Sublime

‘In point of fact,’ resumed Sir James, not choosing to dwell on ‘fits’, ‘Brooke doesn’t mean badly by his tenants or any one else, but he has got that way of paring and clipping at expenses.’

Peter Drucker says one of the critical problems in the workplace today is that there is a lack of understanding between the employer and employee as to what the employee is to do.

Which brings us to our main idea – how both the pyramid and its lifecycle are animated. The dynamics are governed by the Newton’s Law of organizations: The Gervais Principle. The Gervais Principle and Its Consequences The Gervais Principle is this: Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing Losers into middle-managem

John Smith, U.S.A.” He went on to develop his view of himself in some detail: He is the man who doesn’t know much, nor thinks that he knows much. He starts out with certain ambitions but he gradually accumulates obligations as he goes along, and they continually increase. They begin with his inherited family, and grow with the family that results f

If he had to blame any one, it was necessary for him to move all the papers within his reach, or describe various diagrams with his stick, or make calculations with the odd money in his pocket, before he could begin; and he would rather do other men’s work than find fault with their doing. I fear he was a bad disciplinarian.

“Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.”

But academics are also reluctant bureaucrats, in the sense that even when “admin,” as it’s called, ends up becoming most of what a professor actually does, it is always treated as something tacked on—not what they are really qualified for, certainly, and not the work that defines who they really are.

The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy.

Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves—not unlike Soviet workers, actually—working forty- or even fifty-hour weeks on paper but effectively working fifteen hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent