Introduction: We’re Bureaucrats All

INTRODUCTION:
WE’RE BUREAUCRATS ALL

To catch hold of fleeting appearance he must shackle it with rules, tear into its fair body with concepts, and preserve its living spirit in a meagre frame of words.

—Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Bureaucracy Is Us

Homo bureaucraticus: humankind is truly the bureaucratic animal. Psychologists have watched children spend more time arguing over the rules of a game than actually playing it.1 Children learn rule-making, of course, from their parents, those power-crazy authorities who invent and enforce arbitrary decrees about bedtimes and TV watching. We all begin structuring the world bureaucratically long before we learn to develop interactive voice response systems (“Your call is important to us. Please listen distractedly as our options have never changed.”), join congressional subcommittees, or set acceptable use policies for IT systems. Someday, archaeologists will sniff out today’s humans by following our trail of bureaucracy through the zeros and ones of our big data streams.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, stamped as we are in the image of celestial beings, or vice versa. The Jade Emperor, after all, has always presided over a “celestial hierarchy” of Chinese gods that looks suspiciously like a Chinese political bureaucracy. When the Monkey King* of legend is not invited to the Jade Empress’s party, he wants to know who was. “It’s all according to rule, you know … the Venerable Immortals of the Ten Continents and Three Islands, the Mystic Divinity of the North Pole … the Star Lords of the Five Constellations, the Three Pure Ones, the Four Emperors and the Heavenly Immortal of the Great Nomad from the Eight High Caves … [sorry, not done yet] … the Immortal of the Nine Mounds, the Gods of the Seas and Mountains …” Oh yes, and also the terrestrial deities.2

Christian angelology, formalized in the Early Middle Ages, was already quite familiar with the principle of division of labor. It organized the angels into nine “choirs”: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.3 Virtues are responsible (accountable?) for miracles, Thrones for presenting the prayers of humans, and Cherubim for guarding the tree of life.

Judaism has its rabbinic law, the 613 commandments of the Torah, the pseudo-legal document it calls the covenant, and the many pages of Exodus describing exactly how to build an Ark of the Covenant and who may use it. All in the service of implementing rules and regulations laid down by the supreme parental authority—rules we must live by (laws of nature) and rules we should live by (laws of morality).

The gods of the ancient Aegean, though not big on following rules themselves, nevertheless had functional specialties, like employees in a factory: Eros for arrows, Momus for mockery, Alastor for family feuds, Chaos for Information Technology, and Morpheus, presumably, for bureaucracy.† If you wanted wind, you had to get a sign-off from Aeolus; if you wanted a hangover, from Dionysus.

Aeolus—Homer-certified wind deity tasked with air moving, reporting directly to Zeus, the chief executive deity—was surely hired into his position for his wind skills, although he generally delegated to one of his four Anemoi, depending on the wind’s required compass direction. It takes just a small imaginative leap to think of Aeolus as rather busy and needing to prioritize his workload, doesn’t it? Sure, if you have a wind need you can go ahead and pray, but if you really want service, it’s best to file a ticket and get onto his queue.

I mean no disrespect to religions or dead Greeks, because when I label something a bureaucracy, I make no value judgment. We’ve come to view bureaucracy as an evil—maybe even as evil itself since the philosopher Hannah Arendt used the memorable phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the highly bureaucratized Nazi genocide.

But in this book I suggest we step back and consider bureaucracy for what it really is: a way to impose a structure on the world so that we can link general principles to actions. I don’t want to mire you now in the precise definition of bureaucracy‡—we’ll get to that in a few chapters—but for now, let’s just say that a bureaucracy is a form of social organization with formal, rigid rules and formal, rigid hierarchies of authority. That’s not too far from the definition sociologists use.

Digital Transformation

In today’s digital economy—one of rapid change, uncertainty, and complexity—bureaucracy is an impediment. It’s the sticky stuff that prevents companies from dancing nimbly to the music of change. It’s the no-saying choir of a shrouded and inscrutable sub-sub-sub-department, the vampire forms in triplicate that drain employees of motivation, the rules that lock in yesterday’s worst practices, and the impersonal languages of corporatese, legalese, political doublespeak, and—I’m not sure why—the speech of airplane flight attendants (“This is your last and final boarding call for flight 666 with service to Inferno International.”).

As enterprises accept information technologies into the hearts of their corporate personalities, they find today’s tools for rapid change slowed by rules that seem arbitrary, their high-tech Teslas stuck on muddy, potholed rural roads. They need fast 0–60 capability and nimble cornering, but instead they get meetings, sign-offs, and email nastygrams from the guardians of expense-reporting policies. Bureaucracy is a mature company’s symptom of aging, a deteriorating condition that will inevitably lead it to aimless wandering, fits and starts, fear of new technologies, intervention by concerned shareholders, and finally assisted demise at the hands of a Dr. Icahn.§

In IT today we want fast flow. We want to deliver. And what gets in our way? Mysterious corporate rules that can’t be questioned. Signatures we need from people we’ve never heard of. Pleading requests we have to make for tools we need. Time we spend occupying a seat in meetings. Policies that suddenly land on our desks and demand our attention just when we’re on the verge of delivering business value for the company that auto-deposits our paychecks.

At the same time, IT leaders must confront their own bureaucratic instincts. We speak of IT governance—the word just drips with bureaucratic goo, doesn’t it?—and IT standards. We work and breathe within the constricted space allowed us by compliance acronyms—GDPR, SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS. Our security engineers, overwhelmed by constant taunting from nation-states and professional hackers, slam rules on the enterprise to protect it. IT organizations balance centralization with decentralization; standards with evolving architectures; rulebooks, runbooks, and standard operating procedures with ad hoc attempts to be useful. They promote agility but only within a framework of backlogs, stand-ups and burn-downs, and sprint reviews—artifacts and ceremonies redolent of red tape.

Like the Venerable Immortals of the Ten Continents and Three Islands, we find ourselves a part of a hierarchy we didn’t invent or choose, yet we cope with it by electing to manufacture yet more bureaucracy. It comes naturally to us Homo bureaucraticuses—we have our Midas touch that turns even smiley faces into standardized icons and protocols regulating when they should and shouldn’t be used.

Modernity Is Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy has long been seen as a cornerstone of advanced industrial societies, and even as constitutive of modernity itself.4 It sounds strange, but bureaucracy has been called the “primary institutional characteristic of highly complex and differentiated societies, epitomizing ‘the modern era.’”5

For the pioneering sociologist Max Weber, whom we’ll be encountering throughout this book, bureaucracy was just the application of reason to organizational design, a way of setting up rules and accountabilities to promote efficiency.6 To John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth century British philosopher, it was a form of administration that “accumulates experience, acquires well-tried and well-considered maxims, and makes provision for appropriate practical knowledge in those who have the actual conduct of affairs.”7 In our modern age, where we’ve seen science and engineering triumph, where we like to base decisions on hard data, bureaucracy is the application of those types of rational thought patterns to structuring and running a social organization.

Modern bureaucracy developed during the nineteenth century, as science rose and the privileged aristocracy declined, and as business enterprises became larger and clashed in global markets. It so dominated organizations that management historians could say that “almost all the benefits we take for granted in today’s society—modern medicine, modern science, modern industry—rest on a bureaucratic foundation.8 To see the connection between bureaucracy and modernity, it helps to think about what it replaced: in the public sphere, the arbitrariness, capriciousness, and nepotism of monarchies or the chaos of revolutionary governments; in the business world, a lack of formal discipline and management strategies that sounded a lot like “let’s make friends with the king and hope he gives us a charter to exploit a new colony.”

There’s no more dramatic illustration of bureaucracy’s deep impact on modern society than its use by terrorist networks.

From the mid-1990s through late 2001, al-Qa’ida made every effort to become a fully bureaucratized organization, complete with employment contracts specifying vacation policies, explicitly documented roles and responsibilities for different jobs including detailed descriptions of the experiences required for senior leadership roles, security memos written by a specialized security committee, and standardized questionnaires for those arriving at training camps.9

The three-page application to join al-Qa’ida asks applicants to list their hobbies and pastimes, and asks “What objectives would you like to accomplish on your jihad path?”10 Terrorist operatives complain about the burdensome rules they face, particularly the requirements that they get targets approved centrally before striking them.11 There are even stories of would-be suicide bombers being asked to fill out forms in triplicate before being allowed to take exams to assess their suitability.12

History of Bureaucracy (Part One): Pharaoh to Sade

Despite its deep connection to modernity, bureaucracy is hardly new. In ancient Egypt the pharaohs set up a sizable hierarchy to deal with irrigation, mining, and pyramid building, with scribes as their chief bureaucrats.13 Supervisors were assigned a span of control of precisely ten subordinates, and a grand vizier (Joseph in the Bible being the most famous14) presided over the hierarchy. By planning carefully, dividing work among departments, and employing professional full-time administrators, the ancient Egyptians became experts at forecasting the rise of the Nile and coping with its consequences.15

China too developed a bureaucracy as early as 1000 bce, introduced the division of labor as early as ce 1, and, influenced by Confucian principles, began using merit exams to fill positions sometime during the Han Dynasty (206 bce–ce 220).16

Diocletian bureaucratized the Roman Empire; the heavy taxes he then needed to support the administration became one of the reasons for the empire’s fall.17 The Middle Ages saw Roman bureaucracy replaced by the feudal system, which (according to the economist and historian Ludwig Von Mises) was an attempt at governing without a centralized bureaucracy—an effort that failed miserably. “The modern state,” he says, “is built upon the ruins of feudalism. It substituted bureaucratic management of public affairs for the supremacy of a multitude of petty princes and counts.”18

At the same time, the church was evolving its own formal structure. By the third century ce it had organized into a hierarchy of bishops, presbyters, deacons, subdeacons, and acolytes, later adding a pope at the Council of Nicaea.19

Happily for our English language we were able to borrow the useful term byzantine to honor the intricacies of its namesake empire’s administration. And it was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain who, in modernizing the administration of his empire—yes, modernizing—gave us another useful term when he bound important documents with red tape instead of plain white string.20

The intellectual history of bureaucracy goes way back as well. Plato’s Republic is an argument for government by an elite bureaucracy of philosophers.21 Aristotle’s description in Politics of the attributes of a good organization is surprisingly similar to the bureaucracy we know today: (1) specialization of labor, (2) departmentation, (3) centralization, decentralization, and delegation, (4) synergy, and (5) leadership.22

As long as there have been bureaucracies there have been people complaining about them. Well, almost as long, since the ranks of Egyptian and Roman bureaucracies were largely filled with slaves. When Diocletian expanded the Roman bureaucracy, Lactantius (c. 250–325 ce), a Christian apologist and advisor to Emperor Constantine, raged about the burden it imposed on the people:

There were also many stewards of different degrees, and deputies of presidents. Very few civil causes came before them: but there were condemnations daily, and forfeitures frequently inflicted; taxes on numberless commoditie…. While Diocletian, that author of ill, and deviser of misery, was ruining all things, he could not withhold his insults, not even against God.23

The term bureaucracy itself—“rule by offices” or “rule by desks”—was meant to be sarcastic when the French gave it to us in the mid-eighteenth century.24 No one willingly describes themselves as a bureaucrat; the sociologist Robert Merton uses the colorful German word Schimpfwort—that is, an invective or epithet25—to describe the term.

Speaking of bureaucracy and words the French gave us, there’s also the useful word sadism. In an article in Lapham’s Quarterly, the critic Lucy Ives tells us that the Marquis de Sade’s works, particularly The 120 Days of Sodom (written in 1785), are best read as narratives about bureaucracy, tales of cold, formal, and even boring implementations of rules around outrageous sexual practices. Four friends bring together a group of people and occupy an abandoned chateau to practice acts of “dispassionate intensity.” Their debauched activities are constrained by a set of laws they agree to before they enter the chateau. Roles are carefully delineated: “The four friends form an executive committee, which is overseen by the four procuresses, four duennas, and four storytellers, who operate like a toothless board of directors.”26 Bureaucracy and sadism: products of Enlightenment France.

Ludwig Von Mises has the last word on the exquisite pain of bureaucracy:

There cannot be any doubt that this bureaucratic system is essentially antiliberal, undemocratic, and un-American, that it is contrary to the spirit and to the letter of the Constitution, and that it is a replica of the totalitarian methods of Stalin and Hitler.27

Well, then.

The Keynote Story

I’ll use the following story, one that I’ve also related in my previous books, to illustrate the subtleties of bureaucracy.

I was working with a team of software developers as a product owner, charged with representing the business’s needs to the technologists. We were building a software system to help employees process applications submitted by our customers. As is typical in Agile software delivery, we divided the work into two-week iterations and held a retrospective after each to explore ways to improve our process. In one of those retrospectives the team asked me to prepare a certain requirements document—a “state transition” diagram showing all of the states a customer application could pass through as it was processed. That was a bit unusual for us; we typically preferred to flesh out requirements iteratively and face-to-face during each two-week period. But since this was a complex area of the system, they’d need to coordinate their work carefully, and having more formal documentation would make sure that all the pieces fit together well.

It seemed reasonable, but I wanted to avoid the risk of having different copies of this document floating around while we were still refining the requirements. So we agreed that I would sketch the state transition flow and pin it to the corkboard in the team room. That way we’d all be looking at the same diagram and we could easily change it when we needed to.

Two weeks later we were back for another retrospective. The diagram had been a great success, the team members agreed. But one of them complained that when she’d looked for it on the corkboard it wasn’t there. It turned out that another team member had taken it and used it at his desk for a few days, forgetting to return it.

The process improvement parts of our brains locked onto the problem. One team member suggested we pin a sign-out sheet to the corkboard next to the diagram. Whenever someone took the sketch off the board they could write their name on the sign-out sheet, the date and time they took it, and which desk they were sitting at, in case someone else needed to find it. I saw where this was going and made a counter-suggestion. “How about,” I asked, “if whoever takes the diagram remembers to return it quickly?”

Do you see where I’m going with this? The team’s solution was good—it would solve the problem. It was also bureaucratic. Yes, it would mitigate the risk that someone wouldn’t have access to the diagram when they needed it. At the same time, it would impose a cost (the effort of signing out the document) on everyone, regardless of whether they were the kind of person who would remember to return the document promptly. Later, after the incident was forgotten, team members would view the sign-out process as pointless bureaucracy. It was a solution, all right—effective, but not lean. Remembering to return the document would be leaner, as would simply writing one’s initials on the sign-out sheet and nothing else.

Process improvement had led unthinkingly to bureaucracy. This is common. The cycle of formalizing, optimizing, documenting, and then applying a process uniformly is the essence of the bureaucratic art. It institutionalizes “the surest way we’ve found to do this particular task.” Software developers are particularly adept at formalizing and optimizing processes—after all, that is what programming a computer is all about.

When something goes wrong, employees meet in a “postmortem” or “root cause analysis.” Someone asks, “How will we make sure this doesn’t happen again?” Brainstorming ensues. They usually decide to set up a process that adds more controls. Of course they do—their boss would be horrified if they decided not to take any corrective action. Errors require correction, and correction, when designed to avoid an occurrence, almost always adds constraints. But, I say, in many cases doing nothing is precisely the right solution, because the cost of new controls may be higher than the risk-adjusted cost of the error happening again.

It is the layers and layers of these rules and accountabilities, created to “improve” business processes, that make the Frankenstein’s monster we think of as bureaucracy.

A Different View

Bureaucracy, in another sense, is simply form—it’s the structure of our corporate environment, the architectural elements within which we are free to innovate and gratify our customers.28 In our everyday lives, we consider ourselves free. But we’re not free from the law of gravity. We’re not free to violate moral laws (we can, but we may be punished). We can’t tickle a sperm whale to death or eat strozzapreti while winning the Boston Marathon. We exercise our freedom within boundaries that have been set without our involvement or consent. “On one level, all this is obvious,” says David Graeber, the author of The Utopia of Rules. “We are just talking about the emergence of form. Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it’s just randomness.”29

When I write a book, I start by preparing an outline. Then I begin to fill in sections. I invariably wind up changing the outline later, but in the meantime the outline gives form to the book. Although it constrains the content I will create, “create” is still the right word—the outline also provides a structure that allows me to play with silly whale analogies and obscure types of pasta. As long as I “comply” with it, the pieces of the book will assemble themselves into a coherent whole, or in this case perhaps a combatant whale.

Form is constraining, yes, but it also keeps us safe and lets us make decisions based on a knowledge of probable outcomes. Contrast that with the ancient world, where humans were just playthings of the gods. One day you go to the woods for a little walk to clear your head, accidentally stumble onto the goddess Diana taking a bath, get turned into a stag, and wind up being torn apart by dogs. This is not what you expect when you go for a walk.¶

Bureaucracy is the inverse of science: while the latter seeks to find rules for understanding the world, the former creates rules for how we are to operate in the world. Both bring order to chaos. Because bureaucracy is concerned with how we should act, it is a form of ethics.

Bureaucracy memorializes best practices. As long as the concept of “better” exists, bureaucracy must exist, which is why it’s a distinctive competence of Homo bureaucraticus. It’s about structure and creativity, governance, transparency, fairness, morality, standards and exceptions, coolness under pressure, institutionalization of shared knowledge, religion, superstition, planning and foresight, retrospection and evidence, and stability in flux. It is subtle and delicate.

Bureaucracy, a wonderful thing, a gift of the gods to humanity! A string that leads you through a labyrinth;** †† ‡‡ the cumulative knowledge of a long tradition of sages. In this book you’ll learn to command it as Zeus commands lightning. We wax bureaucratic when the muses allow.

Executive Summary, TL;DR

My argument in this book will go something like this:

1. We have a bizarre aversion to bureaucracy, a visceral reaction that prevents us from coping effectively with it. Bureaucracy isn’t just frustrating to us, it’s frustration itself, to such an extent that we call anything that frustrates us bureaucracy. We, and Kafka, have nightmares about it. I suggest that we stop this right now.

2. In fact, we’re natural bureaucrats. We make bureaucracy to be able to act socially in the world despite its complexity. We generalize to simplify the world, and then make rules for action based on those generalizations. In particular, we bureaucratize as a way to turn our problem-solving successes into problem-solved routines.

3. Bureaucracy is a way to structure organizational interactions. That’s all. Not a nightmare, not a prank by minions of Satan. Sometimes it’s even useful (when dealing with compliance and audits, for example).

4. Nevertheless, the bureaucracies we encounter every day are, in fact, frustrating, Satanic, soul-destroying, and Kafkaesque. That’s because they aren’t lean, learning, and enabling, the three characteristics of good, not evil, bureaucracy.

5. We can overcome bureaucracy by blasting holes in it, by shrinking it, and by forcing it to turn upon itself and become lean, learning, and enabling. We have all the devices of mythology and science available to us. We do so by employing the arts of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. I’ll show you how.

Read This Book

This book is for leaders who want their companies to succeed in the digital age. It’s an exploration of the gooey stuff that holds us back and a tactical manual for yanking our boots out of it. I’ll show that it’s not bureaucracy per se that drives us crazy, but rather certain qualities that bureaucracy tends to take on, and which can be reversed.

It’s good news that we can manipulate bureaucracy in this way, because we need it. If nothing else, those acronyms we must comply with—our FISMAs and KYCs, LOLs, and R2D2s§§—demand bureaucracy, since they require structural controls and formal accountabilities. Bureaucracy also provides a framework for our activities where it makes sense to have one; it’s the guardrails and constraints within which we practice our digital arts.

This is a book about information technology, because technology makes vivid the tension in our corporate lives today between speed and freedom on the digits of one hand, and sludge and constraint on the digits of the other. It also happens to be my field. But though I’ll use examples from the technology world, I’m really talking about how any group of people works together. I’ll do my best to explain the technology examples so everyone can follow them.

Because my emphasis will be on information technology and digital transformation, I’ll be devoting a lot of attention to a particular kind of bureaucracy: the kind that oversees, or governs, projects and investments. This is bureaucracy that affects mostly white-collar workers, and it’s enforced not only by officials in high-power positions, but also by administrators who have the power to say no and demand paperwork, and frequently use that power. I refer to them, tongue-in-cheek, as “bureaucratic trolls in caves.” In doing so, I don’t intend anything personal against them; in my imagination, trolls are those cute plastic dolls with big smiles on their faces. I too have moments of troll-like behavior, and I’ll suggest throughout this book that you probably do as well.

I’ll also draw a lot of my examples from the government. Not because it’s only government that faces bureaucratic challenges in its digital transformations, but because government is extreme, so its examples tend to be clearer and more dramatic. It also happens to be where I spent some time and, with the help of some motivated, brilliant bureaucrats, pulled off a surprising digital transformation. There are important differences between government and corporate bureaucracies (see James Q. Wilson’s book Bureaucracy), but the similarities are also striking.

Warnings on Terminology

Traditionally one speaks of managers as the bureaucrats, who apply their bureaucracy coercively to workers. Career, or civil service, government functionaries (as opposed to politicians) are also called bureaucrats. But as bureaucracy has changed, the terminology has become problematic. The bureaucrats in a large enterprise are often not managers but line employees who enforce policies—the trolls in caves that periodically appear and stop productive work until forms are filled out. And line employees who work with customers also act as bureaucrats when they enforce rules and demand paperwork.

Also, an apology: I’m going to use the term digital transformation, which we all know is a trendy buzzword that’s quickly being emptied of all meaning. I’ll do so because I don’t have a better word for this important trend in enterprises today: the movement from slow-moving, don’t-change-too-often management to fast-moving, change-is-normal management. Technology is important in this transformation because it not only makes it possible but also makes it necessary—competitors have access to the same enabling technology, and customers and employees have come to demand it. I use the term while holding my nose.

Structure of the Book

In Part I of this book I’ll tease out the true meaning of bureaucracy from its emotional baggage. I’ll examine how it works, why we hate it, and what we may even be able to borrow from it.

In Part II I’ll draw on contemporary organizational theory to propose a new model for bureaucracy, one that retains its fundamental nature—controls and structure—but is lean, learning, and enabling rather than bloated, stale, and coercive. I know this sounds crazy or pointless, but as you’ll see in Part III it’s both possible and purposeful.

With that new model in mind, in Part III I’ll provide a playbook. I’ll show how we can break through bureaucratic obstructions using the skills of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. And then—get ready for it—I’ll show you how to become a master bureaucrat yourself, so you can wield bureaucracy for the good of society and your organization.

You Know Who You Are

This is a guide for IT practitioners and corporate leaders who (I’d never refer to them as bureaucrats) wish to impose structure and controls (I’d never call them bureaucracy) … um, without driving others crazy. Actually, I will call them by those names.

If you’re leading an IT transformation, you’re frustrated by bureaucracy. Without realizing it, you’re probably also manufacturing it. This book is for you. Do you impose standards? Security controls? Does your exception process involve lots of forms and approval signatures? Do you insist that everyone who wants to talk to you fill out a service ticket first? See my point? You, puny human, Homo bureaucraticus, are (ouch) a bureaucrat.

If you’re an enterprise leader, a CEO, say, or a CFO, COO, board director, legal counsel, or some other chief something, you’re frustrated that your company—IT in particular—doesn’t move fast enough; your folks seem enthusiastic but quickly bog down in execution; your enterprise is not innovative enough. The problem just might be the bureaucracy you’re secretly manufacturing while no one is looking. We’re on to you. This book is for you.

If you’re a technologist, trying to enjoy your work and deliver value to your company, your frustrations are endless, and bureaucracy is chief among them. You need a playbook for dealing with it so you can do your job. Read on.

If you’re an alien from a planet that is bureaucracy-free and you never negotiated the rules of your games as a child, have never been frustrated by your cable company’s customer service, and have never filled out a form with little boxes that are too small, don’t bother with this book. I can recommend plenty of good authors to read, like Franz Kafka and Herman Melville.

Benediction: A Ball of Dung

Let’s call on the ancient Egyptian deity most closely associated with transformation. His name is Khepri, and he’s the god who moves the sun along so that each day can start fresh—an apt metaphor for transformation. His symbol is the dung beetle, which is also the Egyptian hieroglyphic for transformation. Apparently the Egyptians equated his way of nudging the sun from one day to the next with the way a beetle pushes along his little ball of dung.

Khepri is also a qualified bureaucrat: the Egyptian Book of the Dead, envisioning the entrance to the afterlife as a bureaucracy where the newly dead must answer a series of questions precisely and formulaically, suggests burying a dung beetle image with a body to whisper into its ear the required answers.

As if this wasn’t enough to make Khepri our patron deity for bureaucratic transformation, Franz Kafka, the writer most associated with the terrors of bureaucracy, had the protagonist of “The Metamorphosis” metamorphose (transform) into—you guessed it—a dung beetle.¶¶

Oh, Khepri! We ask you to bless our efforts at bureaucratic transformation! Please assist us in rolling this ball of odorous bureaucracy toward the abyss, that we may successfully enter the realm of the digital afterlife! Amen!


*	See Chapter 12, “The Way of the Monkey.” -ed.
†	I’m lying. But the ones I didn’t make up are here: https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net/gods/. And by the way, it’s Atlas who carries the world on his back, not a succession of turtles. -au.
‡	Don’t you hate books that start out by quoting Wikipedia or dictionary definitions of their terms? -au.
§	Famed corporate raider. -ed.
¶	The story of Actaeon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. -ed.
**	The Athenian hero Theseus finds his way in and out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth with the help of thread provided to him by Ariadne. Mr. Schwartz no doubt means to suggest the difficulty of moving through a bureaucracy’s labyrinthian rules. -ed.
††	You know, I keep feeling like I’m being followed by an auditor—sorry, editor—who insists on dropping footnotes into my text. -au.
‡‡	Cute. -ed.
§§	Probably needless to say, but the last is not a compliance acronym, but rather a Star Wars reference. -ed.
¶¶	You might have thought he was transformed into a cockroach. The cockroach/dung beetle controversy is a longstanding debate in academia, but the Dungists appear to be winning; in the story, the maid does specifically call Gregor a dung beetle, whereas cockroaches are never mentioned. -au.