Second law of worker entropy

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

The JC’s second law of worker entropy: The latent confusion entropy in a complex system increases geometrically with the size of that system. Once a system, or organisation, is over a certain size, its resting-state confusion and implicit mediocrity quotient will fall out of stable equilibrium, eventually leading to the implosion of the organisation or, if it is big enough, boredom heat death of the universe itself.

There is no formula for when or where this might happen because at that moment the JC was trying to make one up he was ambushed with an ambiguous request for KPIs by an officious management consultant. He pretended to be having Skype trouble but lost his train of thought and never quite recovered it.

Confusion entropy can be cured with alcohol, but there is a curious paradox, as overdoing the sauce (which, on a conference call, can be tremendously tempting) can itself lead to total collapse through the inebriation event horizon into a black hole of soul-crushing despair.

So it’s either crushing your soul into an infinitesimal point of space-time, or regressing to a sunless, tepid expanse having, in every direction except the one you want to go in, an infinite extension of ennui.

See also

• Laws of worker entropy
• Schwarzschild radius of alcohol consumption