Seventeenth law of worker entropy
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Office anthropology™
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The JC’s seventeenth law of worker entropy describes the rate of growth of tedium in an inflating system:
“The intrinsic tedium acting on any process, organisation or ecosystem is proportional to the square of the number of individuals comprising that system.”
The seventeenth law was discovered by Austrian polymath Otto Büchstein who, while endeavouring to explain some apparent anomalies with the fundamental law of conservation of tedium under conditions of change management that appeared to challenge the law of conservation of tedium stumbled upon a whole new fundamental law of worker entropy.
Büchstein first formulated the argument, curiously, in the form of a comic opera. This did not help with its early credibility among lexophysicists, who take themselves rather seriously.
Büchstein found, just as J. M. F. Biggs had hypothesised a couple of decades earlier, that the law of conservation of tedium is more profoundly affected than had previously been thought, by the size of a given system. The amount of tedium in a given system, Büchstein showed, is a square of the number of agents comprising that system.
“How is it,” he wondered, “that we can flawlessly implement our doctrinally immaculate, McKinsey-approved, outsourcing, right-sizing, offshoring and juniorising programs relocate unglamorous but critical operational functions to low-cost jurisdictions with no modern slavery regulations, or automating software-as-a-service providers, but the process, which we only changed because it was an expensive and dysfunctional mess, has become even more dysfunctional and much more expensive?”
The answer was that, while the purpose, output and total utility of the system remained constant, the size, complexity and “agent quotient” of the system — the total number of rent-seekers it will sustain without collapsing in on itself — had dramatically increased.