"It’s terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don’t."
And where is the challenge if everyone is highly motivated and easy to manage? Then you can just leave the programmers alone. They don't need management in this case.
Just because people are highly motivated doesn't mean they're intrinsically organized. You can leave the programmers alone, but you still need someone to decide what they're working on and how to best allocate resources. A manager ensures a team stays coordinated.
I've found that groups of individual contributors are actually very good on deciding what is important, what they should work on and when, and how to work together to get things done.
Managers can provide a useful role in setting the scene, reminding what the goals of the organisation, the department, and so forth are, and how this connects with what the team is doing. They are perhaps most useful in working with individuals who aren't working well as part of the team at the moment - giving them feedback, mentorship, building bridges, connecting them with people, training, and so forth.
In my opinion, managers hurt more than not if they override the self-organisation of teams, and this most hurts when you need two teams to work together - and one of the managers has (explicitly, perhaps) made it clear that doing things "off the plan" is not appreciated.
That strongly strongly strongly depends on the team and contributors.
I'd agree at my startup employers. I would not agree about several teams I worked with at Apple, to pick on a corporate example. Teams built from the ashes of an acquired startup at Apple, again, I'd be more inclined to agree. You can't support a broad conclusion like that anecdotally, because I can counterexample it anecdotally, implying there's more to it.
It really depends on the ICs in question. Startups are far more selective about their ICs because one person has a very big impact. With the exception of Google and a couple others, large-cap corporate throws IC quantity at problems and distinguished, autonomous, "rockstar" (sigh) ICs are far more rare. You need the cat herders there.
It does depend on the contributors, and obviously depends on the culture of the company (ie, if everyone assumes managers are supposed to do it, nobody will do it).
You can't rely on any random grouping of people to decide well on what's important to do and how to effectively break up the work. But adding a random manager to that group doesn't help specifically. Adding a more experienced IC will generally help more than a less experienced manager.
I find it hard to believe that a complete highly motivated team would need such a guidance. Unless we are not thinking about the same thing when we use the word "motivated".
To me, a complete highly motivated team (a team without any unmotivated person) would certainly feel like they should bring up some kind of organization. They are motivated, after all, and thus they want to get their work done.
A not motivated person, however, needs to be pushed, not in a bad way, but in some way, because he/she is unmotivated (don't feel like wanting to get any job done), and thus the hierarchy comes into play.
Most people fall in this "unmotivated" category. And that is (I think) the actual true reason why management exists in the real world: to push (unmotivated) people, so they get their work done.
Note: by "push" I don't mean "being an idiot". I believe that the presence of the manager is already sufficient for most people to feel like they should work, even though they don't want to.
I look at managing difficult situations as a challenge, but I have to be certain that I believe this is the right thing for the person, team, and ultimately company--not just a way to prove how awesome of a leader I am.
I didn't get the sense the author was advocating just dumping someone on the grounds they have a lack of motivation, but rather understand that we have the ability to terminate someone and that is sometimes the best course for everyone involved--including the person who is struggling with performance.
There's another critical role in many organizations for your manager; defending your team against other managers.
Otherwise your highly-motivated group will become less so as they are blamed for failures beyond their control, have their schedules randomly changed for 'urgent' work, etc.
And where is the challenge if everyone is highly motivated and easy to manage? Then you can just leave the programmers alone. They don't need management in this case.