Mediocrity Machinery

I spent thirty-one years as a forensic accountant, which is to say I spent thirty-one years arriving after the fact. Somebody would telephone — a chairman, a receiver, once a nervous head of a pension fund — and by the time they did, the money was gone and the meeting that lost it was a year in the past. I came with a laptop and a box of files and reconstructed, from the paper, who had decided what, and when, and who had paid for it. That was the work. It sounds forensic and grand. Mostly it was reading, and the reading taught me one thing so thoroughly that I have spent this book trying to say it plainly.

In a failing organisation, the money and the blame travel in opposite directions. Follow both, patiently, and they bring you to the same person: the one who kept the upside and signed for none of the downside. Almost always the same kind of person. Almost never the same trick twice. I expected, when I started, to spend my career catching fraud. Fraud turned out to be the rare case. The ordinary case — the man who games the number promoted over the woman who does the work — broke no law at all. It was not a bug in the system. It was the system, working as built.

This book exists because I could never, while I was working, answer the question that the whole thirty-one years kept asking. I could always tell you who won. The files told me that. What they would not tell me, and what I never had time to work out because the next wreck was always waiting, was why the thing had been built so that they would. Why does an organisation, staffed by ordinary and mostly decent people, reliably hand its authority to exactly the people who should be nowhere near it? That is the question I retired with, and this book is the answer, written after, by a man who is finally not too late.

There are a great many books about mediocrity, decline, and the failure of institutions, and I have read enough of them to know what I did not want to write. I did not want to write the book that tells you the system is rigged and you are right to be angry, and then stops, because being told you are right to be angry changes nothing. And I did not want to write the book that tells you the fault is yours, that you have not optimised your morning or built your brand or hustled hard enough, because that is the machine’s favourite outcome — a workforce busy blaming itself will never look at the structure. There was a gap between those two books, and it is the gap where the actual mechanism lives, and no one seemed to want to stand in it and name the thing. So I have.