Enabling environment? (Score 5, Interesting)

I found this interview with a former employee of Microsoft on Kuro5hin.

You worked at Microsoft for ten years, then left the company two-and-a-half years ago. From your perspective, do you think Microsoft has fundamentally changed as a result of the antitrust lawsuit?
My short answer would be "No".
There were many positive things about the Microsoft work environment. But there were some negatives. People use the term "enabling environment" to mean a situation that encourages someone to act in a negative way, such as drinking alcohol heavily, by mitigating the negative impact of the behavior, and providing tacit approval for it. Well, Microsoft constructed an enabling environment for socially obnoxious behavior: it was welcomed and rationalized into positives. If you were late for meetings it meant you were busy doing important work, if you were extremely confrontational it meant you were passionate about your job, if you required subordinates to work long hours it meant you were committed to the product, if you turned down everyone you interviewed it meant you weren't soft, and so on.
So Microsoft had this system that encouraged and rewarded people who acted a certain way. And some of that behavior trickled out into meetings with customers and partners, where they were correctly seen as negatives and helped foster the anti-Microsoft attitude. But since Microsoft kept hiring and promoting obnoxious people, they kept being obnoxious.

I don't know how much truth lies in this, but when any organization becomes big enough, culture plays a big role in dictating what is allowed and what's not.