What happened to the middle?

We live in a society that worships excess and lionizes those who achieve it with near-total disregard for how they did it, yet marginalizes dedicated effort and success of the plodder. This is a form of social dissonance that has become the new normal. Everyone knows that not everyone can be the winner - that was the whole point of the middle class; of large corporations; of the real working man or woman.

Being average was just that - average. Statistically, by definition, that's what most people are. So how is it that we've become completely disenchanted with anything so pedestrian as being average? When did winning at all costs become an imperative; ethics, kindness, and personal integrity be damned? And when did we decide that if you were among the unfortunate masses of averageness, you would be doomed to a stagnant job in a stalled career, with zero prospects of advancement, no salary increases at all, and the constant cloud of being laid off - possibly for good - looming ever overhead?

It's interesting that companies are scrambling to keep up with technology, citing the importance of being innovative with their products and services, while they are ignoring or laying off the very employees who are best positioned to help them do it: middle aged, stalled middle managers. Instead they look to their twenty-something or thirty-something rising star MBAs, who often have little or no business experience outside the company they hired into right out of grad school, and even less life experience. Meanwhile a fifty-something middle manager with twenty or thirty years of life and work under his belt is toiling away in some corner, hoping his job isn't outsourced or turned over to some new-hire half his age as a way of saving the company a few bucks.

The missing piece, it seems to me, is that companies talk a lot about the need to be innovative and creative, and how much they value that "out of the box" thinking we hear so much about. Yet if you look at the people charged with doing the work where that sort of thinking would be the most valuable, they are often completely ill-equipped. Young, ambitious, socially adept MBAs are also often linear thinking. Focused sometimes to the point of narrow mindedness, these are conservative achievers who's very success is a function of methodical dot connecting, not quantum leaps of imagination.

What's needed is a way of defining both a company's creative needs from a business standpoint, and the employees with the requisite background, talent and skills to fulfill them. And then add to that a recognition and rewards system that values true innovation and creativity, regardless of where it comes from in ther enterprise.

What would have to change in order for such a system to exist in a large, mature company?