"Every man's life, liberty and property are in danger when the Legislature is in session."

Daniel Webster

Perhaps everyone had simply taken too much comfort from the fact that the company's balance sheet had remained in balance right up to the bitter end. Although a few of the workers on the now defunct project had elected to retire, most were solidly established in positions of greater responsibility on the new government contract which had just been awarded to help write regulations which would in the future prohibit failures of the type which had occurred. The experience gained over the years in dealing with so many cantankerous problems had actually qualified many individuals for substantial promotions. It had, of course, become agonizingly clear that the difficulties of the past could not be permitted to recur, and in order to assure this, activity was carried out with a renewed frenzy, particularly by those on the government side, to write regulations which would preclude any such difficulties ever again.

The fallacy in using regulations to prevent problems is that if managers could ignore the old regulation they can ignore the new one, too. The following law provides the mathematical foundation of Lamennais' apothegm, which states, "Centralization breeds apoplexy at the center and anemia at the extremities." The apparently inherent tendency of some senior managers to draw unto themselves authority for making even minute decisions and then to seek to govern by fiat is a proven formula for disaster. It is equivalent to the...