These aren’t mere gripes. They are evidence of a fundamental disconnect in incentives. Employees in market-facing roles know that if they fail to satisfy user needs, they’ll get fired by their customers. Corporate staffers, by contrast, can only be fired by their overlords, so that’s where their loyalties lie. Internal administrators suffer little or no penalty when they inflate costs, offer substandard services, or insist on compliance at any cost.

Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes. Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.

5. Addition Sickness: Putting the Subtraction Mindset to Work

“A study of 137 U.S. public universities by economist Robert E. Martin found that, in 1987, there was a one-to-one ratio of administrators to tenure-track faculty. By 2008, there were two administrators for every faculty member. Robert explained, “Those who hold the purse strings have a natural incentive to hire more employees like themselves.” A 2021 study of 117 universities in the United Kingdom by Alison Wolf and Andrew Jenkins found that such administrative bloat keeps getting worse—and growth is especially rampant among the most highly paid managers, professionals, and executives. Recent studies in the United States, Germany, France, and Australia show that their universities suffer from the same disease. Alison Wolf concludes that administrators are added at a higher rate, in part, because there is “far less scrutiny of nonacademic than academic hiring.” All those administrators aren’t just expensive. Like most of us, they feel the need to justify their existence. Many of the organizational changes they understand, value, and implement entail heaping rules, processes, forms, training, and metrics on faculty, fellow administrators, and students. Timothy Devinney, chair of international business at Alliance Manchester Business School, says, as a result, “Universities are basically strangling the capabilities of the people within them.” The road to such hell is paved with good intentions—administrators who add friction believe they are improving universities.

Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes. Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.

Endings are tougher and take longer than we think. No matter how unhappy we may be in a job, most of us continue to revisit the possibility of making it work because the present role is necessarily tied to a possible self—an image, outdated though it may be, of whom we once wanted to become. June’s academic identity, for example, kept reasserting itself throughout the entire transition period, even after she had handed in her resignation. “My department was family, a dysfunctional one,” June says, “but one I was an intimate part of, one I joined at age seventeen when I went to college.” For her, leaving academia meant not just giving up a long-term career objective but also an image of who she should become that important people in her life, including her mentor, harbored. The emotions she felt when she found the pile of draft articles that would have assured her professorial future show just how much giving up a possible self—even one that has become a burden or lost its appeal—marks a real loss.