The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [38]
And I meant it.
But I also feel that the geometrically elegant machinery of the organization should not get in the way of the human creativity and productivity of individuals.
Personality—personal creativity—personal feelings—personal emotional commitment—personal imagination—there has to be room for these ineffable qualities in every job throughout an organization.
Leaders of complex organizations walk a fine line. They are not running a playroom. There must be rules and routines in every business to maintain the proper rhythm in everything. Over time, however, it seems that inevitably the rules and routines become more important than the ends they were designed to serve. The rules and routines become rigid, obsolete rituals and obstacles to the positive energy of the system.
The bureaucrats who control these rituals guard them with their lives because any change undermines their own power or authority. Gradually the bureaucrats themselves simply can and often do become a major impediment to progress of any kind and guarantee failure.
And do they keep busy! They churn out internal reports and memos. They cover their backsides with trails of thousands of e-mails and memos in the file. They go home at night complaining of how hard they work and in reality no single productive event has taken place all day. In such an enterprise failure is certain. According to the paper industry a few years ago, more than five hundred billion copies are made on office copy machines in the United States every year. And regarding last year’s copy-machine output, the experts are still counting. What on earth is being copied by whom to whom about what? I thought e-mail would eliminate all the paper flow.
(Look at what Xerox really started!)
Having spent my very early years around my father’s cattle business, it was clear that if you kept the right mix of male and female animals you would end up with a lot more animals. Bureaucracies multiply in the same way. Here’s how it works: You put a manager in place and within eighteen months he or she has an assistant. The assistant becomes a junior manager and guess what? Another assistant. The beat goes on.
There are layers upon layers of people, yet when a customer calls, nobody’s home. They are all in meetings. These meetings generate more paperwork, more e-mails, more calls, more meetings. In fact, most often there are even meetings to plan meetings. Meetings are the religious services of a great bureaucracy and the bureaucrats are fervently religious.
In my days at the Coca-Cola Foods Division in Houston, we didn’t have much of a bureaucracy. We were a young company created by the merger of Duncan Foods and Minute Maid. Charles Duncan, who led the unit, was a tough, smart, frugal entrepreneur of Scottish roots. He abhorred bureaucracy and did everything to keep it under control. At the Foods Division we did not have five layers of management between the janitor and the president. We moved quickly and efficiently, and, I might add, profitably.
Later, Charles became president of The Coca-Cola Company and subsequently a cabinet officer in the Carter administration. When he asked me to join him in Atlanta in the U.S. soft drink operation he warned me that significant changes were needed to streamline the large, decades-old system at Coca-Cola headquarters. He was right.
Shortly after I arrived and discovered that the big Coca-Cola bureaucracy had reduced Florence to tears over those unobtainable pencils, I began to learn another lesson about a large bureaucracy: They never say no. They just don’t do what you want when you want.
After I had settled into the U.S.A. headquarters building I happened to notice that the small carpet in one of the elevators was tired and frayed. So I asked Florence to call the maintenance