The "coding wars" conducted in the mid-80s roped me into the process. "Peopleware" was the output. An excellent study in control of time, space, schedule and interruptions.
A fellow employee at PacBell made a bundle writing the Dilbert series. When I read his work, I could just about name the exact person who was the target of his parody.
I was once called to help another telecom company diagnose a serious problem with DNS and routers. The manager in charge of the effort was calling meetings with 30+ people on conference calls that droned on for 90 minutes. That was happening twice each week. He would extoll the virtues of achieving Six Sigma uptime. I had to point out that having 3 or 4 hour failures every other day was so far off from Six Sigma that he was just deluding himself. Finally, I excused myself from the daily meetings by asking him to tally the hourly compensation of each participant in his teleconference. It had not dawned on him that he was burning nearly $5,000 a week in useless conference calls.