I’ve definitely seen what he calls “corporate managers” struggle in smaller companies, just as much as I’ve seen what he calls “lean middle managers” fight themselves to death in corporate scenarios.
The really scary thing, from my perspective at least, is that I have, in a few different places, seen a drift over time from the lean style to the corporate style. A start-up grows into a larger company. A layer of middle management is hired. The HR department becomes more than one person. Now there are processes that need to be followed... The lean management style that used to work doesn't work any more. The sort of feedback that used to be welcomed is now seen as negative. I've witnessed quite a few people get burned out and have to leave companies that they used to be successful in. I guess knowing is half the battle so thank you for writing this great piece.
Another issue is that normally, in those hyper growth phases, companies hire people that had similar previous experience and normally they all see this type of control as necessary to grow. They start looking for predictability (so you start seeing year long roadmaps, change request processes, waterfall processes, precise long term estimations etc) and uniformity, because if your company is growing by the hundreds they don't know how to control that without normalising and unifying the way people work. Normally this type of leadership does not work in a fail safe environment, are not used to give space for people to try and do experiments and is very focused in making things look good to upper management.
As an example, one of my directors once told us managers that every team had to have the same shape and the same distribution of seniority, completely ignoring the different services each team owned and seniority required by those services. I still don't know what problem he was trying to fix, or if this would have fixed any problem at all. We gave feedback, and still had to do the job and explain to the team members why this was good for the tribe.