Exactly. I once had the conversation about bottom-up vs top-down decision making with my CEO, and his point was essentially that the people we've hired can't be trusted with that level of responsibility. For me this was proof that our hiring process needed to improve, for him it was proof that our supervision process needed to improve.

There's a great book about companies run through bottom-up decision making called Reinventing Organizations. My take away was that bottom up can work at any scale, but it requires true believers at the top who are constantly working hard at making themselves unnecessary. Once the true believers walk out organizations naturally revert to hierarchical decision-making.