Nothing ever changes about working in a bureaucracy.
His biggest mistake though was omission of regular 1:1's, annual perf reviews, goal settings from the established HR practices... ah, and "values" of course.
We've had bureaucracies for thousands of years and this "problem" was never solved, because it's an innate trait of bureaucracy and not something that can be addressed and fixed. I'm sometimes amazed that, given that I've seen how they function from inside, the bureaucracies (be it government, military or large companies) manage to accomplish anything at all. They're basically soul killing constructs for achieving (albeit very inefficiently) large scale goals that couldn't be achieved otherwise. We should avoid them if at all possible - i.e. we probably need a military, as uncoordinated defense by local militia will not do against a foreign invasion, but the welfare state or medical care does not really need a large central bureaucracy and could very well be decentralized. Similarly for shopping - instead of getting goods from Wallmart, Aldi, Amazon it's better to get them from a local store, whose workers are not mired in a computerized and automated Kafkeque bureucracy they can do nothing about.