Dave Pollard on Organizational Behavior

....business 'leaders' don't get it: They tell other people what to do, tell them what they want done, and bring in consultants and experts to help them 'effect change' in their organizations. They cannot fathom that most of what happens in their organizations is workarounds developed by front-line people to make things work in the organization despite the inept and usually inappropriate advice of management and professional advisors who only think they understand what is really going on and why.

And when an industry is cartelized among a handful of firms, the internal policies of each firm are likely to be based on the "industry trend": that is, on what a firm's management hears from equally clueless management at other firms, who know as little as they do about the real effect of their policies on what happens at the level of actual production. The people at the tops of the pyramids can communicate with each other much more effectively than they can monitor what's going on at the lower levels of their own organizations. As R.A. Wilson said, you never tell the truth to a man who's pointing a gun at you; information is systematically filtered as it moves up the hierarchy, until those at the top drown in falsified data. Deming said "drive out fear," but it's easier said than done. The only reliable way to do it may be to reverse the flow of authority, from bottom to top.