I have my own term that dominates large hierarchies: the Middle Management Machiavelli. These people don't care about the organization, and they don't care abo

I have my own term that dominates large hierarchies: the Middle Management Machiavelli. These people don't care about the organization, and they don't care about producing things, or even doing their job. Their full time job is gaining power and climbing the ladder. Everyone is fighting for budget and headcount and appearances. And taking credit for things. I would say that there are three phases: 1) the creators/doers: the company aligns to being productive and successful with these people focused on whatever does that. 2) as it increases in size, upper management transitions from industry skills to managerial people. Thus Pournelle's second class comes to dominate. Here the company still may grow and managerial tricks like acquisitions and financial cookbooking will continue growth, but nothing revolutionary. The company begins to plateau. 3) with people settling into a more fixed reporting structure, now the machiavellis will begin to fight over internal territory, and since the top managers are just sociopaths themselves, they let it happen. The company becomes a cesspool of battlegrounds, and will begin to slowly rot. The only thing that saves companies these days is that the US economy is now structured around monopolies and cartels, so companies can obtain direct control and then establish barriers. But the net effect of all markets being cartel/monopoly dominated is that the lack of competition means companies fall into stage 3 more easily, but can't be displaced. So the entirety of the US is now all these cartel/monopolies weighing down the country as a whole, and it becomes overall more and more corrupt. What's the end state of this? Look at Russia.