[nostrademons]

I think that even at the 10,000+ employee level, there's a very heavy correlation between how open & accessible the CEO is and how successful the company is. No, you can't compare a 30,000-employee multinational with a 10-person startup. But within size categories, the correlation holds pretty well.

The Google founders host TGIF every Friday where anybody can get up and ask them anything, no matter how inane. When Lou Gerstner took over IBM, he spent his first 90 days just talking to people and getting a pulse on the organization. Hewlett Packard (in the 70s, before Fiorina destroyed it) popularized the idea of "management by wandering around", where managers would learn about how the organization actually works just by walking up and talking to people. I think there's some other company where the CEO makes it a point to go and spend a day in each job function (eg. he answers customer service calls for a day), so he gets a sense of what it's like to actually be his employees.