CONCEPT
Mintzberg's Law
The structural principle — named in this volume — that the number of interruptions a manager faces is proportional to the number of tools available for generating communication, and that the equilibrium point of any organizational system is overload.
Every communication technology in the history of management was introduced with the promise of saving the manager time. Every one of them increased the total communication load. The letter, the telephone, the fax, email, instant messaging, video conferencing — each tool delivered its promised efficiency at the level of the individual task and produced, at the level of the total system, more communication to process. The pattern is not coincidence. It is a structural law: when the cost of initiating a communication drops, the volume of communication rises, because communications that would not have been worth the old cost are now worth the new one. The manager, sitting at the nexus of the organization's information flows, absorbs the increase. The law has no natural limit. It operates until structure intervenes, or until the manager breaks.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The law's mechanism is recursive. Each new tool does not merely add a channel;