Leadership Quote by Norman Ralph Augustine

Augustine’s line lands like a compliment to “process” until you notice the blade: it’s a joke about institutional self-sabotage dressed up as managerial common sense. The phrasing “a sufficient number” mimics the cool, quantitative voice of bureaucratic planning, as if catastrophe were something you can engineer with the same rigor as a budget forecast. That’s the gag. He treats disaster as a deliverable, a KPI you can guarantee if you just stack enough supervision, approvals, and committees between a problem and the person who could actually solve it.

The subtext is less “managers are bad” than “systems love protecting themselves.” Each extra layer is sold as risk mitigation, but it often functions as risk diffusion: no one owns the decision, so the decision calcifies. Bad outcomes become oddly inevitable not because nobody is smart, but because the organization is optimized for defensibility over clarity. When everyone is accountable, no one is responsible.

Context matters: Augustine isn’t a novelist sniping from the sidelines; he’s associated with the aerospace-and-defense world where complexity, procurement politics, and fear of failure can metastasize into ritualized oversight. In high-stakes industries, layers get added in the name of safety and compliance, yet the accumulation can create new failure modes: slowed feedback, watered-down expertise, and a bias toward what can be justified on paper rather than what works in reality. The line endures because it names a modern anxiety: we keep adding managers to control uncertainty, then act surprised when the controls become the crisis.