Forking Work Simplification – Let's Bring Back Eisenhower's Process Improvement

Here's an online view of the original work being cited: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858047196617&se...

and the catalog record for it: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102942676

It's reasonable, but it belongs to the era when the world ran on tracks of printed paper.

A useful line for process improvement today - "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows." That was a Steve Jobs line that got lost somewhere.

Frustratingly little actual content in the article, but it links to a new-looking website that is WIP and mentions an original source document that is, frustratingly, only available for download in the US.

Archive.org has a copy, here - https://archive.org/details/worksimplificati00coxj

For a brief overview of work simplification and its history I would highly recommend this post - https://www.governance.fyi/p/process-and-performance-how-ame...

I don't know how they intend to implement these ideas if the article can't even give a high level summary of what they are.

I think the actual link is supposed to be this one, which appears in this submission directly adjacent to a newsletter signup, so it's very easy to miss: https://worksimplification.netlify.app/

No, please. Eisenhower Matrix, Scrum, Extreme Ownership and the like - all from the minds of military types, whose supposed valuable lessons from a completely different area of human activity (wars and the like) are supposed to be something we should admire and apply in the workplace, under the joint tagline of "Leadership". In fact, I´d argue that precisely the application of those principles in the last 20 years have contributed to worsening and making the today´s office work environment unnecessarily intense. Everyone has "leadership qualities" these days and is trying to exert "influence" - instead of actually doing some real work.

Germany’s bureaucracy is a beast—especially for non-Germans like me (originally Dutch). Everything’s wrapped in legalese, paper forms, snail mail, and it’s all in German. Locals don’t question it, and arguing won’t get you anywhere. But the upside? It’s predictable. If you figure out the system and plan well, things do work.

Setting up an UG (the “lightweight” GmbH, though not really light) was a trip. It’s less about simplicity and more about skipping the 25K capital requirement. The process involved notaries, banks, accountants, and multiple agencies. Classic chicken-and-egg problem: you need a bank account to register the company, and need the registration to open the account. The workaround? A weird notary ritual where you literally show them cash.

Costs add up quickly—expect a few thousand euros upfront and ~1500/year in running costs, even for a dormant UG. Mine’s three years old, has zero revenue, and owes me 6K. You don't quite need 25K upfront. But you do need some access to capital. If you want to be frugal, you basically cut out the accountant and deal with the tax office directly. I chickened out and pay my accountant to do that for me. I value my time too much.

I've went through the process twice over the past fifteen years. An absolute PITA but it's doable.

If I did it again now, I’d use an LLM. Bureaucracies are basically just predictable API calls made through forms. Perfect for agentic AIs. There are a lot of steps and each step is tedious (lots of form fields, lots of waiting for people to process these and get back to you) but fundamentally quite simple. Maybe don't let the LLM hallucinate your form input but do use them to pick apart any mail that comes in, translations of key stuff, summarizing the process, double checking things people tell you, composing emails, etc. LLMs speak legalese pretty well and are endlessly patient.

The way to fix this process would be to standardize and automate all the manual steps. Why is a notary involved? Because people use non standard contracts with special clauses. The whole point of standardization is to get rid of all the special clauses, the little exceptions to the norm, and all the other silliness. The chamber of commerce is essentially a database. The whole ritual of getting your company registered in Germany boils down to a months long ceremony to execute an FFing INSERT statement and receiving back a database id. Congratulations! Your company now exists. All the rest is ritualistic bullshit that needs to die.

There are some discussions about an EU Inc. That would be great. Doing business in Germany really sucks currently. This was a big theme during the last election round. So, it's not just my opinion. I'm not sure what Eisenhower did but as a battle hardened military person he'd be well familiar with bureaucracies getting in the way of winning a war.

In the famous words of despair.com, "Tradition: Just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not incredibly stupid.": https://despair.com/products/tradition?variant=2457305795

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