[Captain Midnight]

Remember that each large organization generally has units that focus on something in particular. For a firearms manufacturer, there might be "Small Arms", "Missiles", and "Heavy Weapons". Skills that are highly specialized within one area may have little to no application in another -- if you ask a project manager who spent years working on making rifles more reliable to solve a problem with warhead fragmentation for a man-portable anti-aircraft missile, he might not be good at solving it. This often leads to people becoming experts at their own specialty, but not knowing much about the other branches of the company. They may have CONTACTS over there, and be able to go talk to someone if there's a problem, but they may not have the background to handle it on their own.

These areas are often called "divisions" or "departments", and they frequently function like smaller companies in their own right. Division heads will have staff that assists them, and while they won't have a lot of direct authority over functions that belong to the overarching organization, they will often have a significant amount of informal influence, especially if their division is doing well, or if they've been careful to have other folks owing them favors. Some organizations are organized functionally (divisions are made up of employees working on the same sort of job), or geographically (the Texas group), or even some combination. It's very possible to report to different people on different subjects -- you might be part of a group that reports to an R&D head in Munich, but is also working on a project for the Brazilian Navy that has a local project manager in Sao Paolo.

It's possible for employees to be working on multiple projects more or less at the same time, depending on the nature of the work. I work for a civil engineering firm, and our engineers are quite often covering three or four projects in a given week. They might come up with a design, submit it to the client for review, and then go work on something else while the client thinks about it for a while. The client might ask for a meeting next week, and in the meantime, they might be doing some research into subjects the client is interested in while also juggling some work for another client. They log their time spent on each job, and we bill according to that time, generally.

An executive usually has a passable grasp of at least one area within the corporation, and some vague familiarity with the others, but they're generally picked because they have a vision for where they'd like the organization to go. They may have just done a great job selling what someone else wants to hear, but that's beside the point. If you work closely with the broader operations of a large firm for a long time, and you demonstrate useful skills, you may very well be seen as a candidate for a higher position. The CEO will not generally be replaced by an outsider (although it's not impossible), but usually by someone from within; after all, boards want to choose from a known quantity if they decide to replace an executive, and who do they know better than the people who have been there for years?

One thing I haven't seen emphasized very much is the degree to which an executive will need to be in touch with the clients. He'll have to know them, and be able to convince them that his company can help them out with their perceived need. For H&K, they will certainly be tied into the military branches of most major nations, and looking for every opportunity to pitch their products. Performance is key, and you've got to keep those orders coming -- if sales are flat, then there's no added value, and the stock price starts dropping. That's also where the drive for enhanced cost control comes from; if you can't increase sales, you can cut costs to get improved profits.