Part of the reason modern corporate bureaucracies are so bloated and complicated is to reduce the personal risk to executives by muddying the apparent decision-making process at the top. Executives can make it look like they're people who execute complicated processes rather than decision-makers.
They end up taking credit when things go well, and they might look bad when things go poorly, but they essentially never get held criminally liable. Nice work if you can get it.
That’s a very one dimensional view. Bureaucracy exists to standardize control and improve consistency.
Think of a group of friends who go out for dinner. When the group grows, you generally need to set rules to avoid folks stuffing on tips or itemizing their bill to save a buck.
In this case, the friends at the table receive their bill from the top bureaucrat rather than directly. The bureaucrat tells them what they owe. It's more than what the bill calls for, but if they don't like it, they can go to another table where there is another top bureaucrat running the same scheme (more or less).
Usually when a group grows to a certain size, somebody will decide that rather than chipping in $30, because they "just had a salad", they'll toss in $12.95 for the salad, skip tax and tip and disappear.
Interesting. In Poland, and most EU places I've been to, the prices in restaurants and stores are almost universally gross, to make it easier for the buyer to know how much they'll pay.
I think how it goes is you collect the money. The other diners include tips and tend to round up. You take their tips and use it to pay your own bill. The waiter/restaurant lose their tips, your friends lose face and are tricked out of they're generosity, you get food for no money.
I am fascinated by the way "fitness landscapes" manifest in companies OUTSIDE the financial fitness of the company's trade. People often act like trade fitness is the only realm where we compete in capitalism, but there are so many more.
Moat fitness for a company doesn't benefit their trade at all. Customers don't benefit when you kill a competitor, but you do.
Similarly PowerPoint doesn't benefit the customer or the business. It's a tool for employee theater, using it makes employees appear less fit to be fired.
And I like your point that unaccountability fitness is also an existential competition for executives.
I wish there were a big list of these for me to ponder.
In my mind/experience structuring a short PowerPoint deck, the much-dreaded bullet points included, is a clarifying exercise for both presenter and audience if done right. Properly done it’s pretty much an outline for an essay.
Difference what powerpoint allows you to do and what you can do with a static PDF on the projector. The extra that powerpoint offers you is virtually useless; a bunch of flash with little substance. Hardly any justification for its existence.
This becomes more stark when you compare powerpoint with another part of Microsoft Office: Excel. Excel is actually amazing software. Innumerable small businesses are basically run through Excel. Excel is truly user empowering software that lets lay-people exploit the power of their computer to solve real problem.
Compared to Excel, powerpoint is just sad. In theory it keeps people in the audience of any presentation awake, but in reality it fails at even that. Excel empowers users to solve problems, while powerpoint is little more than an emotional crutch for people who are nervous in front of crowds.
The problem with powerpoint is it doesn't give people leverage, which is to say it doesn't make poor presenters better at presenting. I've never even seen evidence of it making good presenters better at presenting.
I've seen it a couple different ways. When a supervisor asks a subordinate to produce a powerpoint that the supervisor will edit/present to higher-ups, it generally looks as you describe. When a team leader produces a set of slides for their team, it's not so transparently theatric.
They end up taking credit when things go well, and they might look bad when things go poorly, but they essentially never get held criminally liable. Nice work if you can get it.