Publishing papers, filing patents, and stacking degrees is more valuable than doing anything actually impactful. Managers expect expertise to be transferrable to any and all domains regardless actual education or experience. Team management is not there to build teams, mentor, create structure, etc. Instead, their job is to be the smartest and most capable person in the room at all time again regardless of background or experience. If they aren't that means the manager is useless. Senior management feels their job is to constantly work on finding out who's secretly hiding how bad they are at their job and then fire them. It's the only organization I'd ever worked in where the smartest and most capable folks were the ones no one ever talked to and management ignored or was actively trying to push out of the org.
A colleague of mine said it felt like working for the mafia. I think that's a pretty apt description.
