The Peter Principle
Formulated by Lawrence J. Peter basicly breaks down into this one simple axiom.

    " A manager will inevitably be promoted past the level of his own competence."

( i hope i'm not mis-quoting this.)

What this means is that there is a very good chance that the person who is issuing orders to you has no real idea of what he's doing or what it's like out in the field.

What do you do when the captian of the vessel freaks out in the face of danger? What do you do when the Time-motion managers give you an impossible task that has to be completed in an impossible amount of time? What do you do when the boss orders you to market unsellable merchandise? What do you do when the head of the lab is so consumed by his own research that nobody can get a chance to talk to him about funding for their own projects? What do you do when the Men in white order you to infiltrate doissetep?

I'll tell you what you do. You act against orders or without them and pray god that you succeed. Hell ,even if you do succeed you may get chewed out and marked as a troublemaker by your incompetent boss. And you can be sure of this. No matter how messed up or oblivious an incompetent manager is, they allways have an unerring sense of people who could take their job away from them.

    "why am I doing this? I got real tired of coming up with last minute solutions to impossible fucking problems create by other fucking people!" -Tommy lee jones,"Under Seige"