You can start by letting them do their jobs. From TFA:

"The process involved coming up with an idea, presenting it and getting approval to run with it. You would then repeat this approval process at various stages during development. It was, however, very hard to get approval for enough resources (both time and people) to finesse an idea long enough to make it obviously a good or bad idea. That aside, I found it very demoralising to not have the opportunity to write code that people could use."

The early Chrome people indicated a similar frustration with upper management once Firefox got popular.

If you want a clear demonstration of the management clusterfuck that is Mozilla, see http://arewereorganizedyet.com/ The average time between reorgs in Mozilla is something like three to four weeks.

It's really not clear to me what definition of "reorg" is being used here, given those dates. The only one that might plausibly fit is "any change in the management structure, anywhere in the organization" to give you that frequency. As in, to get this frequency you have to count "a manager has too many reports, so another one was hired to take part of the load" as a "reorg".

That's fair, though it does seem like a fair number of people at Mozilla don't actually know what their reporting chain is nowadays yet alone who needs to approve any expense.

I'm not sure why people wouldn't know their reporting chain. It's in the company "phonebook": search for yourself, then follow the "Manager" links...

Expense approval is less clear, because it's not obvious which things your immediate manager can approve and which need to be kicked higher up the chain. But in my experience asking your manager works pretty well. It's possibly I've been lucky with managers.

All I can say is that this is not universal. My colleagues in Research and I have been able to pursue longer-term research directions at Mozilla that are now successful and which, frankly, most other companies would have shut down long ago for not having enough short-term value.

Yes, it's from the part of TFA article about developing IoT devices. Also in TFA is the author describing their time working on Firefox Mobile and later Firefox OS in glowing terms.