The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [37]
Why not?
She couldn’t get any pencils.
In the smaller, more unstructured operation at the Food Division in Houston if she wanted pencils she just walked down to the supply room at the end of the hall. In Atlanta, she had to fill out some requisition forms, she was told, but she didn’t have any requisition forms and as it was now late in the afternoon, the requisition form person had already left for the day. This was the last straw for Florence. She’d been fighting the headquarters bureaucracy for two whole days to get a copy machine set up, to get the phones hooked up, to get the stationery changed, to get a larger file cabinet—and so on and on until finally she snapped.
“I can’t get anything done,” she cried. “I can’t even get staples for the stapler that I bought!”
I sent her home and called my wife, Mickie, to tell her I couldn’t do any work that day, so we might as well have an early dinner and catch a movie.
If you want to get nothing done, make sure that administrative concerns take precedence over all others! Love your bureaucracy!
The word “bureaucracy” first popped up in French economic literature sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, from “bureau,” office, and “cratic,” rule. Many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century political scientists and sociologists debated the pros and cons of bureaucracies. There were many cons, as you might expect. The Scottish curmudgeon Thomas Carlyle called bureaucracy “the Continental nuisance.”
But there were those who recognized that bureaucracy was good, even necessary. Historically, it must have evolved quite logically from the heavy administrative requirements involved in carrying out any large enterprise.
In a primitive tribal society, we assume that leaders could simply come to the fore based on their own charismatic appeal. And much like Maori warriors, with enough fire in their eyes they could take charge as chieftains or warlords. However, as societies became more complex, charismatic leadership would not have been sufficient. Clearly, the Chinese could not have built their early empire, nor the Egyptians, nor the Romans without some form of bureaucratic organization. Even with slavery, brute force could not have attended to all the details.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the German sociologist Max Weber pointed out that in large social organizations over time, hierarchical orders of authority were formalized; written rules, specialized training, and, most important, offices with titles and defined functions came into being.
The inventions of mankind that seem the most remarkable to me are those that we simply take for granted because, now that we have them, they seem so obvious. Who, thousands of years ago, came up with the idea of money, for instance? What a great idea—to take little bits of something (silver, gold, shells, beads) and then trade them for tangible assets. (I have some more to say about money later on.)
To me, the idea of the office in a bureaucracy is similarly brilliant.
Weber viewed bureaucratic systems rather bleakly as efficient but impersonal robotic machines. But in our modern society, with our many, many complex institutions, we would come to a grinding halt without such offices. In government and in every large business organization, we have office after office—the vice president of sales, the manager of distribution, the manager of human resources—all neatly laid out on a chart. Each office can be occupied over time by a series of people who carry out the duties of that particular office in order to attain the ongoing goals of the company. It’s beautiful. The people change, but the function of the offices remains constant. We must have that capability in order to maintain continuity of authority.
I always said that any authority or influence I may have had in the world