Why I left Cisco Last Year

Death By Risk Aversion has some good lines that capture life in a big product vendor. The 2nd paragraph below nails it!

But whose fear? The metaphor Liz used (she got from someone else) was that many of the "leaf nodes" (what Microsoft and Sun and others refer to as "individual contributors") tend to be innovative and brave, but many of the "branches" (i.e. layers of management) can't stomach the risks. In their (admirable) desire to be strong and stable, the "branches" put safety above all else.

What kind of safety? Sometimes managers are putting the best interests of the company first. That's great--they're often more experienced and have a better grasp of the bigger context. But (and it's a really big but) sometimes they're just worried about their own damn job. In other words, the leaf node/individual contributors often think about the effect of their work on users, while the mid-level managers often think about the effect of their work on their job. And whose fault is that? All those layers of bosses. Even one risk-averse boss in the chain-of-command can do major damage to innovation, spirt, motivation, etc.