Keith Power

The new organisational chart went up on a Tuesday. Twenty-three boxes, cleaner reporting lines, three fewer layers between the shop floor and the board. The CFO had modelled it for six weeks. The logic was airtight; cost synergies, faster decision-making, a structure built for where the business was going rather than where it had been. By Thursday, the best engineer on the team had updated her CV. Nobody had done anything wrong, exactly. The structure made sense. The targets were rational....

I've stood on both sides of the bed. The one where I redrew someone's role and called it evolution, and watched them hear it along with everyone else. And years before, the one where my own role got redrawn two floors above me, in a meeting at a hotel I found out about from a calendar invite sent at 4.58pm for 9am the next morning. Both times, the bed was already built. The measuring came after. There's an old Greek story about a man called Procrustes who kept an inn on the road to Athens. He...

There's a video doing the rounds at the moment listing eleven "laws of the universe". Most of them I recognised immediately - from boardrooms in Warsaw, factory floors in China, and one memorable budget meeting in Amsterdam where three of them were operating simultaneously. The Greeks had gods for these things. We have eponymous laws named after economists and engineers. Same instinct, which is to give the pattern a name, and suddenly you can see it coming. Here are the ten that have earned...