In the 1970s I worked for a small (500 employees) engineering consulting company in rural Pennsylvania. The original founders were retired and their sons, along with other long time employees, ran the company. It was involved in major electric utility power generation construction projects and had a state of the art IT infrastructure and staff (including me). It took me about a year to figure out that hirings, promotions and salary increases, and any issue that required a decision was never resolved in a timely manner. There was always a logjam until the first week of the next month when, suddenly, all the issues were resolved, promotions announced, etc.
I was bitching about some IT issue with a 3rd party software vendor one day when one of the senior managers said he would discuss it at the prayer breakfast next week. He immediately realized he'd made a mistake, but with that clue I found out that the first Monday of every month the original founders, their sons, and most other senior managers held a "prayer breakfast". During this breakfast each attendee brought their list of outstanding management decisions and received direction from the retired founders and other attendees. It turned out that they all belonged to the same church and had been running the company this way since its inception 40 years ago.
No women or minority employees were invited to the prayer breakfast, regardless of the their formal position on the org chart.
I really don't think the folks that ran the company had evil intentions, but also had no clue about equal opportunity issues or any modern management practices.
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