Walk the floor management meets knowledge workers

Interesting post at Post Money Value called Every Company Needs an Untouchable

The thrust of the post is that in large companies, the CEO is quite distant from day to day operations, and can easily get a distorted picture of how the business is actually doing. Having a direct report who is responsible for each of the really important parts of corporate strategy, is one way to get a more direct connection with the workforce, developers, audience, etc.

This strikes me as the knowledge worker version of Walk-the-floor management.

I always remember back when I was in the Army training at the National Training Center in California, several times while we were setting up camp or running missions, the Battalion XO (2nd in command of around 500 people) would walk around on foot to all the different areas of the camp and ask the individual soldiers how things were going. As a private straight out of training, that really made a big impression on me (really intimidated me as well).