WaMu has about 55,000 employees and only occasionally offers up badly managed efforts to reduce this. And when they do, they’re back up at 55,000 a year later. The problems are three-fold: 1) the need by managers to find work for everyone on their team rather than figure out how many people they need to do a given amount of work (hence why half the people there seem to be project managers or do some sort of reporting), 2) the concept of empire building—the more people one has reporting to them (esp. the more of those direct reports with Blackberries), the more powerful one is, and 3) the inability to pare down its operations to those few basic and simple tasks needed to “extend financial accommodation from point A to point B). The use of consultants, daily reorgs, and the belief that Blackberries actually improve efficiency when they clearly destroy it don’t help either. Down with anyone whose title begins with a C or an E!