A better discussion is about what happened in the late 1980s and lasted until the dotcom bust: empowerment. The empowerment movement was in some sense inspired by Just In Time (JIT) manufacturing. The idea presented simply is to harness the power, or empower, line workers to halt the assembly line when line workers saw a defect. Chains were installed on factory floor assembly lines and line workers would pull the chain when they saw quality defects. This is called total quality control, or TQC. Everyone is empowered to be do quality control and thus TQC. There is a lot more too it but that's the gist. The Harvard professor who invented JIT couldn't get Americans to buy into his idea and had to finally find adoption in Japan. Thus Japan's rise in car and electronic quality and ability to cut costs by having less defects. Empowerment took on many other flavors eventually where Tom Peters of FedEx fame empowered delivery drivers to change schedules and do other things to make delivery times. Empowerment then went into quality of life overall with on campus gyms, on campus day care, bagel fridays etc. The hay day was the 1990s where it seems a new management book every week came out promoting new ways to empower employees and to upgrade management processes with such things as open door policies. But, and here's the but, Americans love tyranny. They always have. The so called captains of industry were never much interested in the power sharing that the word empowerment implies and after the dotcom bust in 2000 the empowerment trend was soon on the defensive. S** rolls downhill, cajoling, and other forms of tyranny are what American management know and love. And that's where things have returned. Management of 2021 has more in common with the late 1970s than the late 1990s. Do as your told reigns king. Know your place. The elephant in the room that this article does not address is that as long as corporate America and the world continues to use an authoritarian, top-down pyramid structure of power then the limits of that structure apply. The empowerment movement has all but been banished and that fundamental, tyrannical space confinement of top-down, micro-management of authoritarianism by threats and intimidation cannot be addressed by any amount of bottom up discussion. Nothing is going to get better until those in power give it up. I actually find it amazing the the empowerment movement ever found fertile ground at all. But to be honest America flirted with power sharing for a time only when it got its azz kicked by Japan in the automobile and electronics industries. America soon abandoned empowerment because the lure of draconian power is ever seductive. Steve Jobs put the final nail in the coffin of the empowerment movement in the tech industry.