U.S. Standard Business Structure
It seems like most U.S. businesses tend to try and organize their tree of responsibility the same way:
President, CEO, CTO, CFO and VPs are in charge of Directors, who are in charge of managers, who are in charge of team leaders, shift leaders or projects leads who are in charge of the grunts.
In several instances this is a very useful setup, like for big chain stores the resposibility setup is very clear and makes things easier. In other organizations, this setup can create a lot of high paid time wasters. For instance:
A software development firm does not need the wole chain of resposibility, you have programmers who get their tasks from their manager (or team lead or project lead), and report their status to them. The manager has enough time to manage several groups so there is no need for a manager for each project, otherwise the manager is wasting time checking on status too much, sending emails and in general dicking around or bugging the programmers. Since one manager can manage several teams, there is no need for a director, and no need for a VP of the department, those positions would equally waste time because they would have so few people to manage. The CTO is not needed because the managers can report straight to the CEO or president.
Overall, most of these positions are filled by highly paid slackers who feel they need to be doing something. Because they feel the need to “manage” something, they spend a lot of their time making things worse for the developers… the people that do most of the work but get paid considerably less. Most of these positions can be dropped or pay the people less to save a considerable amount of money. And if you want a better product, then pay the people who are doing more actual work. In an economy that is failing, it makes sense to drop the dead weight of most upper management to retain the producers of the companies product instead of reducing the producers and keeping the people that sit around making power point presentations.