Management Madness

In large organisations, it often seems that more time is spent in trying to manage things than in actually doing productive work. Moishe Lettvin provides a good example when he describes his time working on Microsoft’s Vista operating system. He worked on a team that was responsible, amongst other things, for the design and implementation of Vista’s shutdown menu. As he says, the implementation took a couple of hundred lines of code. But he found himself interacting with 42 other people in the attempt to design and implement the feature. Madness. It’s a miracle that Vista ever made it out of the doors of Microsoft at all.