Myself and the other two Foremen had a system in place to handle all of the little details that were necessary to get jobs done . We were on a first name basis with the various vendors and contractors that we used for things like equipment rental , environmental issues , dumpster rental , you name it . Call them up , give them a PO number and away we go . Various people within the company decided that they could do a better job of managing OUR work and more and more things had to go through THEM . This added a lot more time to even the simplest tasks .It totally screwed up the relationships we had created with our vendors and subs . And don't get me started on the Safety Department . They were out of control .

I think this is related closely enough to be relevant to this topic. As I read through the thread, and watched half of the video, I thought of a specific group of college professors; those who went straight through from undergraduate to PhD and taught in the university without a single day working in the field they taught. Fortunately, there weren’t that many of them in my case, but the few I encountered were abysmal teachers. What really struck me was the useless projects leading to graduate degrees they had their Masters and PhD candidates working on. Stupid stuff that anyone who spent a month working in the field KNEW was a waste of time and effort.

We had a lot of Supervisors in our group that had EE degrees but knew nothing about what we actually did . During their tenure there they worked on their MBA degree which appeared to be a requirement to move up in the company . Their time in our group seemed to be something to add to their resume along with the MBA .