I keep coming back to the same management mistake: people take survivor behavior and talk about it like portable wisdom. A company succeeds, its leaders become famous, and whatever they were doing gets translated into "best practice" long after the conditions that made it survivable are forgotten
That mistake is especially common in tech, and I think we underrate how forgiving the environment was for a long stretch. Many of the management styles that became famous between roughly 2005 and 2022 operated inside unusually favorable conditions: rising stock prices, prestige strong enough to hold talent, equity compensation that bought tolerance for bad behavior, and market tailwinds that could cover real internal damage. A rising tide rises all boats you know? Regardless of how good they are. Tech has been the growing dramatically in the past decades, the need for automation, tooling and internet solutions has been huge. Burnout, attrition, coordination failures, and cultural debt were often absorbed by the upside, when you float in dollars these issues are not a big deal. Bad business ideas didn't really matter much when some of them make so much money with the famous software-level profit margins. Google and Facebook (Metaverse... lol) are notorously bad at making products, but it doesn't matter since they have a very profitable cash flow.
When the company keeps growing anyway, the style got credit for surviving conditions that would have killed a normal organization. That is the part business-school case studies usually launder out of the story. They turn context into character. The leader becomes the explanation, the management style is the tool. The market conditions disappear.
Twitter after the 2022 acquisition is a useful case because it stripped away many of those buffers at once. The rapid reduction from roughly 7,500 employees toward a far smaller workforce was not, by itself, proof of managerial genius or proof of managerial ruin.1 It was a live test of what an extreme, compliance-demanding style looked like without the older package of prestige, broad internal trust, and equity-aligned patience. Compliance-demanding management means extracting obedience through pressure, fear, urgency, and replaceability rather than through shared confidence that the direction is worth following. What followed at Twitter, advertiser flight, operational instability, and a visibly chaotic management environment, did not prove that management style was the only problem. Twitter (X) is a shitshow now and, after getting Trump elected, not even useful to Elon himself.
GE under Jack Welch is the longer version of the same lesson. Forced ranking, repeated internal purges, and a broader culture of financialized pressure looked like strength while returns were strong and the system still had enough accumulated capacity to carry them.2 A company can eat its own bench strength, internal trust, and institutional memory for years before the bill arrives and, when it arrives, it shocks everyone. The stock chart during the winning years does not tell you how much future capacity is being burned as fuel.
This is the error ordinary managers make when they imitate celebrity CEOs. They copy the demanding behavior without checking what made people tolerate it, or how is it that . A mid-size logistics company cannot offset abrasive management with a life-changing equity package. A normal regional firm cannot assume prestige will keep strong employees from leaving. In most organizations, the people most able to leave are the most capable ones. Honestly, with margin compression, not even faang companies can do it any longer. So the style that gets mythologized as tough-minded management often functions, in ordinary settings, as a sorting mechanism that pushes out exactly the people you would most want to keep. I have seen smaller companies do this part especially badly: they copy the attitude of a famous founder without having any of the buffers that made the attitude survivable.
Before learning from Steve Jobs
Maybe recognize that he had strong talents in some areas (identifying product design criticality, selling, presentations...) while severely lacking in others. He also found himself in the right industry at the right time, which buffered his company from his shortcomings. Yes, he was great at what he was and you should learn and get inspired by him and others. But be realistic about all the factors that were involved in the success they had and think critically about what you want to learn and from whom.
Twitter's headcount changes following the October 2022 acquisition are documented through reporting, litigation, and company-related disclosures. Public reporting widely described a reduction from roughly 7,500 employees to well under 2,000 over the following period, though exact counts vary by date and source.
GE's post-Welch decline is well documented, as is the role critics assign to Welch-era practices such as forced ranking, heavy financial engineering, and the cultivation of GE Capital. Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann's Lights Out (2020) remains a useful account.