Work for a while in a corporate environment and you get a first hand view of what the cartoon above talks of.
I remember the time we did a “corporate review” in my last place of work. The outcome, handed down by HR in consultation with I don’t know how many “outside consultants”, was: You (me, that is) are overburdened; you have too many people reporting to you.
Which is the first time I ever heard that reporters were a burden to an editor. (Around that time, my then global manager, in the midst of her quarterly appraisals, wrote in the “negatives” column that I was spending too much time editing copy, and that this was diluting my effectiveness as a manager. For sheer what-the-fuckery…)
Then it got really bizarre: the recommendation I had to implement was that no person could have more than four people reporting to him/her. I had a staff of 34 (all editorial); I had to break them up into groups of four plus one manager (which meant finding “portfolios” for each group, as opposed to the commonsensical practice that editors work on the site they are part of).
I ended up with 7 managers, one of whom had one less than the “approved” quota of subordinates. I submitted an “org-chart” on these lines. After review, the verdict came back: You still have seven people reporting to you, and that is “three more than optimum”.
At which point I threw my hands up and went, okay, you get your fancy consultants to solve this for me. After a wait of a couple of weeks, they came back with the “solution”: Four of the seven managers would report to one manager, who in turn would report to me; the other three managers would report directly to me.
It all looked wonderful on paper. In practice, not so much. If I wanted one of the editors in, say, the news section to do something, I was supposed to talk to the super-manager, under whom the news manager fell on the org chart. This super manager would pass the word on to the news manager who would… you get the idea?
(I solved the problem in the time-honored way of newsrooms everywhere: if I wanted someone to do something, I just stood up and yelled out to whoever it was.)
I was reminded of this on reading an absolutely hilarious story on the proposed revamp of England cricket following the World Cup debacle (If England keeps “revamping” itself each time it loses…). Here is what I gleaned, in helpful bullet-points:
- The ECB has a CEO and a COO, a chairman and a deputy chairman, and has now added a president to the ranks. Which of course was why they were dumped from the World Cup — they didn’t have a president
- It is now vetting candidates for the post of director of cricket, to replace the incumbent Paul Downton
- No one knows what Downton was actually doing and therefore what his replacement will do
- The director of cricket will, it appears, “create the right environment to achieve lasting success” (which in fact was the outgoing Paul Downton’s brief — but that didn’t turn out so well, says George Dobell)
- The bloke who is supposed to communicate with the media can’t talk too well, so the director will have to “communicate far better with the media”
No, wait, this is when it the story begins to get laugh-out-loud funny, with passages such as:
While the scope of Downton’s job specification was, on the surface, vast, to watch him in action was to see a man attempting to carve out a role for himself. There were already individuals with experience and knowledge of their positions appointed to every aspect of Downton’s remit, which left him wandering around the outfield at the time the toss was taken or sitting in selection meetings despite having no voice on the panel. He was, in short, an expensive white elephant kitted out in a blazer.
Downton’s tenure has in fact been rich in unintentional humor, if nothing else. Sample this from the Dobell story cited above:
To see Downton mingle with the England squad at the airport before this tour was to see the uncle nobody really remembers on the fringes of a family wedding. He has been irrelevant for some time. A decent, well-meaning man, no doubt, but utterly out of his depth in the world of modern, international cricket.
So anyway. How do you know an organization is sitting on a pile of currency? You watch the organizational chart — the bigger it is and the faster it grows particularly at the top, the more money there is to pay inflated salaries for doing nothing much of anything at all.
Seriously: Read this story, at least for a laugh.
And just in case you thought this was an ECB thing, check out Ayaz Memon’s detailing of the various committees the BCCI has put in place. There is, for instance, a “museum committee”, with 18 members.
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