Management: The Sisyphean Fight Against Entropy Growth

Sisyphus is a figure in ancient Greek mythology, condemned to eternal toil for offending the gods. He was forced to push a massive boulder to the summit of Mount Olympus, only for the stone to roll back down every time it neared the peak. Trapped in an endless, repetitive cycle of futile labor, he endured perpetual hardship. This seemingly futile fate serves as a perfect metaphor for the essence of modern organizational management: fundamentally, management is an ongoing, Sisyphean struggle against the inherent entropy growth of all systems.

The law of entropy growth, namely the second law of thermodynamics, states that the disorder (entropy) of an isolated system spontaneously increases over time, eventually reaching a heat death state of maximum entropy and equilibrium. In What Is Life?, quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger put forward the definitive assertion that “life feeds on negative entropy”. The fundamental distinction between living systems and inanimate systems lies in the ability to proactively perform work to counteract spontaneous entropy growth and sustain systemic order. This law applies universally to all complex systems: an untended room will naturally fall into disorder, still hot water will gradually equalize with ambient temperature, and unattended electronic systems will suffer performance degradation and operational lag over time. Without active external intervention, all systems inevitably evolve toward chaos, disorganization, homogenization and decline — a fundamental rule that governs the development of commercial organizations, teams and even individuals.

The ultimate goal of management is not to build static, eternal order, but to sustain the dynamic order of an organization through continuous, repetitive and seemingly futile proactive efforts amid the irreversible entropy growth of systems. This defines the core essence of its Sisyphean nature. In corporate operations, business processes optimized today may generate new adaptation problems next month as business boundaries expand; organizational cultural consensus established this month may dissolve due to personnel turnover by quarter-end; rule systems built in one year often evolve into path-dependency shackles hindering business innovation within one to two years. The inescapable fate of managers is to keep working in a recurring cycle of spontaneous chaos, active governance, emerging disorder and iterative optimization. This represents both the professional value of management and its inherent limitations. Once managers cease proactive intervention, organizations will slide into systematic collapse — a decline rarely caused by external competition, but by internal dissipation. The process is gradual, covert, and carries the fatalistic tone of a classical tragedy.

A large number of corporate managers hold typical cognitive misunderstandings regarding entropy growth. They equate trivial busyness with effective management and regard internal coordination friction as valid operational output. Some managers maintain a grueling daily schedule of 16 working hours, handling over 200 emails and attending more than eight internal meetings per day, yet can only witness continuous declines in organizational efficiency. This is a classic case of “tactical diligence covering strategic laziness”. Much like a person in tailored luxury attire infested with hidden lice, superficial prosperity cannot conceal the collapse of internal systems.

Organizational entropy growth can be quantitatively measured through four core indicators:

Meeting Entropy

The time spent on meetings is significantly negatively correlated with the quality of organizational decision-making. When senior executives spend over 15 hours in weekly meetings while core strategic decisions still rely on subjective experience and unilateral judgment from top management, the organization falls into a vicious cycle of substituting in-depth thinking with procedural discussions and covering substantive disagreements with superficial consensus. Every meeting without clear conclusions results in ineffective dissipation of organizational energy.

Process Entropy

The core value of process design is to reduce internal organizational transaction costs. When routine reimbursement requires seven approval signatures and new project initiation demands confirmation from five cross-departmental authorities, original processes devolve into a “Berlin Wall of organization” that stifles efficiency. Rigid systems and processes essentially raise transaction costs for innovation and severely undermine an organization’s dynamic adaptability.

Talent Entropy

This can be measured by the ratio of internal promotion rate to the survival rate of externally recruited senior talents. When core positions rely entirely on external recruitment and externally hired executives stay in role for less than 18 months on average, the organization loses its self-sustaining internal talent cultivation capability. In the long run, this leads to adverse selection and continuous competency degradation among core teams.

Information Entropy

The most prevalent and concealed form of entropy growth, measured by the distortion and delay rate of information transmission. When over 30% of strategic information is distorted during delivery from top management to frontline teams, and frontline market feedback takes more than 30 days to reach decision-makers, the organizational information transmission chain is severely blocked, resulting in constant mismatches between strategy and execution.

To address the above entropy growth issues, proactive managerial intervention is required to achieve entropy reduction, with a three-dimensional counteraction system as follows:

1. First, build an open system. Organizations must break closed-loop operations and counteract static entropy accumulation through the flow of personnel, information and resources. Huawei’s zig-zag cadre rotation mechanism and ByteDance’s management philosophy of “Context not Control” essentially combat organizational rigidity via factor mobility and offset static sedimentation through dynamic adjustment. Meanwhile, decision-making chains must be streamlined. Most reversible operational decisions do not require multi-level approval. Empowering frontline teams with market-facing decision rights is the core solution to curb meeting entropy.
2. Second, implement structural process simplification. Process optimization requires structural restructuring through radical streamlining, rather than superficial subtraction that may inadvertently strengthen centralization. The core approach is to divide large organizations into autonomous units with independent closed-loop business capabilities and eliminate all redundant processes that serve only managerial authority with no substantive business value. Amazon’s “two-pizza team” principle serves as a typical practice: each independent business team is kept small enough to be fed by two pizzas, ensuring maximum flexibility in decision-making and execution.
3. Third, advance information democratization. The fundamental cure for information entropy is to flatten transmission hierarchies and enable efficient information flow. Although Tesla’s direct CEO reporting mechanism for engineers is extreme, it fully demonstrates the significant value of information democratization in boosting decision efficiency. Removing unnecessary intermediate transmission layers minimizes information distortion and delay.

Organizational entropy growth is an inevitable law of complex system evolution. The boulder pushed to the summit will always roll down, and established order will always descend into disorder. This is not tragedy, but the inherent fate of management.

Nevertheless, managers fall into two distinct categories. Some complain endlessly during the repetitive toil, viewing management as meaningless drudgery; others optimize their approach amid cyclic governance and turn the fight against entropy into rhythmic, progressive work.

Organizational entropy growth can never be completely eliminated, but enterprises can adopt a proactive governance posture to slow entropy accumulation and extend the lifecycle boundary of the organization.