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No doubt all of this is a more balanced view than the first impressions of the article suggest. Baker's article, trying to make a powerful point, was in no way balanced or nuanced. There was ZERO attempt to account for the complaints in a way that might temper one's view of Lincoln, Armstrong, or Zduriencik. Wedge, et al were Gene Autry. The M's front office were the guys in black hats.
I have worked as a lower level manager at a Fortune-500 company, not at the level of many of you, but the nature of my position put me several times a year in a working relationship with high-level national executives, and more often with regional executives. Understand, business is not my gig. I was doing what I had to do to support a family, not what I loved to do.
Upwardly mobile executives, from my vantage point, are kind, supportive and helpful when it suits their purpose, and they are brutal, even ruthless when that suits their purpose. They are what they have to be at any given moment. They are all people, though. They have personal characteristics that color their job performance and their treatment of people along the way. Many, many different sorts find ways to succeed in the world of executive management. None of this paragraph is news.
But while I can sign off on the general soundness of the article in describing such people, I'll bet most of you who have at least rubbed shoulders in such an environment have run into plenty of executives who are textbook cases of the Peter principle, that people are often promoted one level beyond their competence. And when you get several of them together in a team that wields significant power, bad things, VERY bad things can happen. And because they have power they can for a time avoid the consequences of those bad things. But ultimately the truth will out, the house of cards collapses, and the regime falls.
Forgetting the politics of it, if you can, look at Obamacare.
I agree that time will tell how accurately Baker's hit piece portrays Jack Zduriencik. The article itself does not cinch it's argument. But if indeed Zduriencik is in over his head, the kind of things this article exposes are consistent with that.
Lincoln/Armstrong are the easy targets in this. The accusations reinforce the narrative many of us have come to believe over the years. The portrait of Zduriencik, however, exposes a fault line among the fans of Seattle, those who are disposed to be favorable towards him, and those not so disposed. Here the narratives diverge, and the article will be read differently by the two camps. Accusation is not proof.
Let's see where this goes over the next few day. Powerful men, when their regime is threatened by poor performance, go to great lengths to shift the blame.
edited to add:
Regarding the line of argument that "the boss is always right," technically this is true so long as the boss is the boss. If Zduriencik's bosses put him in the position of being a "Yes" man or a dead man, of course with his rookie GM status he had no choice but to comply. If Blengino was under the illusion that his boss, under tremendous pressure from above, was going to serve up his career as a sacrifice to protect him, he was of course badly mistaken.
Honestly, one of my key complaints about Lincoln/Armstrong has always been that they ran the only competents that ever worked for them out of town. It has been clear for a decade that they neither like nor tolerate pushback.