But to do that you need to be able to trust managers to make competent hiring and firing decisions. I have watched firing decisions happen at Microsoft, as well as been hired. I can tell you that managers are definitely not trusted to make these decisions or at least weren't when I was there.
So once you establish that you don't trust managers, you pick managers who excel at politics rather than anything else and the problem continues.
Well I think that is a major underlying reason for why they used the forced curve. It's a problem. I can't say I have an answer for avoiding it other than flattening the business hierarchy and taking the first step of trusting managers to make those decisions.
If you aren't trusting your managers to make these decisions, why do you have managers in the first place?
Those are two things that Microsoft needs to do, namely use IT to replace depth in business hierarchy, and to empower team managers to make these decisions.
Managers do the dirty glue-work that allows their teams to get things done. Managers interface with other business units, again, to allow their teams to get things done. Managers pull together a clear picture of what everyone else is doing so that they can see when something isn't being done--so that they can communicate that back to the team, so it can, once again, get stuff done. See most of the stuff Rands has written on the topic of management (http://www.randsinrepose.com/). Basically, a manager is a glorified secretary who works for everyone in the team at once. The equivalent in sports is the coach.
Management is, however, not the command-and-control backbone of your company. That's leadership, and that's an orthogonal role. Management is about oiling teams to run better; while leadership is about taking responsibility for, and ownership of a team's output.
Leaders, of course, want their teams to be managed, because it makes them work better--and if nobody else will do it, they can do it themselves. But, importantly, the leader role works better when held by a member of the team--someone doing the work, down in the trenches--while the manager role works better on someone who doesn't have any other responsibilities (since it's a full-time job in and of itself.) Leaders who are also managers become out-of-touch in their leadership, because the job of management deprives them of access to the distributed knowledge they need to make leadership decisions (the kind they'd just pick up naturally by doing the job alongside the team.)
Ideally, leaders are just members of teams held in high regard by their peers, who just end up taking ownership of the team's project by default. In contrast, ideally managers are free-floating socialites, working with several teams and ensuring that everyone has everything they need (including introductions to people outside their team they might not know they need!)
You'll notice that there's nowhere in this list of requirements for a "boss" who tells you to "get to work." This is because, if your team lead actually has your respect--and if that lead actually cares about the project--then you don't want to disappoint them by giving them any less than your best. And if either of those two things aren't true, then you probably need to rebuild the team, or scrap the project.
Knowledge is local. We can prove that (see the CAP theorem). Therefore decisions are best made at a local level. Someone needs to take ownership of decisions like hiring and firing and that needs to be someone close to the work. Since the leader is not the one with that power, that leaves the manager, and if you can't trust the manager with that power, then you can't trust the manager with anything.
The basic problem is that with responsibility comes power and vice versa. You can't be responsible for something without the powers necessary to live up to that responsibility. Likewise power without responsibility doesn't work out so well either. The question, as always, is what are the responsibilities and what are the powers that come with them.
My sense from where I was (front lines of Product Support Services in 2000-2003), that the team managers were bit players. They could not fire people. All they could do is try to interface one team to another, but they didn't have the authority to get anything done. I found that for anything out of the ordinary, the last person I wanted to bring in was the team manager because they would claim responsibility for it, but had insufficient power to do anything about problems.
So my point is this: if you are going to give managers responsibility for the production of the team, they need to have the powers to do things like hiring and firing (within a budget of course). if you can't trust them for these things, you are giving them responsibility without power.
So once you establish that you don't trust managers, you pick managers who excel at politics rather than anything else and the problem continues.