Bulldozer00's Blog

The British created a civil service job in 1803 calling for a man to stand on the Cliffs of Dover. The man was supposed to ring a bell if he saw Napolean coming….. The job was abolished in 1945. – Robert Townsend.

The battle of Waterloo, in which Napolean’s army was routed, was fought in 1815. Thus, the series of dudes who stood guard for 130 years after the fall of the egotistical French emperor were busy doing nothing but pissing and pooping off the cliffs every few hours – and gettin’ paid for it.

In “Ackoff’s Best: His Classic Writings On Management“, uber systems thinker Russell Ackoff rails against bureaucracies:

A bureaucracy is an organization whose principle objective is to keep people busy doing nothing. They are preoccupied with what we call make-work…. The problem created by people who are busy doing nothing is that they frequently obstruct others who have real work to do. They impose unproductive requirements on others…. Bureaucracies obstruct development. They retard improvement of quality of life…. Bureaucrats want all parts of an organization to conform to one set of rules and regulations…. Conformity is treated as good in itself, an ultimate good. – Russell Ackoff

Mr. Ackoff not only rages against the machine, he advises on how to beat the system with a bevy of hilarious real-life examples in which individuals successfully “fought city hall” and won. He follows each ditty with a moral. Buy the book and read it for the delicious details of every battle.