Traditionally, a degree of dissociation from direct experience has characterized large corporations simply because of their size.

In almost any large organization, the higher we look on the ladder, the more dependent people are on information from indirect sources: what their staffs tell them;  what’s said at meetings, conferences, seminars and presentations;  what’s written in reports and studies and analyses and white papers;  what consultants find; what the increasingly influential business press reports.

Unsurprisingly, the people tasked with serving up the official reality of businesses have ways of arranging it to meet their own needs. Thus, when the operative reality is presented by internal sources, problems have a curious way of disappearing, except those for which somebody safely outside the reporting chain is to blame.  On the other hand, if the information comes from external sources like consultants, quasi-mystical problems like "paradigm shift" have a way of assuming surreal proportions.

The cumulative result of all this information interpretation and "styling" is that at the uppermost reaches of the corporate hierarchy, direct and reliable knowledge of what’s going on can be in short supply.