Fifth law of worker entropy

From The Jolly Contrarian
Revision as of 22:01, 12 March 2020 by Amwelladmin (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary
The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™
Index — Click the ᐅ to expand:
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 Jolly Contrarian’s fifth law of worker entropy states that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of time, t, a worker spends on a task and its overall importance, i, to the organisation.

Examples

  • Human resources: The organisation will wrack itself for four months of the year crashing mainframe computer systems trying to get a performance appraisal system to work; enforcing its clear desk policy, by way of putative apology celebrating the existence of one half (only) of the population, formulating and updating its risk taxonomy and promoting an internal career fair, but expend exactly no energy promoting actual risk management or risk reduction.
  • Negotiation: A negotiator will spend literally days battling away on the precise waterfall of dispute fallbacks for a NAV trigger — never to be used once the agreement is signed, except to periodically waive triggers that will have inevitably been set too sensitively — but will agree a failure to pay event of default — the one realistic event ever needed — without her counterparty so much as pausing to for breath before moving onto the next item.

See also