Every corporation needs a Marie Kondo

The antidote for bureaucratic creep is an annual spring cleaning to prune long-winded reports, time-sucking meetings, and value-destroying managers.

Adrian Wooldridge Spring is the season for thorough cleaning. Throw away the year's accumulated junk. Eliminate the mess. Tidy the cupboards. The house will not only look better for it; the inhabitants will get a new bounce in their step.

The ritual has different rhythms in different parts of the world - in Japan, for example, "big cleaning" is done in late December.

Consultants have also added a new rigour to the process. The Japanese cleaning guru Marie Kondo has created a multinational company selling "the life-changing magic that comes from tidying up". The Swedish cleaning guru Margareta Magnusson extols the virtues of a "death cleaning" that leaves your children with less to go through when you die.

But the principle is the same everywhere. Junk accumulates. We need to make regular efforts to keep it under control. Organisations are no less in need of spring cleaning. Clutter is as natural to organisational life as it is to domestic life. Managerial hierarchies lengthen. Chief officers multiply and their support staff with them - chief diversity officers, chief compliance officers, chief sustainability officers, chief digital officers and many more, all with their egos and entourages.

Meetings multiply. Memos bloviate. Forms thicken. Professor Gary Hamel and Dr Michele Zanini conducted an online survey in 2019 of 7,000 Harvard Business Review readers as part of their project on bureaucracy creep. The average respondent worked for an organisation with six or more levels. In large organisations (with more than 5,000 employees) there were eight levels above front-line workers. Employees said that they spent an average of 27 per cent of their time on bureaucratic chores, such as writing reports or documenting compliance.