It's the same for all kinds of work outside of academia.
I studied aerospace engineering and day-to-day it's exceedingly rare to need any math beyond basic trigonometry. 80% of the time it's useless meetings, emails, paperwork; only sometimes it's actually useful or fun. Some people study business for years and end up splitting their days between sitting in meetings and updating Gantt charts.
I suspect we were far too quick to get rid of secretaries as actual job-performing useful people rather than just status-signaling living perks. Also I think much of our workforce is wildly over-qualified and over-educated for what they actually do. I suspect there are more people than ever in the proverbial "mail room" that are plenty capable of rising to CEO or President of a region or division and doing a fine job without taking time and money to qualify for then attain an MBA at a top school, but we just don't really do that anymore. 500 people with the education and smarts, given a tiny amount of coaching, to do jobs two notches up the "ladder" for every such position that exists, but several HBS grads applied so we're taking one of them anyway.
I agree completely. I miss having a Department Administrative Assistant who was expert at the things I shouldn't need to be expert at. Like "I need to go to San Francisco next month; please take care of my travel arrangements." Or, "how do you use this Excel feature I never heard of and will never need to use again?"
Our AA saved us countless thousands of hours each year. She was worth her weight in platinum.
I studied aerospace engineering and day-to-day it's exceedingly rare to need any math beyond basic trigonometry. 80% of the time it's useless meetings, emails, paperwork; only sometimes it's actually useful or fun. Some people study business for years and end up splitting their days between sitting in meetings and updating Gantt charts.
That's just how work is.