🍄 Mushroom Management

I recall a quote from the book The Soul of a New Machine that describes "Mushroom Management" and goes something like this:

"Keep them in the dark, feed them sh**, and watch them grow."

(This book chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to build the next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure at Data General in the late 1970s.)

Contrast this with Jensen Huang:

"They never hear me say something to them that is only for them to know. There is not one piece of information that I secretly tell the staff that I don't tell the rest of the company. In that way, our company was designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible, for people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know. That's the architecture of our company."

Where is Data General today? Where is Nvidia? Perhaps this is comparing apples and oranges though, because as system complexity grows, Huang's approach is even more necessary. Systems in the 2020s are many times more complex than those of the 1970s.