The system What on earth is that? Well, I know, I know: when you don't even know how to call it and yet want to sound knowledgeable, "system" does the job.
broke down time after time, and it cost the company hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. In this one sentence you show that you have no clue about Kodak's market. (Perhaps, you know something about the industry, but do look up the difference between the two).
Because of a management screw up, I saw them have to THROW OUT two months worth of their flagship product. All because of an ill-considered costcutting move.
There you go: a typical arrogance of a low-level employee who wants to feel a general for a day. Ill-considered? Were you in the room where that move was discussed? What do you know about the considerations that went into that decision?
Let me guess: not only you were not present at the discussions --- you never spoke to anyone in your life who was. And you did not even use the bathroom next to the room where those considerations were deliberated.
It is not my purpose to reduce this to personalities. All I wanted to put a bit of doubt in you and show you that your opinions are... well, let's say, ill-founded. I believe that it was Mark Twain who said that, towit, "A smart man is not the one who says smart things: it is the one who refrains from saying something stupid."
As I said ealier, learn something about the subject before you form opinions, let alone speak, about it.
They often form group think (I refrain from using the vulger metaphore) and are often motivated by politics. It takes an outsider to state 'the emperor wears no clothes'.
Good managers know to pay attention to those in the trenches. Why? Because they usually have better though narrower data and the smart manager knows it, he also knows better then trusting his middle managers. Management attracts politicians like...
That is'nt to say that there are'nt sometimes hidden variables visible only to managment. But when a manager says 'there are factors of which you are unaware' to explain an apparently insane discision the odds are 90%+ that the manager is full of something. The factors I've seen have included that the presidents office turned out to be 4 inches smaller in one dimension then the VPs, hence the remodel is stopped, floor gutted, a scapegoat was found and tens of thousands were wasted.
Hindsight is wounderfull, to judge a manager from the trenches on a single summers work is stupid, but to say that patterns are'nt formed and valid judgements can't be made from the trenches is equally stupid.
The worst I've seen this is in old big companys (like Kodak). The 'system' is the only thing you can call it. It is to messy for anybody to grok, senior managers included. When managers have 'perverse' motivations all sorts of insane things can happen. (e.g. the company takes it in the shorts but manager A gets fired, manager B promoted. All arranged by manager B. Happens all the time.)