- Netflix is a poster child for this, I've heard their "culture deck" isn't hot air, but is really how they operate. Combo of high autonomy and high responsibility, letting ppl go who don't pass the "keeper test" ("would you fight to keep this person if they told you they were leaving the company" - if not let them go), very open and candid communication, and generally a smart and driven group doing great work
- I don't know that Apple is still like this, but for a long time, as a massive company, it seems they did keep going a really high performing group, that were passionate about their work and hustling hard to build great things. Although could be pretty brutal in terms of long hours and lack of work/life balance
- Have heard SpaceX is similar to how Apple used to be
The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.
You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units small and independent.
You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons companies slide into mediocrity over time.
I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.