That doesn't provide a perfect answer. Sanjay and Jeff (and a lot of other senior Googlers) were all at DEC. Why didn't DEC succeed to the degree that Google has?
"Success" is the result of a very large equation with many variables, and having (some of) the right people is only a few of them.
I do agree that management was the critical ingredient - my former VP at Google (employee #48) credited Urs Hoelzle (employee #9, and Google's first VP) as a key ingredient to Google's success. Ironically, though, Google hired Western Digital's management as well - SVP Alan Eustace came from there - and yet the team under Eustace at Google was much more effective than the team under Eustace at Western Digital.
I suspect that management has sort of a "gatekeeping" effect - if all of your management is good, the whole department does great things, but if a single link in the org chart is a dufus, the whole organization will fail. When I joined Google in 2009, my whole management chain (6 levels, up to Eric Schmidt) were all engineers, and it showed.
So true. As an engineer, the most direct impact on my productivity has been the team and manager. But the manager is a SPOF: if he/she is bad, then my productivity suffers.
I have yet to work in an organization where there was a good chain as you mention though. Maybe that's what sets Google apart. Smaller companies tend to have shorter management chains and I prefer them for that reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transf...
Dozens have companies have benefited from the diaspora of DEC, and now Sun.