I've found the best tactic, being an underling, is to perform the critical thinking for management and continuously improve your area of work.

As a funny and relevant anecdote, I used to process returns for an e-tailer and we had a particular type of refurb product that had a different part numbers on the box, in the firmware, and on the back tag. One day when I had the shop running full bore, I stopped for a few hours while the boss was out, grabbed a piece of paper, then spent some time in a thought experiment reverse-engineering the manufacturers supply chain to find out why. I discovered they had specs for these devices for a particular market, models a through z, and wanted to refurb to those specs to maximize profits. We got the cobbled together unique items that met no spec. I went to the manufacturers website, pulled up a list of PN's by model series, and plug and chugged until I got a valid warranty on every unit with 3 different PN's.

We also had a lot of mis-shipped, mis-picked, mis-recieved, and mis-advertised product. I asked the guy building the SKU's and Ad's for a spec sheet and then grabbed a factory service manual, and by my logs, discovered the issue was they didn't have the right ports on the side listed. The guy doing the SKU's made a change in how he advertised product, the throughput of devices coming through my shop dropped 80% within 3 weeks. I then had time to do things like assemble reciepts for a dozen AV Head units, find and send skids of them to an ASP, get them repaired and sent back, and restocked. Then we discovered we had someone stealing product. All of those fixes resulted in about $400k a year in savings for a $20 million a year company.

How did the CFO Find out about all this? We were selling to a liquidator anything I couldn't fix. They gave us 55c on the dollar of book value when I started, then 35c, then 25c, then 15c, then 5c. Finally nobody would take the garbage I was producing; literally if I had one liquid damaged item I'd use the parts to repair anything and everything else I could and I even did crazy things like using lego's to replace screwable-pegs inside of TV's using 2-part epoxy. So one day about a year after I started the CFO wanders down to the warehouse to see what's going on, and finds 15 skids of absolute garbage.

He then turns to my boss, the warehouse operations manager\account manager, and begins yelling "WHAT THE !@!@# ARE YOU DOING? WHY HASN'T THIS BEEN SOLD? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LIQUIDATOR!" and on and on and on. Apparently, nobody in corporate had performed any quantitative analysis. I had with a 200 meg excel 2003 document that would tell me what was coming in and how much it was.

I was saving him $400k a year. The cheapskate gave me a buck an hour raise for the effort, what a crok. They kept me around as the company shrunk from 200 employee's to 20 and went through bankruptcy. On the other end they were going to use my refurb shop since that was the only profitable side of the org entertainingly enough. I eventually left the place entirely.

The problem in America is that there's a boat-load of executive managers who have no critical thinking skills themselves, so their employee's see that fact, and see decisions are made subjectively or arbitrarily, and they are demotivated or as I call it, they catch "IDon'tGiveAShazbotItus". Lots of people catch the terminal version of that disease; doesn't matter where they go, they will never give a shazbot because they've been lied to so many times. You just cannot work with someone who has no critical thinking skills. There's no striving for continuous improvement and no rewards for it either. My entire career has been about doing bad things to computer and even worse things to executives; I have lost count of the number of people I've gotten fired, including executives.

After-all, if some schmuck with 1 IT certification in a warehouse can save you $400k a year at a 20 million a year company, and the CFO doesn't notice where it's coming from. That's either incompetence or abuse.