Mission-focused staff get displaced by those devoted to the organization itself.
Pournelle's iron law: in any bureaucracy, those devoted to the organisation itself come to control it and to promote their own kind. Graeber's iron law of liberalism is the left's mirror of this.
In practice
- A campaigning charity's most effective organiser is passed over for a director who has run the grants process for eleven years.
- A software company's product decisions migrate from engineers to a programme office, and each transfer was a reasonable response to a coordination problem.