"very nice to the line engineers but hard on people VP-level and above"
That makes me wonder about a "sandwich" model of management - a leader at the top who has a lot in common with engineers at the bottom, together putting the squeeze on management (who still wield most day-to-day authority) in the middle. Looked at another way, authority does mostly flow downward as in the traditional model, but then you "close the loop" by joining those at the bottom back up to the person at the top so that nobody's left without recourse when they think things are going awry.
I'm not really sure where to go with that idea, but it seems to bear thinking about. I'll bet somebody smarter than me already wrote a book about it.
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"very nice to the line engineers but hard on people VP-level and above"
That makes me wonder about a "sandwich" model of management - a leader at the top who has a lot in common with engineers at the bottom, together putting the squeeze on management (who still wield most day-to-day authority) in the middle. Looked at another way, authority does mostly flow downward as in the traditional model, but then you "close the loop" by joining those at the bottom back up to the person at the top so that nobody's left without recourse when they think things are going awry.
I'm not really sure where to go with that idea, but it seems to bear thinking about. I'll bet somebody smarter than me already wrote a book about it.