Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy – In any large organization, the faction devoted to protecting the bureaucracy itself eventually gains control, sidelining the people focused on the mission.
Parkinson’s Law – “Work expands to fill the time (and resources) available.” Bureaucracies therefore grow even when workloads don’t.
Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (the “bike-shed effect”) – Committees lavish discussion on low-cost, low-stakes items while rubber-stamping the truly important, expensive ones.
The Peter Principle – Employees are promoted until they reach a job they can’t do well, leaving layers of managers stuck at their level of incompetence.
The Dilbert Principle – A satirical corollary to Peter: organizations sometimes park their least-competent people in management so they can’t damage real work.
Brooks’s Law – “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later,” because coordination overhead outpaces the extra effort—classic bureaucratic staffing trap.
Putt’s Law (and Corollary) – In technical hierarchies, those who understand technology don’t manage it, and those who manage don’t understand it.
Goodhart’s Law – When a quantitative measure becomes a performance target, it stops being a good measure; people game the metric instead.
Campbell’s Law – The heavier the reliance on quantitative indicators for decision-making, the more those indicators invite corruption and distortion.
Brandolini’s Law (the Bull—- Asymmetry Principle) – It takes an order of magnitude more effort to refute nonsense than to produce it—red tape weaponized.
Sayre’s Law – “The intensity of feeling in academic (or any) politics is inversely proportional to the stakes involved,” explaining vicious turf wars over minor issues.
Merton’s Law of Unintended Consequences – Complex interventions create side-effects nobody foresaw; bureaucratic fixes often spawn fresh problems instead of solving the original one.
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