A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

As you can imagine, we are exhausted here at Exothermic Press, having finally wrangled Mark Schwartz’s new book into the space between two covers. If you know Mr. Schwartz’s writing, you will not be surprised to hear that this book’s ideas kept expanding along all nine known dimensions of the universe (I speak of those posited by string theory), so this task required hearty geometric exertions. We had to cut the chapter on “Bureaucracy and Ballet” and an unfinished one on “Quantum Bureaucracy,” but perhaps they’ll turn up in a later book.

You will notice something new in this book comparari prioribus: I have done my best to annotate some of Schwartz’s more far-flung leaps of imagination to make sure they are accessible to those of us without philosophy degrees or who just want to get right to the meat of Schwartz’s ideas on how to endure the torments of bureaucracy and thrive despite them. Without wishing to spoil the ending, I can tell you that the alliance of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler proves a potent one.

The annotations seemed necessary because, as I pointed out in my conversations with Mr. Schwartz, few readers have as much as noticed his favorite devices in earlier books; to wit, the “fortune cookie” self-referential (he calls it recursive) footnote on page xviii of The Art of Business Value, or the dozen or so references to obscure types of pasta he employed in A Seat at the Table to avoid the IT cliché of “spaghetti code.” He responded as he usually does: with a giggle.

There are several things you should know before you enter the world of The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. The first is that you might be challenged to figure out what Mr. Schwartz really thinks of bureaucracy. We were when first we read the manuscript. At times, he seems almost to be arguing that bureaucracy is a good thing, which for a DevOps and Agile proponent seemed, frankly, mystifying. In other instances he speaks of its crushing soullessness, the burdens it placed in his way as he tried to reform government IT, and the alienation and hopelessness it engenders. So, I asked him. Here’s his response, verbatim:

You can’t fight bureaucracy if you see it as an existential condition, a nightmare, an agent of dread and loathing. It’s strange how viscerally people react to the mention of bureaucracy. The word is almost shorthand for evil, the way “Satan” might have been in the past. And no one thinks of themselves as a bureaucrat—it’s always the person in the next cubicle over. Now bureaucracy is, of course, evil, hey, but let’s laugh rather than tremble before it.

In other words, I still don’t know whether Mr. Schwartz stands pro or con, or what he wishes us to think.

Another thing to keep in mind as you make your way through The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy is that in Mr. Schwartz’s books, motifs tend to surface in odd ways. You will find that Moby Dick plays an important part in this volume. In Herman Melville’s book, Captain Ahab monomaniacally pursues, with murderous intent, a tremendous albino sperm whale that once chewed off his leg. Every omen informs Ahab and his superstitious crew that they will not succeed. Moby Dick is the leviathan of the Bible, a tremendous, angry force of nature, far more powerful than his tiny human opponents who float helplessly in small, unstable boats in a churning, limitless ocean. Fighting Moby Dick is fighting nature, but Ahab tries anyway. His fight is an expression of his freedom.

Similarly, Mr. Schwartz says, bureaucracy is a powerful monster, a force of nature, much larger than us, and largely undefeatable. Cut off a tentacle and another grows in its place. Or as Kafka says, it merely restabilizes and becomes ever more malevolent. Just how powerful is the leviathan of bureaucracy? Mr. Schwartz’s description of the bureaucratic Physeter macrocephalus MD-102 with its eighty-seven required documents and twenty-one oversight roles echoes Melville’s description of a sperm whale:

Between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.1

Big whale, big stack of bureaucratic documents. Harpoon him and red tape spouts from his arteries. Accidentally slip into the area where his brain should be, as one of Ahab’s harpooners does, and you can drown in his slippery, oily, shifting essence.

Nevertheless, Schwartz illustrates how to fight the leviathan and tame it. He teaches us how to ride the whale to successful business outcomes, peel off its blubber, and even train it to do tricks. At the same time, he offers us an adventure story about fighting the bureaucratic whale, a surprising analysis of its physiology, and a guide that will prepare you to harpoon any blubberous bureaucracies that happen to get in your way.

For months now, we at Exothermic, in trying to tame this leviathan of a book, have been dragged along helplessly by it. Nevertheless, like Ahab, we try. Through the book you will find my harpoon-thrusts here and there, which perhaps will slow the monster down just enough so you can get a good look at it.

—Professor Ishmael C. Tollogous,

Visiting Professor of Sceniology,

University of Strozzapreti, Bologna;

Capo Di Tutti I Redattori, Exothermic Press