"He read all the ‘right’ books on management and took the advice to heart: don’t get too chummy, shield your team from anything they don’t need to know, ask the

"He read all the ‘right’ books on management and took the advice to heart: don’t get too chummy, shield your team from anything they don’t need to know, ask them to identify roadblocks to progress, reward them all equally." These are definitely NOT the right books on management. Every single one of those things is the exact opposite of what good managers do. That sounds like the advice from the world's most fear-ridden, counter-productive HR organization. Good managers care about their teams as people, communicate openly, and overwhelmingly reward their best. The approach works great for small, nimble organizations, but it doesn't scale. For instance, I talked with a tech company a few weeks ago that's rounding 50 employees and is now a few years old, and the employees are all frustrated that they've never gotten performance reviews. Founders hate performance reviews, because they're against the DNA of most entrepreneurs. But a lot of the people who become developers, customer support reps, and marketers really like when someone gives them a clear idea of what they're doing well, what they need to work on, and a clear plan for how they can develop. One of the challenging parts of management is that it's really hard, it's highly situational, and it's non-deterministic. Having really great processes helps, but at the end of the day you really just need to hire people who are good at managing and set the right priorities for them as an organization. Inventing weird systems like this sounds great, but in most cases it doesn't scale. For instance, a role-centric organization will work until you realize that you need 60 people involved to get a press release out because someone declared themselves the Word Master and needs to have a say in punctuation. But outside the weird jargon, this isn't a new kind of company, it's just good management principles. Have clear accountability; be candid; care about your people; connect everyone to a broader vision. It sounds like common sense sometimes, but when you go to implement it in the tactical reality of the day to day, it's really hard.