# The Failings of Bureaucracy in a modern workforce - In summary bureaucracy … - Grants excessive credence to the views of precedent-bound leaders - ==(stymies [[Dynamic Capabilities]])== - Discourages rebellious thinking - Stymies creativity and improvisation - Creates long lags between sense and respond - Dynamic capabilities again - Calcifies organizational structures - Blinds silo-dwelling leaders to new opportunities - Suboptimizes trade-offs - Frustrates the rapid redeployment of resources - Discourages risk taking - Politicizes decision making - Unethical decision making- Cronyism - Creates long and tortuous approval pathways - Misaligns power and leadership capability ✅ - Caps opportunities for individual contribution - Undermines frontline accountability - Systematically devalues originality ([Location 1161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=1161)) ### Bureaucracy stymies [[Dynamic Capabilities]] - The power to initiate change is vested in a few senior leaders. There is a tendancy towards denial, arrogance, and [[Nostalgia]]. ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=212)). This links to [[Strategic planning must enable an organisation's response to emergent conditions.]] - Bureaucratic structures seem to be a choke point. ### Bureaucracy stymies Productivity and Creativity/ innovation - Also described as inflexible and apathetic, hidebound, repressive, fainthearted, diffident, dogmatic, inertial, incremental, uninspiring. - Do they have to be these things? What causes this? - Are these symptoms of bureaucracy, or something else? - There are moral arguments, including employee wages and maximising human productivity and humanity (We are most alive when we’re doing something that enchants us. Sadly, for most people, that something isn’t found at work. ([Location 651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=651))) - Max Weber, the pioneering German sociologist wrote: > “Bureaucracy develops more perfectly the more it is ‘dehumanized,’ the more it succeeds in eliminating all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation.” ([Location 711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=711)) - The engagement deficit isn’t about what people do at work, but how they’re managed. ([Location 681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=681)). Managers are no more engaged than their subordinates. ([Location 685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=685)) - many still buy into the bureaucratic conceit that the thinkers are at the top and the doers at the bottom. ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=1100)) ### Creates Poor Performance / disengagement - Economists estimate that between 1972–2014 more than 75 percent of US industries became more concentrated. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=263)). See [[Structure - Conduct - Performance]] for concentration ratios. - The average age of a company on the S&P 500 Index has fallen from sixty years in the 1950s to less than twenty years currently ([Location 551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=551)) - Repeated studies have shown that the correlation between CEO pay and relative share performance is negligible or slightly negative. ([Location 897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=897)) - In a 2016 Ernst & Young global survey, fewer than half of the ten thousand employees surveyed said they had a “great deal of trust” in their colleagues or the company overall.6 ([Location 1830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=1830)) - Bureaucracies are - suboptimal - formal organisations have trade offs between building deep expertise and serving diverse customer groups. Or it can be focussed on customers, but less able to exploit upstream efficiencies. Other trade-offs are consistency vs new products. Organisations, when they reorganise, trade one set of problems for another. - parochial - "its not my job description". Overly circumscribed. The future seldom lines up with the org chart. Parochialism not only makes new opportunities hard to spot, but hard to resource - byzantine - every new challenge spawns a new fiefdom. Also adds to parochial. Means turf battles. - Inflexible. Formal structures are hard to change. Rapid change requires rapid change. "We either change the structures or we change the structures". - we need organisations that, like the biosphere, the internet, or a vibrant city, are more emergent than engineered. ([Location 952](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=952)) - - the structures and rituals of bureaucracy constitute a set of social norms which, like all norms, are difficult to challenge without looking like a buffoon. ([Location 1193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B9HFSHX&location=1193))