This seems to be a very common problem with management types; a fear that if managers show any uncertainty, employees won't respect them.
This sort of thing always backfires. Eventually, management will make a decision that seems wrong to the employees and is proven wrong later. The managers then appear doubly clueless; not only were they too clueless to make the right decision, but they were too clueless to consult the people who weren't.
+1 for "Sharepoint is a wiki", even though that wasn't the main topic of the article.
I've known for ages some things that Sharepoint does, but I've never been able to wrap my head around what it is (what's the unifying theme, what's the boundary between Sharepoint and other systems it integrates with, etc).
People and websites tend to call it a "platform for leveraging organisational collaboration" or something equally content-free. Wikipedia calls it "a collection of products and software elements that includes, among a growing selection of components, ..."
Saying "it's a big clever wiki with bells on" seems like a better starting point.
It's a step up from ASP.Net/Django and a step down and sideways from Mediawiki/Wordpress.
It's possibly closest to Joomla as a kind of let-the-end-users-build-it-themselves CMS. That is, it has bits like 'wiki', 'web page', 'document store', 'site', 'list' and users and groups running through it, so you can give each department/manager/person varying levels of access including being able to build their own intranet, LEGO style.
That is, some people get read access, some can add and edit list items, some can edit the template for list items, some can create new lists, some can create new sites.
You get a very uniform site which is still tailored on a per-team or per-department basis, but without needing people who know web development. But if you have people who know about Sharepoint development you can also add your own custom 'lego brick' components to integrate with your other systems.
Very on point. What's more about Sharepoint: even companies that use it (like my current client) don't have the culture to use it effectively. The top-down approach is very much ingrained in the culture of large corporations. Unless this fundamental point is addressed, things aren't going to change. Corporate bureaucracies are designed as hierarchies.
This sort of thing always backfires. Eventually, management will make a decision that seems wrong to the employees and is proven wrong later. The managers then appear doubly clueless; not only were they too clueless to make the right decision, but they were too clueless to consult the people who weren't.