Rank and Yank Enron: the Performance Review Committee graded employees 1-5 twice yearly, with the bottom 10-15% fired anually. Shockingly, this turns out to be bad, but CEOs keep rediscovering this life-hack every few decades.
But where do they come from? If idle hands are the devil's playthings, then a manager with time to kill is something even satan fears.
The worst ones always come from the top. Sometimes the CEO has seen a really great movie and the entire art direction takes a change, or they become obsessed with alpha-male-rome-bro things and everyone suffers. No matter what it is, it's most likely terrible and it'll be the employees who suffer (as is their duty and role in the grand machine of capitalism). Out of all the bad ideas, these have the most staying power and worse are frequently infectious. In the competitive and rarified air of CEOs, it isn't enough to just be successful, but you have to be more succesful than your rival rich people. If one of them commits to what is a terrible idea, then it's up to you, my dear CEO friend, to try your hand at it to and do it better. Part of it is a fear of missing out, a sort of "but what about" and "just in case" that sees billions dumped into a metaphorical trash fire.
Below them, you have project leads with pet ideas, HR department who read the latest breakthrough in 'morale management', individual producers with way too much time on their hands, and management fads that race through Megacorpolis like a plague. That's not to say that low-level employees can't have bad ideas, but those tend to be stamped out and punished pretty quickly compared to the same or worse quality of idea from someone with a fancy title and a golden parachute.
Soma Industries reorganized their corporation into ~30 competing business units that fought against each other for funding, marketing, and attention, all while having their own bonus structures and internal management. The result is the so called "warring tribes" period ended when Soma Industries was acquired by Centurion Arms & Armor
Other than wasting money and time, Bad Ideas
tm often makes life miserable for everyone involved (except the originator of the idea, that is). The classic examples include but are not limited to: stack ranking (grading employees and firing the bottom 10% every year), open floor office plans, zero-budget justifications, management and HR fads... Whatever it is, you can count on it making work a lot more horrible.
Consequences and Utility
Yeah, man, that's just the way they want it done.
That's
not to say all bad ideas are all bad. For managers, the benefits of bad ideas are primarily that there isn't really any downsides. It'll be a cold day in hell before you'll see the consequences of a bad idea do anything to a manager but promote them. It'll be the kind of thing that strokes egoes and "shows initiative" or some such rot, rather than a stunning lack of basic common sense. Unlike with economics, the trickle down of blame tends to be a flood and always drown the employees.
But even for employees, there's some utility to bad ideas. They tend to be so poorly thought out or organized that there are gaps for people to take a breather, or just pretend to work while nothing it really going on. Other times, there are merch given to (or stolen by) employees based on whatever the higher-ups have cooked up. Sure, everything will be awful, but to survive in Megacorpolis, people try to make the awful work for them.
If nothing else, it's an opportunity to throw rivals and maybe even managers under the bus when the whole thing inevitably collapses.
X-D Not wrong at all!
Thanks for reading and liking! :D
Creator of Araea, Megacorpolis, and many others.