The issue the author is talking about, in my view, is caused by the natural lifespan of corps tending towards bloating middle-management. (Very hard process to fight).
At the start the founder group are rutheless productivity-chasers. Then the corp expands to include the its-just-a-job group. Everything ticks along well, and at some point, the rutheless can't manage the group. So they hire followers to listen to their orders and thereby manage others. In this sense middle management is really "corporate following".
Now you have the its-just-ajobs, rutheless-productives, rutheless-leaders, and leader-followers.
When the corp grows too far the balance in these populations is thrown way off (by, often, the shortsightedness of the real leadership in balloning middle-management to cover for them).
At this point all the meaningful decisions are still held by the exec, but middle management are now so large they have to "find something useful to do", which is regulate all the meaningless decisions.
At this point most of the ruthelessly-productive leave, and you're left with the justajobs, leader-followers and the few clueless productives who'll destroy their mental health trying to grapple with it all.
I suspect if one were to compare a large number of startups to one large company (or even better a portfolio of large companies), the “ruthless founders” will significantly underperform the middle management in large companies even after adjusting for the inherent advantages large companies have.
The only reason the “ruthless founders” look better is because we usually only talk about the successful ones because unsuccessful ones have disappeared.
Middle management is more successful and ruthless founders are less successful than immediate appearances would suggest.
a business needs an executive, and at scale, it needs middle management to implement the general strategic direction set by the executive
if there are more middle-managers than this requires, they start trying to own non-strategic issues -- which is where you get large numbers of meetings about non-issues
I am 100% sure I can dramatically improve the productivity and bottom line of any software company by simply firing 50% of middle management and using the money saved to hire good software developers.
The gervais-style analysis mystifies some of the issues it describes. The heart of the group dynamics is "leader vs follower", "rutheless vs clueless" and "transactional vs passionate".
A startup is largely "passionate rutheless leaders", it grows to include "transactional ruthless followers" (its-just-ajob), then to "passionate clueless followers" (middle-management). At this phase its highly stable... you hire in "passionate rutheless followers" (ie., more actual workers)... who also need more middle-management... and at somepoint this becomes unbalanced due to poor executive incentives.
That gives you your large population of "passionate clueless followers" (ie., middle-management), and the death of the productive phase of corp. action, into a more rent-seeking (or death) phase.
In gervais, "losers become sociopaths" in a mystifying way; and likewise the "clueless" population is inexplicably unpromotable. My breakdown, for example, clarifies why: the "clueless" population never become rutheless-leadrs as they arent leaders at all. They're followers.
I think muddling "transactional" dispositions with "rutheless" ones also mystifies the issue, under gervais, the "noble sociopath" is hard to explain. Really, its that they're both passionate (internally motivated) and rutheless.
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NB., rough definitions: "leader vs follower" (I command vs. I am commanded), "rutheless vs clueless" (success requires it vs. virtue requires it) and "transactional vs passionate" (external-reward vs. intrinstic-reward).
At the start the founder group are rutheless productivity-chasers. Then the corp expands to include the its-just-a-job group. Everything ticks along well, and at some point, the rutheless can't manage the group. So they hire followers to listen to their orders and thereby manage others. In this sense middle management is really "corporate following".
Now you have the its-just-ajobs, rutheless-productives, rutheless-leaders, and leader-followers.
When the corp grows too far the balance in these populations is thrown way off (by, often, the shortsightedness of the real leadership in balloning middle-management to cover for them).
At this point all the meaningful decisions are still held by the exec, but middle management are now so large they have to "find something useful to do", which is regulate all the meaningless decisions.
At this point most of the ruthelessly-productive leave, and you're left with the justajobs, leader-followers and the few clueless productives who'll destroy their mental health trying to grapple with it all.