It's not clueless to expect employees to show up at the pre-agreed time. The post goes in to some detail about why this is important - it's not just a case of a manager demanding he be at his desk for no reason.

Let's say you are responsible for four team members who share support tickets. Support tickets begin arriving at 9am. One of the team is consistently ten minutes late, meaning the other three need to pick up the slack for him.

Forget about the management - this is unfair to his colleagues.