h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Nowhere is that so evident than in large corporations. The more money they generate, the larger they can grow; the larger they grow, the more money they need to generate to be self-sustaining. The problem with accelerated continual growth, though, is it frequently leads to waste due to things "falling through the cracks." This is embodied in the time wasted, the resources gone fallow, the money squandered because there is not enough oversight in all the little corners of the organization to prevent the losses.

Looking at it from the viewpoint of the guys "down in the trenches," it's easy to understand how they can form a Trickle-Down Theory of Economics that looks something like this:

Poor or Lack of Planning
breeds
Confusion in Work
breeds
Wasted Time
breeds
Money

When employees work for an hourly wage, a company can mismanage its processes any damn way it wants. The more fractured the management and supervisory staff, the more chance for delays, the better the opportunities for workers to raise legitimate safety concerns, and the greater likelihood of calling a stop to a procedure that's in error. The more complicated and constricting the processes are, the more chance those same rules will prevent accomplishing the work required.

For instance, if NaJoPoMo was a project with a scheduled start date and a defined deadline and the Company (HooToo) contracted a variety of skilled Craftsmen (all of us) to perform the work (writing Journal Entries every day for the month of November), then they Company started levying a bunch of rules upon the Craftsmen, requiring them to only generate and post a new individual Journal Entry within a prescribed 24-hour period (not before, not after), and then allowed their contractors to have free rein to only perform their duties whenever their other commitments didn't impede them from working the Company (much like how we have our Real Life responsibilities we need to balance against our promise to this project), the success or failure of the whole project and the bonuses stipulated by the Company from the outset (books and trinkets, in this case) would be jeopardized by certain Craftsmen who didn't keep track of the deadlines and only managed to "squeeze in under the wire" some of their obligations to the whole project by finishing a particular Journal Entry right at the last minute and submitting it for the Company review at the last second. That would be how this one played out for me…

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