What is the most inefficient thing you have ever seen in a company?

"Let's spend 15 minutes of a sprint planning meeting with 8 people talking about who will handle the ticket to make an already-understood 2 line change" is a regular favorite, but small overall.

I've seen developers wait for months for the paperwork to complete for them to take the special IT-security training, after which their accounts were finally given the rights needed to install the development environment on their workstations.

After an acquisition of our company, various groups of people had secret meetings about how to integrate ours company parts (engineering, marketing, sales) into their processes. Meanwhile we were told everything would be business as usual. Then some of us started getting invited to these secret groups so we could help with the transition plans. Half the folks acquired started quitting shortly after the plans started leaking out because of the incompetence in the plans.

tldr: Poor communication and secrets