Nazi ball bearing factory management failure

Told as the United Technologies VP of manufacturing's parable about how management overhead inflates to fill available space. Origin story attributed to a colonel running an underground Hitler-era ball-bearing plant.

This breaks the train of thought on steel, but it's a good story. Back in the early days of the LGO [Leaders for Global Operations] program, 25 years ago, I went down to United Technologies to meet with them. There was a guy who was vice president of manufacturing, and he had been vice president of research at United Technologies. Pratt and Whitney, United Technologies — they were a big research-driven company. But he had switched from research to vice president of operations because, as he said, if this company is going to survive, it's not going to be on research. It's going to be on making things better. He decided he was going to go where the real problems of the company were.