How to manage your IT people

Joel has written about of how to manage people. Two of them( The Command and Control Management Method, The Econ 101 Management Method) fail in terms of IT people but there is at least one(The Identity Management Method) that seems to be promising. I've experienced these two wrong approaches and I completely agree that they don't work. I've experienced the good one as well but only partially. My direct boss tried to apply the Identity method but his boss decided to go for the Econ 101 method. That was a strange kind of mix which was really confusing. I hope I will experience in the future more of the Identity method in its neat and proper form :)