It's one of those things that ought to be possible, but the problem is scaling middle management. Plenty of IC talent on the bottom, but it's impossible to have hundreds or thousands of IC report to the same individual executive with a vision. One you start to hire middle management, you get politics: fiefdoms, silos, power games, selective storytelling, cherry-picking statistics. In a small company where an executive oversees a single layer of middle management, it can be fought against, and stamped out where it's found. Two layers of middle-management, getting executives to be out of touch with the IC level, it starts to get very difficult to parse through what's bullshit and what's not; by three layers, there's too many people playing telephone, and you have an echo chamber.
The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.
I don’t think middle management are the ONLY cause, but I do agree that once you start getting layers of management, managers “shielding their teams” from the rest of the company, cross-team dependencies that require lots of planning, and execs/upper-management that are very disconnected from the details of the business and product, you’re basically doomed to mediocrity-at-best.
The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.