Reminds me about how yall had "no idea" that you had banned benchmarking. Remarkable how much leaders can not know about their company's operations!
Oh please. These are large corporations, I would honestly be flabbergasted if leadership knew every mundane detail. Particularly in the benchmarking issue you noted, it's pretty easy to understand how that could have been added as legal boilerplate, but just went too far.
Decisions individuals make in large organisations are, on average, downstream of institutional culture, so if a large organisation is responsible for a lot of bad decisions then the leaders are responsible for the culture which made those decisions seem reasonable.
…On a public message board and seems interested in figuring out what is or isn’t happening.
It's possible to be thoughtful and introspective, and try to learn about the things you don't know, but still fail to learn literally everything. We're only human.
This is really naive. Every layer of indirection misses out on details, esp in an organization (public, private, gov, even at team levels).
Surely you understand this basic concept?
Therefore it's completely implausible that even one word written there hasn't been discussed with C-level staff.
Saying the opposite is just throwing PR smoke grenades in the hope some naive people will believe that kind show.
The fish always stinks from the head. (That's why "plausible deniability" is of so great importance to those people, btw).
I think this is just proof that you are not familiar with how C-level responsibilities work at large corporations.
There's an entire wikipedia article dedicated to that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability