I think about this a lot and to me, a large part of this is the fact that most tasks in a corporation need to be carried up and down the chain several times in order for them to actually get greenlit. At each stop, the person who wants the task to happen has to explain to someone who is hearing about it for the first time what needs doing and what they need. A giant game of telephone basically.

This makes it so that the boss of your boss only knows what your boss is telling him is happening. He doesn’t know what most of the actual work even is. And the CEO gets informed by the boss of your boss of your boss what the boss of your boss thinks is going on. So while the workers are in the trenches, making do with whatever the fuck the actual work is, some guy four or more steps removed from their reality decides how much budget they should get to do the work he doesn’t know shit about.

This is also why you can so easily pretend to do work in this system. If you can fool your boss, or ideally have several bosses you answer to, they won’t have time to talk to each other all the time. So if you got to do Four different tasks for four different bosses…you can tell all of them that it’s taking longer because of the other three tasks and goof off for half the day each day, deliver everything late and still get thanked for it.