Page once fired all Google managers believing engineers self-organize like birds

Evidence

As Google’s first CEO, Page once fired all of Google’s managers, reasoning that they were not only useless, but interfered with engineering, what with all their meetings, planning sessions, and so on. He genuinely believed that engineers, like a flock of birds, were self-organizing creatures without need of oversight, and that, left to their own, they would produce miracles. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 895

Categorization

• CANDY: A fun, tweetable anecdote — the CEO who fired all his managers because engineers were ‘self-organizing creatures.’
• SHARE: Send to anyone in tech management — it’s a perfect conversation piece about adhocracy vs bureaucracy.