Exactly what I thought. This is a view of employees as mindless drones whose only function is to make themselves busy. A very toxic management style. The advice that it is ok to be hated dogs the ditch further.

This is also an implicit permission to the employees to lie to the CTO. This is pretty standard narcissistic behavior, where your lies to employees are just doing business, while employees lying to the management is a grave offence that calls for job termination.