I worked for GE Appliances for 32 years.
Jack Welch instituted some really stupid policies, but the worst was his “management go-round”.
He did not believe that managers needed to know the businesses they were running.
Plastics guys would get put in charge of appliances.
Appliance guy goes to jet engines.
Constantly shifting people around resulted in wasted effort as the new guy undid his predecessor’s plan and implemented his own.
Each new manager relearning the business basics. Jack destroyed institutional intellectual property. He destroyed legacy knowledge. Destroyed the ability of companies to develop long term strategies. How could they? Every manager was new.
Jack was known as the guy who trained the competition. Because eventually everyone got pushed out and went back to work in the field they knew. Competing with GE.
“the new guy undid his predecessor’s plan and implemented his own.”
the thing i found out about ignorant/incompetent managers is that they focused on what they knew (or thought they knew) and ignored everything else.
For example, if a newly promoted manager to a technical division was big on team-building, then he or she would spend all of their energy on arranging team-building “exercises”, dragging everyone else away from their primary duties to waste time on such pointless activities ... pretty much everything else going on in the division was beside the point ...