Laws of worker entropy
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Towards a scientific understanding of the commercial universe:
The JC’s first law of worker entropy (also known as the “meeting paradox”):
- (i) The probability of a meeting starting on time can never be 100%;
- (ii) As the number of scheduled participants increases, that probability tends to zero.
- (iii) The more participants there are the more retarded the starting time (and content) of the meeting will be.
This is true of any meeting containing more than one person. (A single-person meeting, of course, ought not, in a sensible mind, count, at least since Otto Büchstein asserted its incoherence through his maxim “convenimus ergo es”).
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.
The JC’s third law of worker entropy, also known as “the law of inevitable tedium”: There is a 100% correlation between
- (i) activities that, however important they might seem, in fact have no value, and
- (ii) activities that are tedious.
All other things being equal, if an activity is tedious, it is wasteful. If it is wasteful, you shouldn’t do it. The JC’s fourth law of worker entropy: The very fact of an escalation—the very interposition of an approval step, in itself, in which one part of the meatware shunts a problem to another part of the meatware—causes more in aggregate delay, confusion, aggravation and second-order bureaucracy than is ever solved by the resolution it promises to deliver.
See also
- Boredom heat-death of the universe
- Tedium