You forget the 3rd kind: the ones who think ahead of the time, but use urgency as a way of shielding their decision-making reasoning.
Let's say Employee A comes up to Manager three months before Defcon, saying he'd like to do such and such. Manager doesn't like it, but he doesn't want to upset A at that time because Reasons. He says "sure bud, you go ahead, I'll check with the lawyers just in case and let you know if there is any problem". Then he waits, and half an hour before the talk, through an indirect medium like email or text, he goes "sorry man, I only just got a message back from the lawyers that you can't talk about that. Totally gutted! Oh well, better luck next year, uh?"
30 mins before the presentation, after they've all flown to the conference, is not incompetence; it's malice.
At least in that case I wouldn't mind if a superior was honestly and truly checking with Legal Departments, and others of authority, to verify whether some action I was considering taking was going to cost me my job... Could any of us here really be upset about a Manager that does that?
I'm fairly certain the implication here is that he was not, in fact, checking with Legal or anyone, but simply holding off to make it seem as if he was and it was too late to question.
Jim is known for retaliating against his employees. That's why we got rid of him at MSFT and then Google... He is happy enjoying his millions in stock units and 100% bonus target. What did you expect? SOP.
No, I don't think so, assuming the manager also said something along the lines of "The check might run right up before your talk. Please make sure to check your phones before walking on stage so that if something happens last minute you'll know. I'll promise to text you either way."
Let's say Employee A comes up to Manager three months before Defcon, saying he'd like to do such and such. Manager doesn't like it, but he doesn't want to upset A at that time because Reasons. He says "sure bud, you go ahead, I'll check with the lawyers just in case and let you know if there is any problem". Then he waits, and half an hour before the talk, through an indirect medium like email or text, he goes "sorry man, I only just got a message back from the lawyers that you can't talk about that. Totally gutted! Oh well, better luck next year, uh?"
30 mins before the presentation, after they've all flown to the conference, is not incompetence; it's malice.