutely not claiming it would definitely work, leadership's role is to align feedback and goals defined by their direct reports.

In this model, and again I'm absolutely not claiming it would definitely work, leadership's role is to align feedback and goals defined by their direct reports. Everyone won't get what they want, but its every manager's role to both trust and respect their team and to play the role of aligning it to whatever business goals exist st their level. If done well, the manager would also be defining business goals based on team-provided key indicators. I would also add that if a company scales to such a size that this model wouldn't work, in my opinion the company is too large. I would expect this to work very well on a small team, if managed well. I'd expect it to scale okay for a while but to fail miserably at the scale of big tech. That's a feature in my opinion, I expect we'd be better off collectively without such massive corporations accruing so much power. I'd also note that i don't think your concern is unique to the bottom up approach. With the usual top down approach, leadership at the top is likely very skilled in defining business goals and how to make money. They rarely are skilled at the day to day work that actually keeps the company running. I've personally worked at companies where having leaders define direction while so disconnected from the front lines led to a very poorly functioning company.