The New York Times

People are nice and smart. The building is beautiful, and, hey, it's The New York Times! Most employees are capable of great work. The paper really is making great strides into the digital age.

It's a very strange mix. Most managers want to improve products and change the procedures that prevent problems from being fixed and useful work from being done efficiently, but somehow they can't. Managers spend their time talking with other managers and are only vaguely aware of what their employees are doing. The Agile process is used not to empower developers, but to control their actions minutely. Vastly inefficient procedures take up people's time, and programmers are highly respected as a group but end up individually as powerless serfs. Frustration is common, and secrecy and control rule.

Spend a few minutes asking your employees what's working for them and what isn't.

Spend less time discussing abstractions with other management.

You know very little about the work that's being done and why it's being done so slowly.

Trust the smart people you've hired and set them free!