Bulldozer00's Blog

Every non-trivially sized profit-making organization has a number of approvers and approvees. For approvees to be enabled to do anything of significance like, uh, create products and respond to customers, they need the blessing of one or more approvers. As the graph below implies, it’s the “or more” word duo in the previous sentence that has an ominous connotation.

As the AAR in a group of people organized for a purpose increases, the org’s CPERF will start declining at some point in time. At a mystical value of “K”, the point of no return is reached and it’s all down hill from there. As the K threshold is exceeded, the maze of approver signatures that an approvee needs to navigate becomes untenable and the responsiveness of the “system” goes down the crapper. Even worse, the lower class approvee subgroup soon jettisons its sense of initiative and only assaults the approver fortress when a high ranking approver him/herself forces the action.

In clueless corpricracies, no one diligently watches over the AAR and prevents it from exceeding K. Quite the contrary, approvers love to hire more approvers because they have much in common with them and they love to have other approvers report to them – so they can approve the underling approver’s future requests for approval.

Approve, approve, approve your request, gently up the chain.
Sourly, sourly, sourly, sourly, work is but a drain.