> Treating people like adults is that One Neat Trick that influencer bloggers don't want you to know.

In the companies below Big Tech in valuation at least, having been in the room with drunken executives speaking their real thoughts multiple times, I’ve found it’s because they don’t want to treat people like adults.

They want serfs to order around because they have some cultural value around being “the boss” and you can’t be “the boss” if you aren’t telling people what to do. The more things you tell them to do, the more of a boss you are.

It’s how you get executives crowing to you about all of these faang ideas like google’s 20% time back in the day, or engineers being able to vote with their feet and only attend meetings they found useful, but then have people on pips because they were consistently 30-60 seconds late to daily standups.

It’s not the only failure mode by far, but having leadership like that seems like a cause for companies getting hard stuck below a billion in profit