Which means they rarely lay off the right people. It’s always the productive people who get laid off leaving behind the ass kissers and dead weight.
There is some truth to what you say. I've worked in many different industries and seen quite a few different management cultures. There exists across the board a culture of "managers" who exist to "manage" and for whom entrepreneurial spirit is just a form of camouflage. They usually learn the ropes at a larger dysfunctional enterprise. Many executives come from this culture and they see this culture as the "right" one.
Unfortunately this culture is also inept at business. As long as things are good it doesn't matter too much to the bottom line, but the top line will suffer. In a downturn these folks will look after the bottom line, and because they don't understand the underpinnings of the top line, your business will waste away as the supporting staff are let go. These guys don't really understand how a well connected team can be orders of magnitude more effective than a crowd of individual specialists, or how to maintain a culture of trust...they are blind to the negative consequences of their actions. They tend to clog up cross enterprise information flows in the guise of corporate confidentiality or credibility (actually protecting their power). They will chase dollars after a failure instead of treating it as a sunk cost because it is more important to them to maintain a perception of "all-is-well". They may subscribe to measures of productivity supporting an increased number of "managers" but are measures antithetical to true value-added metrics.
In some industries, your company becomes top-heavy in management, all "chiefs with no Indians", as the old saying gos. In the 80's there was a great blood-letting as everyone realized these "middle managers" didn't really contribute much to productivity and were let go in huge numbers...of course some of the good went with the bad (this didn't happen in some companies who made a practice of keeping management simple and focused).
So true.