> Technical issues? They're probably equivalent. However, an 8 year old,
> would probably have problems understanding how to hide profits in a
> tax-haven country...

LOL.

>> In my limited experience, managers are astonishingly stupid people.
>> (Depending on how high up they are, generally. Some of the ones lower
>> down actually *have* a clue...)
>
> While managers are sometimes hired from the "old boys' network" and make
> Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss look like a rocket scientist, as someone
> once pointed out to me, managers have to supervise a team of people,or
> in the case of upper management, teams of teams. They CAN NOT possibly
> know more than every member of each of these teams. It's not their role.
> And, as you point out, the further up the food chain you go, the less
> they know about each individual's field of experitse. Besides, someone
> who did know more than all of her team members would be a horrible
> manager, micro-managing every one.
>
> This, unfortunately means, that they will sometimes misundertand your
> explanations and will have to go to their management with their flawed
> view of your concerns, and may return with what they think is a "good
> compromise" that is totally unworkable.

This is how competent management works, yes.

The problem seems to be that most managers apparently don't live in the 
real world. I'm not talking about not understanding computing or 
whatever. As you point out, managers hire other people to do that for them.

I'm talking about things like... The company is making several million 
dollars in losses annually because our order books are *empty*. Back 
when the order book wasn't empty, we were making a decent profit, but 
since our best salesmen left we're getting hardly any business. 
Activities which will not rectify this situation include:

- Firing people.

- Making all employees memorise the 12-point company objectives list.

- Having a meeting once per month where all the employees stop doing 
productive work to spend 2 hours listening to various financial officers 
describe the current health of the company in extraneous detail.

- Redesigning the employee performance appraisal process.

- Changing people's job titles.

- Reducing investment in vital laboratory equipment.

- Giving employees "team work evaluation" questionnaires to fill out.

- Replacing the entire sales team every 3 to 4 months.

- Lecturing employees about efficiency.

- Streamlining order processing via formal task analysis methods.

- Telling people [who haven't seen a pay rise in half a decade] that 
they should be willing to work unpaid overtime when the situation arises 
[even though we've got so little work on that people are sitting around 
the lab reading books and playing Flash games during office hours].

Activities which will improve the situation include:

- Hiring more sales staff and reducing turnover.

- Putting more resources towards customer liaisons.

- Producing a coherent marketing strategy.

Three guesses which set of activities top management are throwing all of 
their time and energy at...

Standing on the ground, it seems as if management have absolutely no 
idea what the problem is, and are blindly trying everything they can 
think of to figure out why we're losing so much money. And, standing on 
the ground, it seems bloody obvious that no sales = no profits. You 
would think that management would be urgently attacking the problem of 
massively increasing sales ASAP, given that we work in an industry with 
extremely high fixed overhead costs that can't be reduced. But nooo...

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