Why CEOs are failing software engineers and other creative teams (2020)

I think this article overthinks the issue. There's a preponderance of marketing/corporate seminar buzzwords that makes me much less receptive to the overall argument. I have noticed that there seems to be an endemic issue in the tech industry with failed management. However, in my experience, I can usually sum up the issue in a few words. And they're broader in scope, often having less to do with management "styles". There seem to be a handful of contributing factors:

* Management often is not sufficiently well connected to the problem they're trying to solve. Sometimes they don't even have a problem they're solving. They just have a personal entrepreneur/idea person brand that they're selling to investors. In the extreme case, to that kind of person the right choice of turtle neck can matter more than actual hands-on experience or customer need.

* Management and founders tend to be primarily motivated by exit strategies. This means that they necessarily become less concerned with the problem they're solving and more concerned with how they talk about the problem to investors. There seems to be a fundamental trade-off between pleasing investors and actually doing meaningful work.

* Management nowadays is often composed of the most highly-motivated yet most unqualified individuals in the talent pool. I've noticed that there seems to be this notion that grit alone is enough to go out and change the world. This means you end up with a lot of go getter types who are highly motivated to do something but have no practical management or business strategy experience. The problem gets especially bad where management experience is lacking. You end up with people using lots of subtly coercive tactics to motivate their employees, often without even realizing it. Part of this comes from the fact that coercion seems to be the default strategy for most humans. After all, we're all basically just animals with a recently developed neocortex. In my experience, when push comes to shove, most people revert back to force or threats.

* The glut of tech workers means that companies can go through them like paper plates. There's very little incentive from a labor market standpoint for companies to develop healthy relationships with their employees.

Anyway, there's my brain dump take on it :).

> The tip of creative management is learning to think of the value fulfillment cycle functionally as a high velocity change engine that takes value attempts often in the form of minimal viable products and design studies, having some associated customer development (see Steve Blank, customer development) effort running in parallel with the engineering/solution effort.

This is just meaningless jargon.

CEOs (any others) fail, but it's usually because of simple things like failing to develop a viable business strategy, making crappy hires, and failing to implement basic software engineering practices like having good technical leaders and solid QA.

Most of his material here is fundamentally applicable to other types of technical or creative efforts not just software and/or engineering.

That puts him strongly in the high-growth inspirational camp for me.