The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [39]
A year later when I became president of the division I mentioned that the carpet in the elevator hadn’t been replaced yet. I was told it’s on the agenda right now. When I moved from Coca-Cola USA to the corporate offices two years later the carpet in the elevator had still not been replaced. The maintenance department never refused our request. I never heard a “no.” All we got, though, was no new carpet.
If you want to impede all real progress, make sure that administrative concerns take precedence over all others! Love your bureaucracy!
Every organization has choke points, another hallmark of an entrenched bureaucracy that no one, not even the top managers, is able to break through. And you dare not insult those keepers of the choke points or else they will drag their feet even more slowly in providing whatever service it is they are to supply. Some years ago when copy centers became the latest office innovation and all copies were made on a few centralized large copying machines, massive choke points began to impede efficient operations. In many cases, the person in charge of the process frequently became a stubborn tyrant, consumed with his or her own power and authority. Even to get the simplest, most routine order executed required endless flattery.
Similar situations exist in every department in a bureaucracy and these internal barons cannot be crossed. Going over the head of someone who runs the travel department or the office supply department in charge of paper clips will often result in vindictive behavior toward you later on. The result is that getting any service from them, even a ticket or a paper clip, becomes a personal battle. Not too long ago, in a column on such office tyrants, Wall Street Journal writer Jared Sandberg wrote of a particularly obstructive purchasing agent who demanded a requisition form for even the smallest item. When a secretary came to him because she had run out of requisition forms he told her: “Fill out a requisition form.”
A sclerotic bureaucracy is frustrating because entrenched bureaucrats do little productive work themselves, but they clearly also prevent others from doing their work. Bureaucrats are so busy protecting their own turf that they will actually block the flow of essential information and subvert any opportunity for success in order to enhance their own.
The old law of the business jungle, “Your success is my failure,” is fully operational in a heavily layered bureaucracy. You can almost smell the blood. Rivalry is a part of human nature. But more often, the more petty the issues and the more inconsequential the rivalry, the more counterproductive the struggle.
The whole institution is a Gulliver tied down by hundreds of Lilliputians. It’s been said there is a new game called Bureaucracy. Everybody stands in a circle and the first person to do anything loses!
If you want to lose some of your best talent, make sure that administrative concerns take precedence over all others! Love your bureaucracy!
Human resource experts have told me that when you lose a middle-level manager, the cost of finding, attracting, and training a replacement will be at least two times the former employee’s average annual salary. Clearly, it pays to hang on to good people. During my years at The Coca-Cola Company, we fought to keep our most talented people, as did most companies. In a far-flung global enterprise, some people inevitably will be lured away. But if we learned that an employee we valued was dissatisfied we would move quickly to find out why and try to turn the situation around. Sometimes the information did not arrive soon enough, and the person was lost before anything could be done. Sometimes nothing could be done.
But I learned from the experience that one of the reasons often given for an employee’s leaving was not money, not the difficulty