For typical american manufacturing companies

There probably are some very good technical people. 

Management usually comes from sales and application people.  Many of them likes to make simple things complicated.  Manufactuer management level is way too big.  High level management usually has a background on Finance and Accounting.

Many of those companies would have serious issues after one to two successful products (one or two years later).  Sadly, Finance people tend to be very short sighted when it comes to engineering.  They tend to respond to technical trends slowly and wrongly.

A good example is CISCO.  I heard several of their top technical talents just couldn't bear with those management and decided to build a pure "engineering" company. So far, they have been doing pretty good.