brian's blog

From BusinessWeek, The Real Reasons You're Working So Hard:

You and a colleague in another part of the company may dream up a great idea for a new product -- but it takes months to get approvals from your boss, his boss, and their boss. Or the corporate bigwigs order you to join a taskforce that is supposed to promote collaboration and innovation -- but it ends up taking a big chunk of your time. And no matter how many layers of management were supposed to be taken out, there always seem to be more people on the e-mail distribution lists.

There's much more to the article than the above, but the above struck me. It's impossible to eliminate all possible redundancies and inefficiencies in a large company, and employees certainly can't spend huge chunks of their time on projects that don't have support from management. But most of my frustrations at work stem from the types of problems listed above.

The problems are clear, but what's the solution? What's even possible? More individual leeway in making decisions? Disable email access from 11am to 4pm? Allow Google-style "free time?"

Or are these problems just inevitable in a large company? Are they not even problems?