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When your enterprise grows big enough to require management that is not involved in the daily operations of the enterprise, you lose information about what’s happening at the “production line” and decisions are made according to what little information percolates up through the system. The same thing happens when someone new buys a business and then attempts to learn the ropes from the top down. In both cases, the growing business loses basic functions and becomes blind.
In attempts to gain more information, the management applies measurements and metrics which attempt to simplify things down to some key variables and averages easily understood by managers, not by people making or using the product. The product of your enterprise is then made to cater to these metrics – not to actual customer demands or needs. This is seen by the management as rationalizing the business, cutting out the fat, etc. while the customers see loss of features and loss of responsiveness from the company.
“the system has a severely censored and distorted view of reality from biased and filtering sensory organs which displaces understanding of the actual real-world which pales and tends to disappear. This displacement creates a type of sensory deprivation and a kind of hallucinogenic effect on those inside the systems, causing them to lose common sense. In addition to negatively affecting those inside the system, the system attracts to it people who are optimized for the pathological environment”
-John Gall, Systemantics, 1978