Do you find cyclomatic complexity a useful measure

1. Yes. Your first example has a decision point and your second does not, so the first has a higher CC.
2. Yes-maybe, your first example has multiple decision points and thus a higher CC. (See below for explanation.)
3. Yes-maybe. Obviously they have the same number of decision points, but there are different ways to calculate CC, which means ...

... if your company is measuring CC in a specific way, then you need to become familiar with that method (hopefully they are using tools to do this). There are different ways to calculate CC for different situations (case statements, Boolean operators, etc.), but you should get the same kind of information from the metric no matter what convention you use.

The bigger problem is what others have mentioned, that your company seems to be focusing more on CC than on the code behind it. In general, sure, below 5 is great, below 10 is good, below 20 is okay, 21 to 50 should be a warning sign, and above 50 should be a big warning sign, but those are guides, not absolute rules. You should probably examine the code in a procedure that has a CC above 50 to ensure it isn't just a huge heap of code, but maybe there is a specific reason why the procedure is written that way, and it's not feasible (for any number of reasons) to refactor it.

If you use tools to refactor your code to reduce CC, make sure you understand what the tools are doing, and that they're not simply shifting one problem to another place. Ultimately, you want your code to have few defects, to work properly, and to be relatively easy to maintain. If that code also has a low CC, good for it. If your code meets these criteria and has a CC above 10, maybe it's time to sit down with whatever management you can and defend your code (and perhaps get them to examine their policy).

Cyclomatic complexity usually does not apply across function call boundaries, but is an intra-function metric. Hence, virtual calls do not count any more than non-virtual, static function calls.