Michael O'Hare: Giving Management a Bad Name: "My graduate school at UC Berkeley has raised some funds and we are embarking on a new building... (Live from Overpaid Administrator Land)
...This morning a group of staff and I met to kick off the programming process.... There is an office high up in our organization chart called “Space Management and Capital Programs”.... I would welcome guidance from such a unit such as “How to decide whether you want cubicles plus a lot of small conference rooms, or private offices” or “New options for classroom design: thinking outside the lecture hall box.” No such luck; instead we were provided this remarkable document... regulatory, not advisory... no-one was willing to put his or her name on such an ill-informed, incompetent exercise of mindless bureaucratic pound-foolishness.
The authors obviously hail from a ruthlessly hierarchical private sector culture, where the size of one’s workspace must precisely indicate one’s place in a pecking order. One would think the right question would be “how much value would an additional square foot of space for someone doing job X add to the organization”, but one would be wrong. Professors are all alike... and what bricks and mortar are for is to indicate precisely how much better and more important they are (50%) than than the staffer who manages their research funds or gets students enrolled in their courses.... All meetings are held in the office of the senior person attending, are populated in proportion to his rank, and in which peers never need to collaborate; don’t even ask about faculty meetings with student groups....
The rigidity of this absurd effort by central administration... and its insistence that we use the precious resource of physical space to pointlessly signal status are not... worst.... The worst part is its relentless, insistent, ignorance of the real benefit-cost facts that reasonable people would use to make decisions like, duh, “how big should whose office be?”... One meme constantly rolling through our discussions is that our senior administrators seem to be paid an awful lot, and there seem to be more and more of them.... I do not tolerate mindless disrespect for public officials and people who make organizations work, but a document like this... makes a prima facie case that at least some of those very well-paid senior administrators suck at what they do...
