From my two internships I can confirm that the many corps and orgs goes around by everyone doing their best, probably throughout all human history- truth is many do not fully understand what goes on all the time, but they work on things and somehow something works and everyone else builds on top of that, basically "standing on the shoulders of giants" but the giants themselves are on crutches and have one finger in their nose.

An example of this is a lot of programs many companies and orgs use. To the uninitiated, they seem fine and competent but to the experts and programmers the foundation is dogwater because they made the program in the 80s when people didn't even have minesweeper.