Forking Work Simplification – Let's Bring Back Eisenhower's Process Improvement | Hacker News Reader

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

governance.fyi

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.

It would still be useful for Germany then

I think paper is a good test for complexity: Never let administration become so overarching that you cannot do it with the same amount of people and purely based on paper.

Right. Amazon, run like Sears pre-computer.

FTFA:

> it centers on citizen experience rather than administrative convenience

There is not paper, real or implied, involved in that goal.

And yet we still enter zip code after the rest of the address.

Huh. In the UK we usually enter postcode plus house number and have the computer look up the rest of the address (even though that's a paid API).

A UK post code is much more specific than a five digit zip code which might be one reason why.

Good point, but because the postcode database was privatised it will always have to be a paid service which is why not everyone uses it.

It's still paid even if it's public. The difference is now the people who use it pay for it.

This sounds reasonable. However there was a study showing major economic benefits if was free. These benefits came from more people implementing it, time saved by all those additional users, removal of licensing hassle.

Also the entire database can be incorporated into things like FOSS map software, or free map data. Websites can have the DB stored locally so do not rely on an external API.

We would get more utility out of it that way.

We would also not have the extra cost from the profit made on selling the data.

I know what you mean, but it would also be of economic benefit if you worked for free and any downstream customers all got that discount of the profit you make from selling your time.

A lot of sites these days have some sort of live search functionality that apparently knows about all addresses. There, I can type in my house number and maybe the first three letters of my street name and it somehow manages to find me.

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

Actually, scratch that, the link I posted is to a master thesis.

Have you tried reaching out to the guy for a copy?

Yup, that’s what I did next.

Did he reply back with the book?

I actually asked the author of the original article, which was linked in the article you posted, and got no reply.

But I managed to track it down elsewhere. I've thrown it onto my static site, so that it's easy to get to. My understanding is that it's in the public domain, so this is fine. If I get told otherwise I'll take it down.

https://riazarbi.github.io/files/Work%20simplification%20as%...

Well, after all that, it turns out the netlify app linked in the post is a copy of the original PDF! So, if you care about the actual content, just go read that. The PDF does have some cool graphic design though.

I know I'm just talking to myself at this point, but I _finally_ get the meaning of the linked article title.

The netlify app is a fork, like a code fork, of the original document. Which is to say, they have taken the original work, transcribed it to a digital format, and will now evolve it.

I don't know if that just went way over my head or if it was not clearly communicated, but there you have it.

I think the bulk of the people gotten it

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.

Here is another article about Work Simplification (which was linked but apparently someone can't be bothered to click): https://www.statecapacitance.pub/p/eisenhowers-bureaucrats

Idea1: Selling simplification is more profitable than implementing it.

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

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 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/

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

I help people navigate German bureaucracy for a living.

The biggest issue in my opinion is unpredictability. Every state, city, office and case worker does things differently. They have different requirements, policies and timelines. My job is not to document the truth but the variance.

My favourite recent bit of German bureaucracy was the integration test to apply for citizenship. I had to apply for an in-person appointment. The appointment was to book a test date. The test is a 33-question, multiple choice test. Getting the appointment can take a few weeks. The test date is 1-4 weeks later. Grading the test takes up to 8 weeks.

All of that to answer 33 questions.

The word kafka-esque was inspired by German bureaucracy. Making an appointment to make an appointment sounds exactly like that.

I once queued in at the local council in Berlin for a guy that handed out numbers for the machine in the waiting room. When your name comes up, you go to the assigned room for whatever you needed (something related to my registration if I remember correctly). All the guy did was push a button and hand out a number. So you queue to start queuing. Very nice guy and friendly. But also one of the most pointless jobs I've ever seen.

Somebody later explained to me that they invented jobs like this to keep otherwise completely redundant former DDR civil servants in some kind of job. They had way too many of those and they were kind of very unemployable in a city with very high unemployment (at the time). It's literal busy work that they invented to avoid having to fire the person. Besides, being a civil servant is an iron clad job for life in Germany. So firing wasn't an option to begin with.

A German DOGE wouldn't be a bad thing at this point. Maybe do it without all the hyperbole and libertarianism. But the CDU that just won the election did actuall campaign on the notion of Germany being crippled by its own bureaucracy. Which of course the CDU helped create for the many decades they've been in power (almost on stop since WW II). The last four years were one of only two (I think) exceptions to that.

Damn, we have it good in France. It costs less than 10 euros to open a micro-company and you only need to have a separate account in your personnal bank (you dont need to open a pro account) . Of course its limited in term of revenue you can make with it but it erase totally the "I cant do this one shot consulting gig a friend ask me to do"

What GP outlined was opening up a limited liability company in Germany, which comes with more liability protections than alternative company types, but also more responsibilities, which if you offload them to e.g. an accountant results in a non-negligable baseline cost.

If you were to open a sole proprietorship ("Einzelunternehmen"), or even just a "Gewerbe" for side-hustles, you can also get things up in a quite lean way and with low overhead costs.

> it erase totally the "I cant do this one shot consulting gig a friend ask me to do"

At leas in Germany, I think the bigger (perceived) hurdle is that most employment contracts state that side-gigs need to be announced to the employer, and just going through those motions is too much of a hurdle.

In Germany, there is as well the Freiberufler status for one-off side gigs. I don't know all the details, but my wife used that for a one-off job.

In some countries you can buy an empty company which was created just to get you a headstart on the creation process. Wonder if that is a thing in Germany...

Yes, buying pre-founded companies is/was also a thing here.

I think in Berlin there was quite a demand for that in the ~2017 crypto wave, where a lot of companies were being founded and at the same time notaries/district courts were backlogged and the normal founding process could take a few months.

I doubt there is as much demand for it right now. I just founded a GmbH and the full process took 4 weeks (of that 1 day of active work). It would have been 2 weeks if I hadn't missed a letter regarding application fees, and it also helped a lot that I was flexible regarding notary appointments.

So with all of that, there is little value in using a pre-founded company, especially since you will very likely need a notary appointment anyways (for ownership transfer and/or adjusting the bylaws).

There are some gotchas, like how it can take a while (8 weeks for me last year) to get your tax number, and some (or perhaps most/all?) banks don't issue a credit card if your business account hasn't existed for at least six months or something. I can see how a startup not short on cash but in a hurry to start buying/selling could benefit from taking an existing company over.

Are you telling me that in Germany it's a viable business model to make a business creating and selling businesses?

Creating, operating, and selling shelf companies is probably viable in lots of countries. A quick search shows lots of providers in Germany.

Likely to tie in with a business that helps operate the bureaucracy for small companies in general. In the US, you usually see shelf company offerings along with registered agent and maybe some board meeting things; I'd assume similar elsewhere.

I had to dismiss multiple useless popups (like subscription asks) to read this article. Surely those are useless steps that could be simplified if the writer cared about the citizens/user experience like they say the govt should.

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.

“ instead of actually doing some real work.”

Doing real work is for suckers. Talking about it is where the real money is.

Sadly, you are absolutely spot on.

Or it may be the application of principles that are described or marketed as being these old principles, but are often just junk with a fake veneer.

These giant systems really are fascinating, although I'm glad I don't work in them. And I believe they were massively advanced during World War II. Because besides the obvious task of fighting a war, a lot of military work is logistics. No large scale operation can be accomplished without putting a lot of thought and work into it. A lot of what is required is sophisticated supply chain.

You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics. General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics. Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps)

You're right about everything, including the note on logistics. But workplaces should not be modelled after battlefields, that's my point.

The original implementation is different from what it's turned into. There was a heavy emphasis on listening to workers and understanding why each step of a process was important (or not) and making appropriate improvements. The top-down one-size-fits-all manager hellscape framework approach (scrum etc) is more a product of the Clinton era.

Well, scrum was invented by a Vietnam-war combat pilot (what the hell did he know about producing value as opposed to wasting value, for example by dropping ordinances).

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