Companies are still fighting yesterday's war.<p>Traditional industrial labor has a concave relationship between input (effort, skill) and output (diminishing returns) where the difference between mediocrity and excellence is minimal to zero. Modern technological work has a convex curve (accelerating returns) where the difference between mediocrity and failure is minimal while that between mediocrity and excellence is massive.<p>When the work is concave, you want to minimize variance, which means you eliminate individuality and manage toward mediocrity. Control-freak managers and petty tyrants are good at that, because you can trust them to tighten down bolts and yell at people. ("Ahem! There's SAND in my boots!" -- Kefka.) You build out a hierarchy, give managers total control over their reports, and even though there's a lot of loss in the form of attrition (good people fired by bad bosses) and squandered capability (strong people doing mediocre tasks) that's treated as a rounding error. People are fungible and, if they're not, then something is wrong with your process. Your goal isn't excellence. It's repeatable mediocrity.<p>Convex work is an entirely different game. It's much more like R&D. The problems being solved are a lot harder, although the upside of a success is much greater. Technological work is becoming increasingly convex with time.<p>When you have concave work, your management strategy is to beat up on the slackers. If the best people are 1.5 times as productive as the average, then one slacker cancels out 2 excellent people, so rooting them out and disciplining them is the right strategy.<p>With convex work, the danger isn't having a few slackers. It's that you don't have <i>any</i> excellent people, or that the excellent people you do have are unmotivated and underperforming. The best way to "manage" convex work is to hire the best people and get out of their way.<p>Managerial extortion (i.e. the manager's use of his unilateral ability to damage an employee's career to put the employee toward his career goals, rather than company goals or individual growth) is ruinous when one is attempting convex work, but large companies don't see it that way. Their processes are oriented completely toward concave, commodity labor.<p>So, "employees leave managers" is only half the story. Managers go bad because companies allow them to do so. A company that doesn't want managerial extortion can implement Valve-style open allocation, but few do. Companies allow them to do so because they're fighting the last century's war. They're industrial machines, and anachronistic in a technological era.