And never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by hundreds of individually intelligent people optimizing for their own short term benefit (ie career growth).

We see this in the software industry all the time. Large organizations act inefficiently or against their own interests because large organizations don't actually have consciousness, instead their decisions emerge from the sum of a lot of little decisions and actions, each of which might be individually reasonable.

As an aside, I believe that's how large organizations can come to be evil even if the vast majority of members are not evil.