Middle management
The inevitable consequence of scale; when your organisation passes the fulcrum between arsehole risk and tedium risk. It is an event horizon from which there is no return; a kind of Schwarzschild radius of bureaucracy. The thing is you can always find and get rid of — or at least deal with — an arsehole: the more people in your organisation the easier it is to do. But bureaucracy is a type of entropy; it is a point of flat, tepid equilibrium to which dead organisms converge. It is sticky. Once you have appointed a director of human resources, you are stuck with an HR department until the organisation dies: there is no personnel manager who will ever tell accept one it not needed; and it will can only grow: it will develop “competencies”: it will institute performance appraisal systems; create then outsource and manage talent acquisition and retention programmes; it will develop future leadership courses and will appoint itself as sole competence for [[environmental and social governance[[ and diversity and inclusion, to which the remainder of the organisation is thereafter accountable.
There is an argument that the moment your organisation is big enough to need a chief operating officer, and not just a head of operations, is the unequivocal point at which your organisation has maximised its growth, maximised its return, and commenced the slow, steady, comforting decline into entropy and death.