I work for a government research lab. Our business model is that we don't receive government-budgeted money, we actually sell our services to other parts of the government. So in effect we have a bunch of researchers and engineers who theoretically report to "management", but actually report to a local program manager, who reports to an external sponsor.

We had an official manager, a "branch head", who was worse than incompetent. He couldn't find his butt with both hands, but he also thought he was God's gift to management, and would forcefully and emphatically make bad decision after bad decision.

Eventually, he had screwed up the group's major program so thoroughly it looked like a sure fire failure, and he found another job, and didn't bother to tell anyone; he just stopped showing up for work one day.

The level of management above him had bigger problems to deal with than replacing him, so they made sure we had a competent secretary and left us alone for two and a half years. It turned out to be arguably the most productive period of my professional life. My buddy and I took over business development. THe team turned the big project around and made it a rousing success, and grew the funding from it by two orders of magnitude.

The point being: there's bad management, that acts randomly or not at all; and then there's really bad management, which takes up your days with constantly changing orders, fixing relationships with customers or sponsors that they've screwed up, and levying time-taxes in the form of training, reports, and morale boosting exercises.

If given a choice between bad management and really bad management, pick bad management.

Fifteen years later, my buddy runs the place and I'm the senior scientist.