My favorite line in the post, and one that inspires my own efforts lately:
> How to be a 10x engineer: help ten other engineers be twice as good. Producing high-quality educational materials enables you to be a 300x engineer.
> How to be a 10x engineer: help ten other engineers be twice as good. Producing high-quality educational materials enables you to be a 300x engineer.
The PM meeting was not a status reporting meeting. It had no management beyond the PMs (that is, no supervisors proper). The entire purpose was to facilitate sharing information across project boundaries (technical, procedural, or even just a chance to vent). I considered it to have "paid for itself" after two PMs discovered that another PM had already solved a procedural problem (how to get something done, not a technical problem) that they'd been stumbling over for months. That was also the day the PMs stopped complaining about the (non-mandatory) meeting that I'd set up for them. Another time, a PM discovered that another project had exactly the test capabilities they needed (but because of physical separation was totally unaware of this test lab tucked into a corner). Saved a lot of time and money that day, and the project ended up ahead of schedule in that aspect (not sure if they kept that lead, I left shortly after).
I wish I'd been able to get the technical meeting going, but management wasn't willing to give people the hour I asked for and "lunch & learn" only works for the motivated when you aren't getting paid and you aren't getting training credits towards some certification.
At my last office, I set up something very similar for our org with similar success. Your PM procedural problem case is a perfect example down to the complaining about having to attend a meeting they weren't required to attend.
Enter new management. After 8 weeks of ice-breaking meetings in triplicate and taking cues from all the wrong people, the first concrete thing they did that touched me was cancel that meeting. I found new employment shortly thereafter.
It's now an essential part of my repertoire. For technical people? Well that's mostly my team. We have a Trello board where anyone on team can drop RFC cards. Members of my team meet every couple weeks to review and discuss. It's visible to the whole org if anyone else is interested. (Generally, they aren't.)
In the end, I quit before I could realize that, and what did happen (after I left) was more like you describe. Several teams basically did what you describe and set up their own internal learning and instruction approaches. But that doesn't help across the org, the bad teams are still bad. And the problem, mostly, wasn't the people but the time. They needed an opportunity to step back and think, and the firefighting they'd gotten stuck in was neverending. An hour every couple of weeks to hear and learn from others would've benefited them greatly.
I mean take someone like Martin Fowler who wrote a number of highly influential book and a great website. Every time you look for him, you'll find his company or employer, ThoughtWorks. He and his work have put that company on the map as one of the top consultancy firms; he and his work educate everyone that works for that company, they follow his teachings and mindset, and become "10x" because of it.
Companies would be DESPERATE to hire him. Maybe not the kind of employers you think of, no, and maybe you wouldn't hire him for his 'output', but that's a very superficial way to look at it.