He is completely failing because he did not meet one on one within 6 month? I must have worked with completely failing managers for my whole career over the last 16 years.
Well, there are a lot of completely failing managers out there, so that's plausible.
When I started managing people I read and thought a lot about what management was about, and who my good and bad managers were. I came to the same conclusion as Ben Horowitz did here: my main job was to make sure that my people were happy and had what they needed to get their jobs done. And that it was impossible to do that that without directly talking with them, one on one, on a regular basis.
Of course, that had absolutely no relation to the skills that got me to the point of managing people, so it's no surprise to me that many managers never figure that out.
