draconis brings up two excellent points. First, few employees at the manager level in technical companies can do the work they oversee. Many can't even understand it. This is not their fault exactly, though one wonders why anyone would accept responsibilities they can't truly handle. It's the fault of the corporate culture and everything bad that can go with it: buddy-system, somehow an MBA means you're a worthwhile individual and not an Enron exec, &c. It's an inefficient company that makes these mistakes b/c it's obvious from all the posts here, and any water cooler conversation, that it causes friction and wasted time in most offices.

Second, the horror. Few managers are good enough to admit they were wrong. I think many of them are too scared to b/c they are aware they have landed in a seat via musical chairs and not by skill, effort, or brains. We had a chaotic but nicely functioning system of command line Perl tools in our office for a few hundred employees. Management replaced it with a Java GUI which, nearly a year after it was supposed to be complete, still only covered 30% of the original tool base. This basically wrecked an entire department. Two sets of tools. Infighting about who was using what. Two sets training. Unofficial training to catch up. 80% abandonment of the new toolset.

This fiasco cost the company millions of dollars and everyone saw it coming and understood it from the first 2 months of it. But the managers were unwilling to accept that it was a bad idea. That they'd completely misunderstood the scope of the environment and they should just cut their losses. They just kept jamming a square peg in the round hole. It went on, crippling what I think was the best department of its kind the world, until the Java was scrapped in favor of a fresh set of Perl (often wrapping C/C++).

If they'd been willing to admit they were wrong, it could have been dealt with in 6 months instead of 2 years.