When one (of many) underlings falls far short on one (of many) company edicts and you don't know about it, that's not "completely failing" as a manager.
What is a manager doing without awareness of what is happening as it pertains to company priorities? Seriously, what is such a manager even doing?
To clarify, the person failing far short was Tim (the manager) not Steve (the manager's manager).
He's completely failing at his job if and only if his entire job is to ensure that the 1:1s occur, which would be just as bad as being "Steve" in the meeting described in the article.
He is completely failing because he did not meet one on one within 6 month? I must have worked with completely failing managers for my whole career over the last 16 years.
Well, there are a lot of completely failing managers out there, so that's plausible.
When I started managing people I read and thought a lot about what management was about, and who my good and bad managers were. I came to the same conclusion as Ben Horowitz did here: my main job was to make sure that my people were happy and had what they needed to get their jobs done. And that it was impossible to do that that without directly talking with them, one on one, on a regular basis.
Of course, that had absolutely no relation to the skills that got me to the point of managing people, so it's no surprise to me that many managers never figure that out.
I agree with the rest of what you're saying, but I think you're greatly understating the problem.