It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying anything whatsoever, but they don't seem to specifically say what Paul's article says.
As with any complex system, you have to be careful about degrees of freedom, too many and it can break down and too little and it can get seized.
I think the founder not only motivates people to work on the correct thing by doing this, but the founder also directly experiences feedback from working with people lower on the org chart, enabling them to steer the company with more accurate information.
To my mind the CEO job at scale is 4 things - Keeping the fight fair-- The leadership and executive management should argue viciously, The CEO should make sure these conflicts remain constructive and aligned with company goals
Holding the vision true-- There's a risk of mission drift, continually reinforce and refine the company's vision, make sure all leaders remain aligned with longterm goals
Enforcing strategic adherence-- A strategy is only as good as its execution. ensure the leadership team not only understands the strategy but implements it across all levels of the organization. Manager of Leaders
Deal with the real world-- Q-calls, investor relations, supply chains/vendors/etc.
This is often the problem I have with business advice, it's general but not generally applicable. Scale matters probably most in the context, followed by the type of business.
I imagine from what I read about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang is that all three of them have/had unconventional management style in the sense that they're often amongst the IC's. Obviously you can't do that with all of your 30.000 employees, but I think they're just picking the teams that are most crucial at a certain point.
For example if Steve Jobs is managing Apple while launching the iPhone, I imagine he's talking to the VP of Sales in the management meetings, but he's not on the sales floor, nor is he sitting with MacOS dev teams or making sure motivations are high in the customer service department. But I bet you could find him in weekly iPhone design team meetings, and maybe he'd be shown progress on iOS every month and have a 3-hour brainstorm with a core team of senior devs on that team. Maybe they'd pull him into procurement meetings to make sure the capacitative touch screens would be made in the quantity they needed.
You'd have your VP's, directors and senior management making sure the ship sails, but you'd have the founder CEO present where they can have most impact, which just isn't in those top level meetings.
At the least, they said you need to hear directly from the people on the ground to know what they’re experiencing. The people on top could talk to them about what they learned.
Additionally, companies like IBM and FedEx used to give rewards to employees for ideas to improve the company. It was often a percentage of what those ideas made or saved up to a certain cap. A bunch of people would usually collect the max reward whenever this way implemented.
Those are a few examples that I saw show up in many places.
