His 60% has got to be untrue. Much more likely it's 60% of the people he is actually exposed to.
While reading, I was expecting the 60% to be the salt of the earth, the nameless drones who did the unsexy work that no one else wanted to do, the professional service workers, the documentation workers, the QA folks, etc.
I don't know. Have you ever worked in a large IT department or large organization? It can be very, very painful when 10% of the people are working their ass off and the rest are kind of skating. Even worse the 80% can make projects harder than they need to be by layering on meeting after meeting because they approach all projects with the same techniques - large or small.
It's very difficult to fire people in most countries. If you've got someone who was never particularly good at their technical job (or hasn't kept their skills current), you kind of have to transfer them to a hands-off position to keep them from damaging anything directly, and the only way to do that and everyone saves face (i.e you don't get sued for constructive dismissal) is to promote them to management.
And that does protect the codebase and the production systems in the short term, in the long term, all the reports they insist people write that don't create any new and valuable knowledge, all the meetings they insist people attend that don't communicate any information or make any decisions, etc, are enormously damaging, not only directly in lost productivity but in the damage to the morale of those who are still motivated.
So most management really is bad, but not because of anything inherent in the management role - because the wrong people are doing it for the wrong reasons. There needs to be much more up-or-out http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur... .
I agree, I work in a relatively small company (100 people) and there are a large number of people who are more concerned about the traditions of their functional role rather than the overall health of the business and adapting to market realities. I don't think it is 60% of people, but based on what I've heard from friends who work at places like P&G it isn't too far off.
Sometimes the reasons the rest are "kind of skating" is the obnoxious behavior of the managerial classes I'm referring to. Though I admit that I'm speculating about the original post.
While reading, I was expecting the 60% to be the salt of the earth, the nameless drones who did the unsexy work that no one else wanted to do, the professional service workers, the documentation workers, the QA folks, etc.