Got My Black Belt in 'Bloated Bureacracy'

Seems like the larger a company gets and/or the more involved with federal regulations it gets, the more that company buys into certain ideas: 

• The cure for anything is a regulation, a new process rule, or a new standard.  The problem isn't that people aren't thinking for themselves; the problem is that they are doing entirely too much thinking for themselves. 
• The key to competitiveness is really optimization, not innovation.  That's why it's important to reward and recognize (and build whole hierarchies for) for optimizing (or really, the gesture of optimizing).   
• Better to automate "employee development" as much as possible. Personal mentorship is overrated, and only works if you actually encourage leadership anyway.  
• We can replace actual leadership with aphorisms about leadership.
• We can replace actual accountability with slogans about accountability.
• You can promote ethical behavior by coercing employees to sign documents averring they intend to behave ethically.  

Et cetera.

One of the effects on engineering (assuming that a big company has such a division) is that a company will expect their engineers to feel empowered to control his process [don't be dismayed is this sounds like gibberish--it is gibberish] while choosing their tools for them, both intellectual tools and instrumental tools.

The "leadership" in big companies tend to see nothing wrong with this.  (Until recently, Google may have been an exception.) They absolutely don't see where the conflict lies.  Big corporations nowadays tend to appoint short-sighted optimization junkies (i.e. lean process black belts [more gibberish]) out of the manufacturing area.  You see, in engineering we work with ideas and, so the story goes, don't actually make anything.

What good are ideas anyway?