| I've witnessed this first hand so often that I'm well aware of what it's caused by: overload at the top. The end beneficial owners of a business have limited power over it. They exert weak control remotely. Usually this amounts to no more than "hire someone to run the business, reward him based on profits" (and sometimes barely even that). That person, the CEO, also has limited control. He only has so much energy and time in a day. Meanwhile, parasitism is the norm. The easiest way to get a promotion is to simply do less work and do more of what you want. Spending all day in meetings sounding important, going on junkets, playing around with new tech for fun, puttering around with emails instead of impactful work, etc. Then you're getting the same pay for less work. Therefore it requires constant pressure from the top to retain alignment of the staff with profitability. How effective the CEO and his team is in suppressing politics, suppressing friendship based (vs meritocratic) promotions, suppressing false work / lazing (meetings & makework etc), will always hit a limit. It's just as much an area of ongoing development as anything else in business -- how to maintain the productivity of small teams as the organization grows and vice becomes harder to suppress. So I think this is more likely the cause than people being promoted to the point of incompetence -- the organization grows to the limit of its leader's ability. |