I don't think many would say it's how the world ought to work, but it definitely is how the world does work.
The coordination problem just gets intractable at a certain scale.
The coordination problem just gets intractable at a certain scale.
The intractability of the coordination problem at scale is the reason the original article is valuable. At scale, you do need management that focuses the majority of their time on the overall coordination of the work in order to protect the time of those doing the work. Because of that scale you can't involve everyone in every conversation. So you start needing to have conversations that abstract to a higher level, and which cross levels of leadership. Hence "How to present to executives" But even as a company grows, it can choose to maintain a culture of collaboration and transparency, even if the practices that enable them have to change to adapt to the larger scale.
The "trick" (not really a trick, just basic politics as correctly pointed out by other commenters) of cultivating one-to-one relationships stems exactly from that realization. There are all sorts of reasons why people oppose technical solutions, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or the collective well-being of the set of people defined by "the organization".
My ideal of how the world ought to work is a perfect, strict meritocracy. But people play games on me, hence I have to play games on them in self-defense. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma, defecting is at its most powerful when the expectation is that you will cooperate.
There is no honor in naivete. Or rather, you'll be told how honorable you are right before you get stabbed in the back.
Going into it with conviction that closed doors are correct default way ensures your company will on high level of it.