Rex Tillerson is out at State. In retrospect, the only surprising thing about this move is that it took so long to happen.
Tillerson got the job after one meeting with the then-President-elect at Trump Tower. Perhaps the lesson to take home is that one meeting might not afford enough opportunity to assess whether a President and his most senior cabinet officer are temperamentally compatible. Not to be dismissive of other federal departments, but what might suffice as enough quality time to select a Secretary of Transportation may not be enough for State. That certainly seems to be the case here.
After that single meeting, Tillerson left four decades, clearly very successful decades, at the largest energy company not-controlled by a petro-state (yes, I include Russia in that definition) for Foggy Bottom. I have never worked at Exxon/Mobile, but I suspect there is something of a corporate culture there that allows some to thrive while others flail. I know for a fact that such a culture exists at State. The conflict between those cultures is not what got Tillerson fired, but it does partially explain why no one is weeping about it.
All new Secretaries have to cope with the culture of State. Successful Secretaries either co-opt the bureaucracy or learn how to set about accomplishing their priorities independent of the Department. Tillerson's approach, reportedly, was to remake the Department in his own image, or at least in the image of the culture with which he was comfortable. As much as I would have loved to see that new Org Chart he was allegedly drafting, it appears that time ran out.
However, as I said above, the fact that he never "gelled" with FSOs and civil servants at State is not what doomed Tillerson. Prior Secretaries have had bad relations with the bureaucracy and nonetheless left with a legacy of success. Likewise, other Secretaries have served Presidents pursuing agendas inimical to most career diplomats without losing this jobs. At the end of the day, the only relationship that matters for the Secretary of State is that with the President.
The operative point here is that Trump and Tillerson clearly didn't agree on a number of important issues. With that established, Tillerson was unable or unwilling to suppress his own positions in favor of the President's. Setting aside what I (or you) think about President Trump's foreign policy, we have to agree that it is HIS foreign policy, and it is the Secretary's job get on board and execute it. It has been fairly well established that Colin Powell did not agree with W. Bush's decisions leading up the Iraq War (nor did he agree with decisions of the Bush I administration leading up to the Gulf War), but he nonetheless understood the relationship and not only set-aside his misgivings, but became a famously public advocate of the policy. None of this is suggest that the Secretary shouldn't advocate his position to the President. To the contrary, this may be the Secretary's most important job. But once decisions are made, that needs to be it. At least publicly.
I was prepared to take Tillerson to the proverbial shed for violating that rule, but I can't actually recall an occasion when Tillerson contradicted the administration, at least not after the policy had been set. Thanks to the fact that this Administration leaks like a colander, we do know that Tillerson opposed decertifying Iran's compliance with the JCPOA. We know that he famously proposed talking to the North Koreans, only to be more publicly smacked down by the President. (An act that I, personally, would have found to be an intolerable undercutting of authority and, had I been in Tillerson's position, would have caused me to resign immediately on principal. But clearly he disagreed.) And there is the famous occasion of when Tillerson reportedly called the President a "moron." Who cares? That said, I'll give credit where credit is due: Tillerson didn't spar with the President in public of his own volition. At worst, he made statements that hadn't been cleared with the White House in advance. Perhaps this happened again when he agreed (rightly) with the British condemnation of Russia, one of Tillerson's last acts.
All that said, Tillerson needed to go for two reasons. The first, he didn't see eye-to-eye with the White House, has been shown. The second, equally valid reason, is that he simply wasn't a good Secretary of State. This goes beyond failing to establish an effective relationship with the bureaucracy (see supra). He didn't seem to care that the building was in all-but-open rebellion and was hemorrhaging career employees without any apparent effort to stem the flow. He acquiesced to Trump's budget cuts for an already criminally underfunded Department. He clearly gets Iran wrong. I don't really know what his position on North Korea is, but I suspect that he's in the "pro-talks" camp based on his earlier comments. So even if he is right on issues like Russia, tariffs, NATO, trade, etc., it appears that he doesn't hold any sway within the White House. Given that, what's the point?