Notes-management

people aren't immune to advertising even when they consciously fight it

same with flattery

At Microsoft, management was extremely hands-off. In general, everybody was given some area to own, and they owned it. Managers made no attempt to tell people what to do, in fact, they saw their role as running around, moving the furniture out of the way, so their reports could get things done.

There were some great examples of this. Managers always refused to resolve conflicts. Typically what would happen is that a designer would get into an argument with a developer over what a feature should look like. They would argue back and forth, discussing the issue for an hour, and eventually, failing to reach agreement, they would stomp into some manager's office hoping for a resolution. Now you've got three people in the room: a designer, a developer, and a manager. Who's the person who knows least about the problem? Obviously, it's the manager -- who was just hauled in at the last minute for Conflict Resolution. At Microsoft, the manager would usually refuse to make the decision. After all, they have the least information about the problem. The manager would generally force the designer and developer to work it out on their own, which, eventually, they did.

At Juno, quite the opposite was the case. Nobody at Juno owned anything, they just worked on it, and different layers of management happily stuck their finger into every pie, giving orders left and right in a style which I started calling hit and run management because managers tended to pop up unannounced, give some silly order for exactly how they wanted something done, dammit, without giving any thought to the matter, and leave the room for everyone else to pick up the pieces. The most egregious example was the CEO and president of the company, who would regularly demand printouts of every screen, take them home, and edit them using a red pen. His edits were sometimes helpful (spelling and grammar corrections), but usually, they demonstrated a complete lack of understanding as to what went into the screens and why they said what they said. For months later, we would have meetings where people would say things like "Charles [the CEO] doesn't like dropdown list boxes," because of something he had edited without any thought, and that was supposed to end the discussion. You couldn't argue against this fictional Charles because he wasn't there; he didn't participate in the design except for hit and run purposes. Ouch.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html