Let's turn it around and think about tech, Google amazed people with their 20% time. 20% of your time to do wha you want to do - it kept engineers motivated and spawned new ideas. It was a fantastic recruiting tool too. If you stick someone in a box and tell them they're never getting out, guess what? They're going to lose motivation. Pretty much one of the fundamentals of tech is getting engineers motivated. A motivated engineer is 1000x more effective than a great, but bored, engineer. Why can't people realise this pattern can be generalised.
And with time, they changed that factor... they made a business decision to largely cut the 20% time projects previously allowed. Owners and Management made a decision to change things, as they often do.
And the generalization would be... give people some autonomy in their work, even if sandboxed (the 20% was expected to not be completely random)? If so, it does sound right.
