I am a retired project manager. Lucky me, I have full benefits. One thing I noticed, after coming into AT&T from IBM, is the many layers of management that add no value. During my last few years of work, I found myself presenting and conducting status and issue meetings for vice presidents and doing all the talking. My AVP and director would be basically silent, especially my AVP, because they did not know what the hell was going on. They knew a few buzz words etc but DID NOT conceptually understand what I was talking about. Amazingly, my VP did understand. I often wondered during those meetings, why was I at the bottom of the totem pole while these no value add AVP's and Directors offered nothing but FLUFF to the presentations!!! Replace the top two layers of executive leadership AND eliminate the AVP level entirely. Then WATCH the company take off and fly!!! Need someone with big cajones to do that. Guess what, it's not Randall and company. Bring in an outsider with cajones!
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I remember when we had wire center managers who were responsible for everything that went on in their wire center regardless of titles involved. Decisions could be made at a low level quickly and generally made sense. Then everyone started reporting up their own title chain of command with more layers of management and all of sudden decisions took forever and there was a lot of WTFs? after they were made. I remember when I reported to a 2nd line in my building that reported to a 3rd line that was responsible for everything that went on in my building. Decisions could be made at a low level quickly and generally made sense. Then another 4 layers of management were added in that building and all of a sudden decisions took forever and a lot of WTFs? after they were made. When management became decentralized it seemed to slow things down quite a bit and people just go in the way of each other. The industry has changed...the technology has changed...and corporate America has changed. Maybe it didn't have any choice but things sure seemed to run smoother back in the day when management was more localized.
I had an AVP who was seriously concerned about power point presentation formatting. He had no clue about content.... he focused on colors, fonts, text and titles aligning in the exact spot page to page.... Ol Jeff wanted aspired to be an executive and thinks that is what is takes.... HE IS PROBABLY RIGHT!!! that gives you an idea of the type and quality of leadership circulating in Dallas.
I would have multiple separate meetings with a director, avp, vp, and then the svp which I would be excluded from. So 4 meetings so everyone could understand and look like they were in the know and then in the final meeting things would be lost in translation because the expert on the matter wasn't deemed worthy to be there. ATT is all about looking good and unfortunately looking good is a scorecard that is fudged and doesn't have much tangible to it. Everyone wants face time and I think the leaders above enjoy making their organizations do a jig and a dance for them even if it provides worthless results. Countless times upper level people jump through 10 hoops and circles to answer an SVP question when a simple email would suffice. How often did you have some dork supervisor who in order to answer a question out together a 5 page PowerPoint. Just too much malaise and incompetence to be a fine tuned running machine. Long story short too much inbred nonsense and people coddling their leaders.