The oil/electronics manufacturing industry, by nature is volatile and this occasionally leads to less than efficient allocation of resources/people/time due to changing objectives. The company structure is very laterally organized and therefore opportunity for advancement is sometimes slow or lacking. Often there seems to be a lack of defined overall goals and steps to measure the progress towards achieving them. This creates an environment where middle management isn't utilized to its greatest effect, i.e. fine-tuning the efforts of individual work-groups to support the efforts of other work-groups in the company.