I don't... like the author of this piece. He writes like he doesn't really understand what he is discussing.<p>For instance, he conflates the move to open plan offices, which is seen as increasing communication within teams, but also enables an almost oppressive level of employee monitoring, with googles propensity to space hoppers. These are quite different things, coming from quite different places. Open plan offices have very little to do with happy employees, and everything to do with productivity.<p>I detect a subtext when he says 'hierarchical is better, managers should think about strategy, Blackberry CEOs are a <i>professional</i> manager and a <i>technician</i> (which is a loaded word, as it means a low skilled technical worker).<p>I mean, is this a backlash against the increasingly irrelevance of management in flat organizations? If we read an article by an IT worker, explaining that Amazon Cloud might be making him irrelevant, but companies migrating to it are making a huge mistake, then we would see his true motivations in writing that. I wonder if computer enabled flat management is making people like Schumpeter feel under threat.<p>The idea of risks and experimentation, is that companies like Google are not creating products through a predictable process - they are farming black swans.<p>You can manufacture software to spec predictably. If you can find developers who will work to spec, remain motivated without personal control of their work, and generally put up with being treated like a production line worker, you can make software on a production line. Infosys do just this.<p>But you can't manufacture technological progress, the next big thing. Because the creation, validation, and creative implementation of ideas is not something that comes out of a factory. Sony try this. Look where that gets them.