It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:

"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy. A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."

While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.