A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

As for the metaphysical thoughts, my dear sir, allow me to say that any brain is capable of producing them, it’s just that we cannot always find the words.

—José Saramago, All the Names

Someone must have been telling lies about Mark S., because one day, without having done anything wrong, he woke in his bed to find himself suddenly transformed into a giant insect—a bureaucrat.* Crawling through government office buildings, his exoskeleton examined by puzzled security folks; burrowing through great piles of bureaucratic waste; propping himself upright in meeting-room chairs never designed for creatures with more than two legs; learning to tell his I-90s from his I-485s and his SF-86s from his TPS reports;† peeling off the paperwork that stuck to him like flypaper, he flapped his antennae helplessly—for the first few years at least—but with an insect’s sniffing curiosity.

Over time, he realized that everyone else around him, private sector and public, while railing against bureaucracy—who doesn’t?—was also beginning to grow antennae and take on the shape of bureaucrats without noticing it. Upon leaving the federal bureaucracy he found the insect apocalypse well underway: banks, insurance companies, educational institutions, and even those tech companies that are admired for their agility and speed had long since settled into that energetic languor that makes a bureaucracy busy on paper and sticky and gooey on execution.

Yes, I, Mark S., had become the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a part of the Department of Homeland Security. By definition, a bureaucrat. By inclination, an iconoclastic, playful, get-things-done ex-software-developer who imagined he could sit down at a keyboard and change the world. By chronology, an incoming government employee at precisely the moment when it had finally become interested in agile ways of working and wanted to stop manufacturing huge, monolithic IT projects that went over budget, fell behind schedule, and were featured on the front page of the Washington Post. But the government couldn’t help itself. Agile was a word, and the bureaucracy could not rest until it had redefined it and formalized it and surrounded it with rules and constraints—in other words, until it had drained Agile of its agility.

My colleagues and I spent some years trying to convince policymakers to accept the dictionary definition of agility. We looked for ways to nudge the bureaucracy in the direction of what we were all calling digital transformation. After we’d banged our little insect heads against the wall for several years, the wall slowly began to move. Where before we’d only been able to release IT capabilities once every eighteen months or so, we found we were delivering new software as often as three times a day. Our multibillion-dollar, five-plus-year projects shrank to a size where we could actually execute them. We became a case study in the IT buzzwords of today—DevOps, microservices, cloud, containers, kombucha. And we did it as bureaucrats.

Somehow, along the way, I thought I’d begun to understand bureaucracy. Don’t get me wrong, I hate sluggish officialdom as much as the next Homo sapiens. But it turned out that the evil trolls of bureaucracy—the ones who lived in a cave somewhere and only popped out now and then to shout “No!” and hand the public more forms to fill out—well, they were human too, trying to do the right thing. And much of what we see as wasteful government bureaucracy, it turned out, had been put there deliberately to accomplish social or political goals that you and I supported. There was a frightening beauty to the way the bureaucracy worked once you cleared away the red tape and got a good look at it.

These days I meet with executives from about 120 companies a year and speak with enterprise leaders at conferences, at dinner roundtables, and while waiting to use the restroom at industry events. And, amazingly, my stories of bureaucracy light them right up. They tell me about how their companies’ bureaucracies are pinning them under mountains of red tape‡—ironically, in many cases bureaucracies they’ve set up themselves. Sometimes they say they need “cultural change”—but what they mean is they need to break free of their companies’ rigid rules and rigid authorities, the controls that control innovation and change by making sure they don’t happen.

It’s strange to be writing a book on bureaucracy. Who’d want to read such a thing? I’m inspired by a couple of books I’ve read over the last year. One was Death, by Shelly Kagan, a great philosopher and professor at Yale. For Khepri’s§ sake, who’d want to read a book on death? Well, I heartily recommend it. Kagan will make you think and rethink and puzzle and wonder why you’ve never read one before. The other book was Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders. Who’d want to read such a thing? But she just seems so excited about digestion that the book is hard to put down. I’m hoping that my fascination for bureaucracy will similarly shine through, and that I’ll be able to make bureaucracy as interesting as she makes human excrement. Or Kagan makes death.

I figured I’d drop a few stories throughout the book from my experience in the big bureaucracy. I left a few good ones out too. Like the time I was in a contentious government meeting and one of the participants suddenly leapt up and excused himself, saying, “I have to go move a supercomputer!” I wasn’t sure if that was a sly way to say that he badly needed a bathroom break, a reference to some new government bloat, or just a “dog ate my homework” excuse for shutting down my ideas on bureaucracy-busting.¶

Anyway, I have reason to think that we all have a secret fascination with bureaucracy. Take the universal appeal of Kafka’s writing. We know that Joseph K. is not going to be acquitted and we know that the Land Surveyor will never make it to the Castle. Yet we read of their adventures with some kind of compulsion to see how bureaucracy inevitably triumphs. We replay to ourselves the mechanism of Catch-22 and want to scream at the officials of the Ministry of Circumlocutions as they circumlocute.** We laugh as the good soldier Svejk makes his way through a military bureaucracy filled with buffoons and mortal danger.††

Bureaucracy moves us, mystifies us, and represents something deep about the human condition. It has something to do with the tension between freedom and constraint, order and chaos, accountability and authority, and how humans organize socially to accomplish common objectives. In writing this book, I wanted to peel away the blubber and find its heart.

Bureaucracy is also a critical player in enterprises’ digital transformations, which, nominally, is my subject. I’ve written a series of books on leadership in the digital world: The Art of Business Value, A Seat at the Table, and War and Peace and IT. In them I’ve tried to help leaders of large enterprises “unstick” their organizations so that they can become digital. My books have described how new ways of delivering technology are also changing how leaders lead, and how digitally inspired techniques can be used to succeed in today’s digital economy. But when my readers try to apply those ideas, they often find themselves stymied by the roles and rules and formalities they’ve set up to bring order and control to their enterprises.

So a book on bureaucracy seems as essential today as a book on human waste, and one that you can read while you’re eating. I might ask you to think a little bit differently about bureaucracy. I will definitely ask you to join me and become a Chaos Monkey, a Knight of Occam, and a Lean Sumo Wrestler. Together we can wield bureaucracy as a superpower and bust through it at the same time.

Press 1 to bust a bureaucracy, 2 to forge a new bureaucracy, or hold the line if you wish to speak to a reader care associate. Ding dongle, the functionary’s dead. Long live the functionary!

Mark S.

Boston, 2020

*	Mr. Schwartz is conflating the opening sentence of Kafka’s The Trial with that of The Metamorphosis. -ed.
†	TPS Reports are a recurring bureaucratic joke in the movie Office Space. -ed.
‡	A reference to the Monkey King, who reappears in Chapter 12. -ed.
§	An Egyptian god who winds up playing a large role in this book. See Introduction. -ed.
¶	See Giulia Enders, Gut, above. -au.
**	That’s from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. -ed.
††	A bureaucratic romp through the Czech military by Jaroslav Hašek, often compared to Heller’s Catch-22. -ed.