ODE TO A BUREAUCRAT

What empowers the bureaucrats of the world?

In 1600, a battle held in the strategic mountain pass of Sekigahara decided the fate of Japan. Tokugawa Ieyasu was outnumbered, yet gained the upper hand after persuading several enemy commanders to join his ranks. The victory won him the position of shogun—supreme ruler of Japan. Under the dynasty he founded, which held power for more than 200 years, Japan was stable and culture flourished as never before. The samurai, warriors dedicated to protecting their noble master, fell from their elite status and found themselves bereft of masters and of war. They became governors, judges, tax collectors, police chiefs and clerks—servants of a bureaucracy that was a far cry from the world they knew and for which they had been lengthily trained. The adjustment was difficult, especially as it meant a loss of finances. For years, the samurai kept up the displays of loyalty to which they had been accustomed, avenging their masters and committing suicide over their graves. With time, however, they yielded to the shogun and shifted their loyalty to the state and its institutions. The only way to keep their heritage alive was to develop martial arts, which could not be put into practical use. It was during this time that discipline and obedience grew central to Japanese culture. This historical example illustrates how bureaucratic structures force individuals into modes of behavior that change everything they have been brought up on, and in many ways even their emotional makeup.

“There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem,” observed American writer Gore Vidal. Indeed, most bureaucrats are psychologically built differently from the rest of society. They draw their identity from the organization they serve—sometimes, at the cost of blurring their personal boundaries. A bureaucratic organization cannot permit its workers the freedom to evaluate what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is not. Consequently, bureaucrats are not influenced by an inner value system that guides their actions, and their professional compass functions separately from their emotional world. That is also why bureaucrats often cannot be swayed by considerations of goodness, fairness or justice. They go by the protocol or by the letter of the law. Discretion is not on their job description and is not part of the formula that ensures promotion. There is little reason to envy bureaucrats: many experience a crisis when required to replace their personal identity with that of the organization. They are frustrated by depending on their employer for their identity and by relinquishing discretion in general, and value judgements in particular. The bureaucrat is required to leave his feelings at home, in a world in which every human encounter generates expression of emotion.

I have met many bureaucrats throughout my career, yet almost every attempt to explain my position to them in my usual business format has met with abject failure. Eventually, I realized that bureaucrats are essentially different from business people and therefore guided by different considerations. Business cares about end results; bureaucracy cares about the process. If an entrepreneur is a person who can make the impossible possible, many bureaucrats have perfected the art of making the possible impossible.

Bureaucrats have nothing to gain and something to lose. Their wages do not motivate them to take unnecessary risks in decision-making, and bonuses for taking successful risks are a distant dream. They are primarily engaged with minimizing personal costs. A bureaucrat is like a weather vane when it comes to detecting the direction from which minimal danger blows. His behavior can only be altered by pointing out a greater risk in a different direction. Then, he may decide in favor of the applicant, whose request appears to entail less risk in the given situation.

A common tactic is threatening to sue for damages over delaying a decision. However, if you know the mind of a bureaucrat, you don’t need to go that far. A business acquaintance of mine once related how he had been questioned by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commision, the US financial regulator) as a witness in a case of the use of insider information by a third party. The SEC’s lawyer who questioned him, and who was eager to have his suspicions corroborated, kept repeating what the witness was saying, occasionally misquoting him, as part of the questioning technique. My acquaintance, tired of correcting him, decided to shift the power balance in the room by introducing a new risk. “If you don’t stop quoting me imprecisely, I will start speaking very slowly and you will be stuck in the office until after five.” The unpredicted risk worked like magic, and the questioning came to a quick end.