[rich_sasha]

I had a boss once who was hoarding projects to manage - he wanted to have fingers in all possible pies.

As a result, he basically spent most of his time in transit between meetings (not even in the meetings themselves...).

If it sounds great, it wasn't. He was notionally in charge of ~50 projects or so and a blocker on each one. Nothing definitive could be done without his approval, which was hard, as he wasn't even au fait with the project's status. So to get anything done you had to (a) physically find him and pin him down, (b) explain what approval he needs to give and why, (c) let him go to think about it, and (d) repeat every few days until he makes a decision (or lets you make it instead).

His desk was flanked by two piles of "in-tray" papers about a foot tall, from earlier years when people thought leaving reports and forms on his desk was a way to get them in his job queue. Alas, he basically never sat at his desk, and when he did, he just peeked at the flanked screen with no sense of irony.

[CSSer]

I’m not suggesting he was one, but there’s a version of this person where they not only do this but they’re also incompetent. Since upper management has even less domain-specific knowledge than this hypothetical person, they appear extraordinarily productive because of their calendars and workloads. I watched one systematically eliminate good people using this method by laundering accountability to them for things that were totally out of their control. If you ever encounter this person, my advice is to leave the company ASAP.