Well, it's a choice that we get to make by shaping our own work environments. The more senior we get, the more impact we have to shape the culture of our workplaces. In my experience technical contributors underestimate the amount of leverage they have to impact these kinds of cultural matters. We often think about the power we have to leave, but we don't use that power to change, or we assume that the organization wouldn't value our input without any attempt to validate that assumption. I have found it valuable in my own career to be more vocal about the kind of organization I want to be in, the kind of team dynamics and politics we choose to enable, etc. I wish I had done so sooner.
The intractability of the coordination problem at scale is the reason the original article is valuable. At scale, you do need management that focuses the majority of their time on the overall coordination of the work in order to protect the time of those doing the work. Because of that scale you can't involve everyone in every conversation. So you start needing to have conversations that abstract to a higher level, and which cross levels of leadership. Hence "How to present to executives" But even as a company grows, it can choose to maintain a culture of collaboration and transparency, even if the practices that enable them have to change to adapt to the larger scale.
I think what I'm getting at is this: it's wrong to think that there exists any such thing as "the organization". Like "the government" or "the people", it's a useful shorthand but it doesn't really point to anything specific.
The "trick" (not really a trick, just basic politics as correctly pointed out by other commenters) of cultivating one-to-one relationships stems exactly from that realization. There are all sorts of reasons why people oppose technical solutions, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or the collective well-being of the set of people defined by "the organization".
My ideal of how the world ought to work is a perfect, strict meritocracy. But people play games on me, hence I have to play games on them in self-defense. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma, defecting is at its most powerful when the expectation is that you will cooperate.
There is no honor in naivete. Or rather, you'll be told how honorable you are right before you get stabbed in the back.
The intractability of the coordination problem at scale is the reason the original article is valuable. At scale, you do need management that focuses the majority of their time on the overall coordination of the work in order to protect the time of those doing the work. Because of that scale you can't involve everyone in every conversation. So you start needing to have conversations that abstract to a higher level, and which cross levels of leadership. Hence "How to present to executives" But even as a company grows, it can choose to maintain a culture of collaboration and transparency, even if the practices that enable them have to change to adapt to the larger scale.