I disagree with a lot of things pg has said but this essay is SPOT ON. Manager mode is utter BS. MBA books and management coaching teaches people to occupy a h

I disagree with a lot of things pg has said but this essay is SPOT ON. Manager mode is utter BS. MBA books and management coaching teaches people to occupy a higher position in the org chart and to define rules, bureaucracy, and measurement of whatever they are managing. Tech companies have a perverted form of this where IC track and manager track are separate - so managers are only defining rules, bureaucracy, and measurement of people - stack ranking them. Of course this method is flawed. We all inherently feel so. But no one asks why this is flawed. It is flawed because MBA-style box management is trying to impose boxes - which is orthogonal to innovation. Innovation literally means thinking/doing work outside the box. As an example, lets say that your 10 layers of management has hired a whole bunch of innovators but then said that they will be stack ranked against each other every 6 months based on criterias and hiring committees. This is a BOX - that is preventing ANY work that may require working OUTSIDE THE CONFINES OF THE BOX. Imagine a situation where a project is at 6 months performance review BOX boundary but still needs 2 weeks of slow rollout to ensure it doesn't crash on customers. In FOUNDER mode, the team is encouraged to take those 2 weeks to ensure that customers get a good experience - because it matters. In BOX management mode, these 2 weeks are going to appear as a fail for the stack rank committee gods. The nuance of the 2 weeks is lost. Instead, the management chain will ensure that the stack rank is executed perfectly - thus causing the people WHO CARED about the service and customers to depart - voluntarily or involuntarily. Ultimately, NO ONE is happy with the BOX management mode of work. Employees feel like their work and insight is undervalued, C-Suite is unhappy about causing customer issues, teams are unhappy because the BOX is hurting morale and causing sabotagey environments. The only people who seem to be ok with this is the 10 layers of BOX managers whose entire existence depends on perfect execution of the BOX.