Middle management ouija
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Office anthropology™
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The curious void at the center whence the profound daftness of most management conviction comes.
Who is it? Whose bright idea was it, exactly, to oblige the staff to tilt at all these windmills?
It is not the CEO’s: she floats above the fray, above the messy operational layer. She could care not a row of buttons about the federation of employees at all, much less the management information and statistics they generate, as long as they are generating enough cash or, failing that, good works, to justify her salary.
Nor will any of functionaries nominally in charge of the workstream own it. When quizzed on the topic, every one will instantly agree that, to take a random example, the 365 performance appraisal system is from its foundations up a nonce; it achieves nothing, wastes time, encourages bad behaviour and fosters resentment, rancour and demotivation. The more literate ones will even cite the passage from HBR in 1975 that established this beyond all reason.
But while none can be found with a single word to say for such a silly idea, all will be certain that someone else does. Someone way above their pay grade — perhaps even a lot of someone elses, all at so great a remove from the commonplace experience that one can scarcely imagine who they might be, never mind whence comes their affection for such a roundly derided trope. Not one will speak for it. Not one. Yes still: as a collective, when they join hands and place them on the planchette, they watch in terrible, fearful admiration as it strides about the agenda signalling for all their several doubts that as a collective they are firmly resolved upon it, and therefore it must happen.
This is the middle management ouija board: really just a special case of a general emergent phenomenon we will call ouija politics.