It's all common sense - which too many of my bosses just didn't have - and the summary form help bring them to focus. IMO it's good. YMMV, I appreciate.
Sure, each point in the article may sound reasonable, but there are also 1000 other bullet points that also make sense. How do you sort out all the "good" Common Sense from the "bad"?
Not to mention that every bullet points also has tons of Gotchas, where it works 80% of the time and enumerating the remaining 20% cases turns into another giant bullet list which must also be internalized as Common Sense to be effectuated well.
Let's take this then
> Common Sense usually means Big Hairy Ball of Experience-Grounded Implicit Knowledge
I don't agree, here's some very straightforward 'common sense' statements that I've seen not followed at so many companies
Don't micromanage.
Do trust, but verify.
Treat your staff like humans, not like crap.
If the staff you employed know more than you, listen to them.
Focus on business outcomes, not the tech.
All good rules with few if any gotchas. All horribly broken at various places I've worked.
That statement is vacuous because no decent human being would say: "I want to treat my staff like crap". It is easy to agree with your points because they are universal but don't provide any meaningful way to differentiate, e.g., what is and what isn't "treating your staff like crap".
Go not by what they say but what they do, and I've known plenty who have treated their staff like utter crap, from screaming abuse at them to ignoring them to undervaluing them to psychological bullying and more. I guess all your workplaces must be like heaven compared to what I've seen.
I don't understand where you're coming from. To me it's a decent and useful post and you are just tearing it down for no reason I can see.
It was useful to me. And the statements are not empty, not to me at least.
(I'm yet another person, I mean, not GP.)
Regardless, I'd rather you evaluate the post's content on its own merits rather than from your or my personal background.
The world would be better without such people, but they certainly exist and seem to have a habit of floating to the top.
For such people it might not actually occur to them that treating people like crap may be counterproductive to other goals like profit. Years ago I recall a family member telling me about their then boss proudly stating something along the lines of "if my workers are happy then I'm not managing them properly, employees need to be miserable to be productive".
The "decent" word is carrying much of the weight in your argument.
Not everyone is a decent person, but if being a decent person is actually a way to become a good manager, then the statement is not vacuous at all. Given the conventional wisdom that CEOs have sociopathic tendencies, the statement may be flat out wrong even. I just don't think it's obviously vacuous.