One example of how a company wastes.

Just shifting gears now, slightly, to show some points I am trying to make. I am going to give some observations from past work experience to prove my point. I will not mention companies or names, so it does not look as a sour apples or revenge story.
One such company is a very large and old Multinational Corporation. It will only from one departments and person's perspective.
I was hired to work an as Engineering Technician, testing tools. The mainstay of the tests was a room of test fixtures for testing the life of a tool and if failures occurred, the type, time, etc was recorded. These test systems were setup to closely mimic actual use of the tool.
One portion of this system was a brake assembly that utilized a high lead bronze as a "brake pad" that had grease injected into the braking surface. The whole system had been designed and implemented decades ago. And, as designed, the system worked perfectly, however the system was not working perfectly and I mentioned this to my boss about 2 months after being there. I was given a speech about the systems and everything was as it should be and I should concern myself with the setups only...
I did for 2 years, Will need to point out that in the meantime I had noticed a case of a tech taking shortcuts and guessing at test numbers to put in. I soon was pulled to the side by my boss and asked why I was slower than the other guys and I was seeing why but only said something when my boss became angry that I was talking to another employee about it. He did not believe me but decided to confront the other technician who admitted it. Well we all agreed to just not mention it again and that it would not happen again. It did with the same tech but with another partner on the test. It was not reported.
But needless to say that I thought my boss was worried that I had something over him. Which could be what may have sent him over when I informed him that I decided to do a hardness test on the Bronze we used for the test system and it was as much as ten times harder!!! I did it when I noticed different colors of bronze to which my boss and his boss both laughed at me and said "what do we need a metallurgist for, will just give it to you and you can tell us what it is. Well short story I gathered 3 sets plus one piece which I thought was all different, sent to metallurgist and confirmed for what I said and what it was and all different!
They had 60 combined years with the company... I had 2!
Kinda get my point so far?
My boss thought he would show his worth and find what we needed when I told him it would only take me hours! He was concerned that I may spend too much time on it. So a week later he came to me and said he could not find it, and did I have an idea? I had a company in an hour but they took to long on the quote and in the meantime one of my boss's friends in another division found and got a quote the same day my guy quoted and at a lower price.
My boss went with his find at the higher quote.........He also told me that the material had been changed for over 10 years, but that it did not mean the tests were invalid. I heard engineers say that almost 90% of the tools I tested, matched field results and they had all the data required where others had failures that did not match field results and they did not have enough data to tell them why???
Ok so your sayin sour grapes yadda yadda what's the point?
This is not the techs fault when you have bosses with decades of straight employment with the same company.. It's just the "internal politics" as they like to call it. It helps certain people to keep a job no matter how badly they do it, because it is only 1 person in 40,000 employees.
Now think of the costs put into an item because it was improperly tested. Time taken away from the development of new items because time is wasted on current products fixing problems that are nonexistent because the test system was not operating to specifications.
Now imagine some of those tech jobs moving to another country because their testing more closely matches literature when the lab in this country, tested those same tools after they were shipped back to the states and numbers changed.
These types of companies Really do need to rely on those people in these positions to know what they are doing. If a boss does not recognize a problem, or refuses to, then everyone in under him can be considered as part of the failure, if the failure is out in the open. Whether it is or not, but they stand a greater chance of losing their jobs than the boss will. Often these companies need to do a double take at some of those employees that were in the same dept for 30 years. Maybe they will find a big chunk of wasted money right there!
So until the executives bring their fat butts down under the clouds more often to check on their own company, then this type of waste will go on, and they still won't have a good sense of their own business.