Fifth law of worker entropy

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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, formulating and updating its risk taxonomy and promoting an internal career fair, but expend no energy promoting actual risk managemenbt 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

• First law of worker entropy
• Second law of worker entropy
• Third law of worker entropy
• Fourth law of worker entropy
• Sixth law of worker entropy