Indeed but with very large organisations what happens is that perfectly reasonable questions/decisions at the top level grow lives of their own as they permeate through the organisation.
In my experience the reason is often that the rationale for the decision, say shareholder perception, is not something that the majority of people working actually spend their time caring about. As the actions move further from the rationale, you start to get emergent behaviour.
This is exacerbated by the tendency of managers to feel a need to do something even when not doing anything is demonstrably better. So I often see cases where someone senior make a fairly throwaway comment of the form "What are we doing about X?". Even if the answer is nothing because nothing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the effect of the question is that something gets done. The higher the level of the questioner the more activity it tends to generate.
In my experience the reason is often that the rationale for the decision, say shareholder perception, is not something that the majority of people working actually spend their time caring about. As the actions move further from the rationale, you start to get emergent behaviour.
This is exacerbated by the tendency of managers to feel a need to do something even when not doing anything is demonstrably better. So I often see cases where someone senior make a fairly throwaway comment of the form "What are we doing about X?". Even if the answer is nothing because nothing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the effect of the question is that something gets done. The higher the level of the questioner the more activity it tends to generate.