The management GP refers to is the one that tends to develop from people attempting to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats, like most people, are primarily about self-preservation, not about making themselves obsolete.
When one finds a method that allows half the management layer to do all the work, do you really think most of those managers are willing to just give up their cushy jobs? Of course not. Allen Hobub commented on this in "The Death of Agile": if all of us truly were agile, and managers would find themselves in this position, they would shift their job to deliver value in a different form (read: less management activities). Instead, we encourage Scrum, which largely rebrands managers and keeps them around, just with a different name. The real danger is that of cargo-culting, which is just stuff being there for the sake of it, or for self-preservation.
Having someone who controls for results is good. Having 10 people do the work of 1 person is horribly inefficient, and in case of technically-deficient managers, often to the detriment of the executing layer: they can't help you do your task, only act like a secretary (and often they just relay the message to you anyway. So much for that.)
What results? Sure, making money is the final result we want to measure, but how do you determine how much each person contributes to the bottom line?
So we need to set objectives so we can measure results, then we need some way to measure results, some way to compare results across different objectives, some way to evaluate if our objectives and measures are working....
And suddenly you have management and 'culture'
I don't understand people who say we just need to 'focus on results'.... that is even more useless as saying "we just need to focus on making money"
We all know the end result we want (making money), but the hard part is figuring out how.
Take the example of a basketball team, where at least the objectives and measurement technique is well known... you have to score more points than the opponent. Even then, putting together a team is not simple. Which combination of players will produce the best outcome? Which players are good but on bad teams? What strategy should the team employ?
Your concept of work being a series of contractual outsourcing arrangements already IS how our economy works. The issue is that most things we create can't be made by one person, so the contract to make something is subcontracted out to many people who sign contracts with the one main contractor... and suddenly you have a company.