[nostrademons]

His point is that while you're waiting for the future, all of the people who report up to that executive have lost confidence in him. That confidence is impossible to regain. In the process, you will lose your best individual contributors and your best first-level managers.

Think of it from the perspective of a talented, savvy engineer at the company. If your CEO hires a bozo to manage engineering, do you stick around? Why should you? You are very good at what you do; you have plenty of options elsewhere, friends at other companies that are continually asking "Why don't you come work for Floogle?", and recruiters from Flare that are battering down your LinkedIn account. You're already aware that your VP makes a lot more money than you do; if it's clear that you are way more competent than he is, why should you stay?

Ben's guiding philosophy of management is "Always view all of your decisions from the perspective of everyone in the company." Trying to develop an executive for future potential may be what the CEO wants, it certainly is what the executive wants - but it's not fair to the individual contributors who work under that executive.

[cauterized]

Why is it that binary, though? Surely somewhere between "incompetent" and "world-class" there's space for execs who are "good enough to earn their reports' respect but with room to grow in a few areas"?

[nostrademons]

It's not binary, from an objective perspective. The thing is, if you even think that his advice might apply to your situation, the exec in question has lost your respect. That means that they lost their reports' respect several months ago (the CEO is always the last to know), and you have a major problem on your hands.

[cauterized]

I don't know about that. It'd be really easy for a credulous person to read that article and think "oh, some of my execs aren't world class yet. Guess I'd better replace them."

Yeah, once you've lost the respect of your reports (or failed to ever gain it) you can't do your job as a manager or executive, period. But that doesn't mean that great execs are born rather than made or that nobody should put any effort into developing a great manager into a new exec or a new exec into a great one, which the article seems to fallaciously suggest.