Meddling Middle Management

Originally Published in the London Paper on 27th April 2009 as 'The Middle Men Caused This Mess'

As I travelled to work one morning in a crammed tube carriage with my head wedged into the armpit of a man I was sure I recognised from Channel Five's The World's Sweatiest Man I glumly reflected on my situation and realised that we were squashed together because our middle managers insisted we all start work at the same time, and we were stuck in a tunnel because TFL management had once again failed to prevent delays from occurring. But as I thought about it more I came to a startling conclusion: far from simply being an irritation as we go about our working lives, middle management are in fact responsible for virtually everything wrong with the world today.

To illustrate this, consider the following examples: first, there's the breakdown in law and order, which has largely come about because police officers have become so bogged down by quotas and paperwork set by managers that they no longer have time to chase criminals other than ones who can be easily convicted, meaning that muggers go free whilst prisons fill up with those insane criminal geniuses who put the wrong kind of plastics in their recycling bags. Then there's the economic crisis, which is usually blamed on bankers until you remember that it was triggered by the collapse in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and that came about because estate agents ran out of financially reliable people to sell mortgages to so started lending to inbred yokels in order to meet the never-ending targets set by their managers. The crisis then spread when middle managers across the world reacted with their traditional herd mentality: instead of devising original, long-term solutions to the problem they simply made people redundant so it looked like they were doing something.

It's the same if you look at any other situation, like how the NHS became more concerned with chasing targets than actually curing people, which raises an important question: why is it that the only people who can't see that middle managers do very little except obsess over irrelevant statistics and pointless rules, are the board of directors, the only ones who can do anything about them? Well, unfortunately I didn't have time to think of an explanation: when I got to work it was 9.01 so I had to spend the next two hours in a disciplinary meeting and then write a 10,000 word report on my unacceptable lateness...