By writing its own rules, this bureaucratic caste has seized control of day-to-day decisions from people who do the actual work

A ridiculously exaggerated position but one which also feels like it has obvious merit.  From We are experiencing an unusually high volume of bureaucracy by Rory Sutherland.

I have a hunch why people in late middle age are abandoning the workforce: their jobs, as they once knew them, no longer exist. I don’t mean that there is no longer pay for what they do; it’s simply that corporate bureaucracy has eliminated many of the perks which made work enjoyable in the first place.

A legal-financial-HR-procurement-managerial commissariat, by ratcheting itself ever deeper into organisations, has eliminated the patronage, autonomy and exercise of knowledge which once came hand-in-hand with professional ability. Regardless of your experience, your every action now requires approval from number- crunchers who understand nothing of your job, using only data and metrics they define. By writing its own rules, this bureaucratic caste has seized control of day-to-day decisions from people who do the actual work, effectively infantilising them.

The result is that jobs that used to feel like driving a car now feel like flying on a low-cost airline, where you are endlessly subject to petty rules and restrictions, or forced to undergo needless humiliations so some accountant can squeeze another three seats on the plane.

Fifty years ago, if you had a skill or wished to develop one, you implicitly joined a tribe. Your boss was someone better at your job than you were. It was far from perfect, but at the level of basic primatology, it worked. Look after your tribe and your tribe will look after you. Do your job well and you will rise in stature, do it badly and you’re out. Hospitals were run by doctors, newspapers by journalists, history faculties by academics, so your best career move was to be seen by your peer group as being good at the thing your organisation purported to do. In return you were assured of advancement and job security, which your boss had the power to bestow. Back then ‘Finance’ was called ‘Accounts’ and ‘HR’ was called ‘Personnel’. No one had an MBA.

Not any more. As a doctor, you may have been hired for your medical expertise by eminent practitioners, but you must defer to people with no medical knowledge at all. Foremen have been replaced by someone with an algorithm. It’s why all call centres ‘are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls recently’. Why? You’d think that, since the job of a business is to solve customers’ problems, investing in staff to answer the phone might be a good idea. But the commissariat define cost-saving as ‘value’ and answering the phone as ‘a cost’. Interestingly this caste never turns the same critical lens on themselves: ‘We are experiencing an unusually high level of needless bureaucracy, and have decided to downsize the HR department.’ Good luck waiting for that. Quis ipsos custodes custodiet?