I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

—Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.

—Plutarch, Moralia

Authorities and Royal Fools

Let’s take any social organization, by which I mean a group of people working together toward common goals. It could be, perhaps, a government, or a business corporation, or a nonprofit. By what authority do leaders lead in this organization, and how can they set up their organization to make sure it accomplishes their goals?

There are three ways. The first is through tradition—leaders become leaders because … well, tradition says they should be. For example, kings and queens are generally kings and queens and not acrobats and newscasters because they’re born into the right families. Pharaohs commanded their people to build pyramids because pharaohs commanded people to build pyramids—there were no skate parks back then. The role of monarch is defined pretty loosely*—search online for “king” and you’ll find jobs in King County and at Burger King, but no job description for “ruler.”

A cool thing about monarchs is that they’re necessarily right about everything—because they say so. To the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in Leviathan,† that’s exactly the point. People are born naturally into a “brutish” state—if they don’t cede power to a sovereign and accept the sovereign’s judgement as binding, they’ll spend their time killing each other rather than making cat videos. Melville, compiling references to whales for his introduction to Moby Dick, gleefully quotes the opening line of Hobbes’s Leviathan: “By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.”1 I do the same here, just as gleefully.‡

In traditional organizations, officials act in traditional roles. The Cup-Bearer bears cups. A Royal Fool acts foolishly. A Gentleman of the Bedchamber oversees a king’s “physicians and entertainments.” A Bearded One, in Byzantine times, was responsible for not being a eunuch, while a Nipsistiarios was beardless and held the water basin. And, yes, the Groom of the King’s Stool did precisely what it sounds like.§ Let’s just say that a traditional hierarchy is not always organized logically for the most efficient management of the realm.

A second type of authority is that of the charismatic leader, such as, say, Hitler, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa, the Pied Piper, or—I have to assume—the first lemming in a suicide parade. Here it’s the leader’s personal magnetism that inspires their followers and powers their administration. A problem for organizations of this type is continuity—charismatic leaders tend to hold power only briefly. Consider the lemming.

These two types of authority—traditional and charismatic—can be referred to as leadership by notables or patrimonial leadership. Notables exercise leadership in their own names—their interests are the state’s or business’s interests. They may profit personally from their administration, and they may grant the authority to profit to the officials who act in their names—for example by allowing tax collectors or grooms of the stool to collect a little extra for themselves.

Is it possible that a notable is sometimes also acting in the best interests of the business or state? To ask that question, I think, is to misunderstand the idea of leadership by notables. In the famous words of Louis XIV (which he probably never uttered), “L’etat, c’est moi” (“the state—that’s me!”).2 The kingdom was the ruler’s, personally; there was no separation between the role and the person who filled it—at least until the rise of constitutional monarchies, when the power of monarchs became restricted to waving at the public and perpetrating sex scandals.

The third possible source of authority is rational-legal authority, where roles are defined according to some agreed-upon logic and then occupied by individuals who thereby gain the power and accountabilities assigned to the role. Occupying the role is the crucial concept—the person is no longer acting as an individual but in an official capacity. They are not authorized to seek personal profit, nor to bring their prejudices, personal vendettas, or family relationships into their jobs. Roles and the relationships between them are specified in rules that have been chosen to promote the success of the organization.

Such authority is rational in the sense that reason is used to design the best set of roles and practices for achieving the desired outcomes. It is legal in the sense that rules determine behavior rather than whim, caprice, or personal interests. Rational-legal authority allows for continuity because different people may fill the roles over time. Each role is occupied by the person best able to fill it, someone who can demonstrate the necessary skills. Once in the role they’re backed by legal authority (as opposed to the power of their army or charismatic manipulation), but their authority is carefully limited to what’s necessary to accomplish the organization’s goals.3

If this model sounds familiar, that’s because most of the institutions we know today are organized on the basis of rational-legal authority. It’s a defining characteristic of our modern age. It’s the structuring principle of business organizations and government agencies. It’s known as bureaucracy.

Max Weber Arrives

The distinction I’ve laid out between traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal authority is more or less that of Max Weber (1864–1920), one of the pioneers of sociology, writing in the early twentieth century.¶ His is the canonical analysis of bureaucracy, the citation that appears in every scholarly work on the subject. He emphasized the sociological aspects of bureaucracy, mostly how authority is obtained and exercised, rather than its political-economic or public administration aspects. But his thinking is so clear that his writings are the starting point for almost everything written on the subject.

For Weber, the modern age has been defined by a movement from “magical” ways of looking at the world to more “scientific” or rational ways. Rationalization, to Weber, meant the use of rules and instrumental systems to understand and manage the world, and bureaucracy was simply one aspect of a broader trend4 toward rationality epitomized by science and engineering. Frolicking gods and angelic intervention would no longer determine business success or national policy now that the world had become “dis-enchanted” (that is, no longer understood as based on enchantment). Instead, the mind would impose order and efficiency on a world that was becoming increasingly complex.

Weber described the archetype or “ideal” form of bureaucracy** as a system with these characteristics: (1) division of labor (specialization), (2) hierarchical organization, (3) rules, (4) technical competence, (5) impersonality, (6) formal, documented communications.††

To make it easier to work with, I like to think of Weber’s framework in groupings like this:

• Roles: A bureaucracy has a formal delineation of accountabilities, organized into a hierarchy and filled with people who have the expertise to accomplish the tasks of their roles.
• Rules: The activities of a bureaucracy are determined by rules, which are applied universally and impersonally. A “paper trail” makes the rules self-proving; in other words, one output of a bureaucratic process is a paper flow that proves that the process was followed.

Even more simply: formal, rigid roles and formal, rigid rules.

Robert Merton, the sociologist best known for introducing the terms “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy,” emphasized this formal aspect of bureaucracy, explaining that in it, “rituals” of communication minimize friction by restricting the interactions between roles to those that are officially sanctioned. With formalized patterns of interaction, officials can work together regardless of their attitudes toward one another, which might even be hostile. Formalities also allow for calculability in the sense that each person knows more or less how the other will act in a given interaction.5

Impersonality

Impersonality, item five on Weber’s list, is worth a deeper look. It implies that the rules of the bureaucracy are applied equally to everyone. Weber used the Latin phrase sine ira et studio, “without anger or bias,” sometimes translated as “without hatred or passion” or “without affection or enthusiasm.” What it really means is everyone is subject to formal equality of treatment.6

Impersonality is crucial to the bureaucratic mindset for the following reasons:

• It separates the official’s person from their role. Officials apply the rules uniformly, and therefore not on the basis of their prejudice, mood, profit, blood sugar level, or whim.
• It promotes fairness. Everyone is treated equally. No special exceptions are made for friends, movie stars, Kardashians, or dangerous-looking maniacs with Kalashnikovs.
• It breeds efficiency, in that the rules encapsulate the best known practices, and are applied in all cases. Exceptions, which would reduce efficiency, are not permitted.
• It leads to calculability. One knows what outcome will result from a request, whereas petitioning a pharaoh or Charles Manson, or the possibility that your competitor is doing so, can lead to surprises.

Bureaucratic Efficiency

Weber and Merton—and many other writers on bureaucracy—emphasize its efficiency, which sounds strange to those of us brought up on stories of bureaucratic waste and ineptitude, and who have likely witnessed it ourselves. In Weber’s words, bureaucracy

is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability…. The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dilettantism in the field of administration.7

Weber saw the modern era as one where specialized technical skills were increasingly necessary. Gone was the time when “dilettantes” could manage business functions. Instead, experts would be accountable for areas in which they were experts, and formalized interactions would be used to coordinate their efforts. Efficiency would result and would be amplified by removing emotional concerns like personal relationships, hostility, anxiety, and the like, leaving only rational considerations.8

For both Weber and Merton, efficiency was not a single characteristic, but a complex set of attributes. “The chief merit of bureaucracy is its technical efficiency, with a premium placed on precision, speed, expert control, continuity, discretion, and optimal returns on input,” says Merton.9 Or, in Weber’s words:

Precision, speed, unambiguousness, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs—these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.10

So, let me pause and ask, reader, what’s your problem with bureaucracy? Why buy a book about how to bust through it? It’s hard to see anything objectionable in Weber’s definition. Sure, I’ve got a few reservations: in the IT world we’ve been finding that generalists (“dilettantes”) actually are quite valuable, “discipline” is a heavy-handed word, and I’m not sure efficiency is the right goal (leanness is more like it). But Weber is just talking about organizing logically to get good results.

In recent years our view of bureaucracy has diverged a wee bit from Weber’s idealized picture.

The term “bureaucracy” is popularly associated with impersonal hierarchy, rigid rules, predictable procedures, and a pace of decision-making and change that would embarrass a glacier. Emphasizing the disadvantages of bureaucracy in a fast-paced world, theorists have consistently contrasted inflexible mechanistic systems with fluid organic systems, and plodding segmentalist cultures with innovative integrative cultures.11

Glaciers are not easily embarrassed.

Over time, Weber’s broad understanding of efficiency yielded to a narrower idea of process optimization.12 Bureaucracies petrified and grew tentacles of red tape that seemed to defy rationality rather than exemplify it.

Business and Government

Modern democratic governments are necessarily bureaucracies. They’re based on the rule of law and administered by a civil service chosen by merit, separately from the election of political officials.

But businesses too have been designed as bureaucracies. Mass production demanded strict repeatability and statistical quality control. Global competition demanded cost efficiencies. And the increasing size and scale of business organizations demanded some sort of centralized control over decentralized organizations. In Weber’s words, “the very large modern capitalist enterprises are themselves unequalled models of strict bureaucratic organization.”13 “All complex organizations,” Wilson says, “display bureaucratic problems of confusion, red tape, and the avoidance of responsibility.”14 It’s no wonder that large companies and government agencies looking to digitally transform face similar bureaucratic impediments.

One of the most compelling uses of bureaucracy in today’s economy is to support a company’s branding. A brand must be consistent; it must deliver a unified, coherent, recognizable experience to customers. And that consistency is a specialty of bureaucracy. McDonald’s, for example, has standardized, in minute detail, the operation of its stores and the activities of its employees in an operations manual that is six hundred pages long and weighs four pounds.15

Branding guidelines specify how a company’s logo should be used, what typefaces are acceptable, the positioning of elements on a page, and the voice and style to be used for communications. Guardrails and reviews ensure that those branding guidelines are followed. Because brands can have tremendous business value—Coca Cola’s is said to be worth $59.2 billion and Disney’s $52.2 billion16—it’s no exaggeration to say that a company’s bureaucracy can be a critical component of its value.

Just as the government must answer to a diverse citizenry, businesses—at least publicly traded ones—must answer to a diverse base of shareholders. To ensure that employees are doing what those stakeholders want, companies devise governance structures and controls. The larger and more complex an organization is, the more it will see bureaucracy as the solution for aligning its employees with its stakeholders.

The convergence of government and business bureaucracies is noted by Graeber in The Utopia of Rules. On one hand, he says, “The rise of the modern corporation, in the late nineteenth century, was largely seen at the time as a matter of applying modern, bureaucratic techniques to the private sector.”17 On the other hand, the bureaucratic techniques of government, Graeber says, originally came from the private sector and then seeped into all aspects of life:

Americans often seem embarrassed by the fact that, on the whole, we’re really quite good at bureaucracy. It doesn’t fit our American self-image…. If Americans are able to overlook their awkward preeminence in this field, it is probably because most of our bureaucratic habits and sensibilities—the clothing, the language, the design of forms and offices—emerged from the private sector.18

In the ultimate twist, private sector bureaucracy actually forces the government to be bureaucratic. Weber draws this connection: “Today, it is primarily the capitalist market economy which demands that the official business of public administration be discharged precisely, unambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible.”19 One reason that businesses demand bureaucracy from the government is the predictability (calculability) it offers. Free markets require transparency and predictability:

The peculiarity of modern culture, and specifically of its technical and economic basis, demands this very “calculating” of results…. Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is “dehumanized,” the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is appraised its special virtue by capitalism.20

While bureaucracy may seem mechanical and “faceless,” the same is true of the “invisible hand of the market.” Business decisions today are ultimately out of executives’ control—they are made by consumers. The market is relentless, merciless, and foils your best plans. Its decisions cannot be appealed. That is to say, it has many of the characteristics of a bureaucracy.

Customer-Facing Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy goes beyond the organization of work within a business; even businesses with a market incentive to provide good customer service can take on the characteristics of bureaucratic impersonality and rigidity in their public personas. Medical insurance companies in the US continue to innovate ways to frustrate their customers with obscure billing codes, arbitrary-seeming rules, surprise requirements for “pre-authorizations,” and endless telephone wait times. Graeber relates his experience with a bank when trying to access his account information from overseas, a process that required “speaking to four different representatives, two referrals to nonexistent numbers, three long explanations of complicated and apparently arbitrary rules, and two failed attempts to change outdated address and phone number information lodged on various computer systems.”21

This bureaucratization of service may partly be explained by a need for formal rules to ensure equal treatment of customers, pressure to standardize processes to control costs, and—in Graeber’s situation—the need to ensure security and privacy. But it wouldn’t survive without our increasing acceptance, as customers and employees, of this formality and rigidity in customer service. As someone who travels a lot, I’m constantly struck by the scolding, condescending, and mechanical tone airlines use with me.

But a deeper connection between internal and external bureaucracy may be derived as a variation on Conway’s Law.22 Melvin Conway, a computer programmer, observed in 1967 that the structure of an organization’s software tends to mirror the organization’s communication patterns. In effect, the architecture of its software systems looks a lot like the structure of its organizational chart.

In my bureaucratic variation on Conway’s Law, the face that a company presents to its customers is also influenced by its internal structure. When you telephone a company, you’re transferred from one customer service agent to another based on their different positions in the organizational chart. You’re shifted from phone line to phone line as you cross organizational boundaries. They’ll have to look you up in four different IT systems because hierarchical bureaucracies don’t put much value on information sharing between silos. Your experience, in other words, mirrors their bureaucracy. Bureaucratic goop seeps through the walls of an enterprise and becomes embarrassingly visible to customers.

Bureaucracy affects even the language enterprises and their officials speak to the public. In Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, a government agency called the Ministry of Circumlocutions circumlocutes and discourages the public from filling out the many forms it requires—on the cogent grounds that nothing will happen with their cases anyway. Chrysler Corp. announced layoffs with a message saying that it was going to initiate a “career alternative enhancement program.”23 Governments, eager to obscure their more questionable actions, find ways to bury us under mountains of verbiage.‡‡

What seems to underlie this type of speech is a denial of agency. Individuals avoid acknowledging their responsibility with the help of vague and confusing language, just as they do by pointing to bureaucratic rules they are obliged to follow. George Orwell famously translated a well-known biblical passage into this anesthetizing exemplar of bureaucracy-speak that avoids using the word “I”:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.24

The original passage, from Ecclesiastes (9:11), was:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

We at Satanic Airlines are pleased to welcome you to Inferno International Airport, where the local time is … eternity. Please remember to take all your personal belongings.

History of Bureaucracy (Part Two):
Napoleon to Gaga

As we’ve seen, bureaucracy has been around at least since Y2K (bce, that is) when the Old Kingdom of Egypt was building huge stone cats without noses. But something changed in modern times to make it such a deep and disturbing part of our lives. By the time Weber was tossing around Schimpfworts, the bureaucratic lifestyle had already progressed enough that he was describing something well established. What had happened?

It’s tempting to date modern bureaucracy to the scientific management theories of Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) and Henri Fayol (1841–1925), but really the change was well underway in Europe by the early years of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution in 1789 had replaced a seemingly stable monarchy with the chaos of the mob, thereby initiating a century or so of seesawing between republic and monarchy in an attempt to regain control and structure while also promoting democracy and equality.

Napoleon entered the scene early in the nineteenth century and began bureaucratizing France, restructuring the civil service and introducing his Napoleonic Code. As you know from my last book (War and Peace and IT), Napoleon fought his wars on a grand scale. In earlier days, soldiers might have been appointed by a sovereign, drawn from the nobility with little care for whether they knew which end of a rifle shoots the bullets. By the time of Waterloo in 1815, though, Napoleon was managing an army of 200,000 troops against 500,000 British and other allied soldiers. The front at Waterloo was six times the length of that at the battle of Agincourt four hundred years earlier, and Napoleon commanded from a position more than a mile away.§§

He was able to manage on this huge scale because the French army had become a professional, hierarchical organization with a well-defined command structure. It had a dozen tiers of rank, at the bottom of which the soldiers were further classified into riflemen, light and heavy infantry, artillery, dragoons, grenadiers, light and heavy cavalry, signalmen, engineers, and scouts.25 It’s a common pattern: with scale, centralization of authority, and specialization come the sparkling adornments of bureaucracy.

France continued to be an innovator in bureaucracy throughout the 1800s. In time, as we’ve seen, they developed that strange idea of rule by desks, based on the notion of a fair, impersonal, rule-driven society, with continuity provided by a cadre of civil servants. This made sense to Weber, who found it natural that bureaucracy would accompany mass democracy—its universal rules and ideals help create order in an environment where economic and social differences, along with patrimonial authority, are eliminated.26 Unfortunately, France’s bureaucracy was quickly distorted by the petty maneuverings of the appointed officials that Balzac painfully describes in The Bureaucrats.27

Among the spoils of war that the English seized after Waterloo, apparently, was the idea of rule by desks, for they soon began to vie with France for bureaucratic supremacy. Refusing to be outdone by Balzac, Charles Dickens also took inspiration from the escalating bureaucratic arms race and became a spokesperson for British supremacy. “Britannia,” he says in David Copperfield, “that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl: skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.”28 Ugh, sick image, but no doubt sincere. There’s the nineteenth century for you.

On the business side, firms became larger as industrialization allowed for economies of scale. With advances in industry and technology—particularly in transportation and communication—and the need for large capital investments to build factories came centralization and standardization.29 The obvious next step was to apply a science and engineering mentality—the pride of the modern era—to business processes and accountabilities. That’s when Fayol, Taylor, and Weber came along and gave us the beginnings of management theory.

Skip a few more decades forward, to the Nazi genocide, a highly engineered bureaucracy applied to unspeakable ends. The Nazis too faced a problem of scale. After 1942, determined to murder all the Jews, they had to figure out how to make it practical. Six million is a lot—and they also had to deal with the Slavs, Romani, homosexuals, and others they’d marked for elimination. They mobilized an unprecedented bureaucratic effort to find, catalog, transport, kill, and dispose of their victims and their possessions.

It was not just in the mechanization of death that the Nazis showcased what bureaucracy can do; they also systematically used the legal bureaucracy to turn Jews into noncitizens and deprive them of their rights. Once the bureaucracy was in motion, it was easy for the perpetrators to overlook their own responsibility; they were simply filling roles in a machine efficiently set up to manufacture Jewish death. As Arendt put it, bureaucracy was conveniently a system where “neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody…. Rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done.”30

Nevertheless, by the 1950s bureaucracy had become the everyday lifestyle for corporate men and women in proverbial gray flannel suits.¶¶ Cookie-cutter suburbs fed white collar workers into city offices, and large enterprises became larger. Then, in the 1960s, students rioted against coercive authority, later becoming executives so they could exercise coercive authority themselves. Bureaucracy spread like a virus.

Then computers and the internet invented speed, and Lady Gaga began changing musical genres and clothing styles every few days. Which brings us to today’s anxiety about the need to move fast while neck-deep in bureaucratic sludge.

Busting Bureaucracy

We hear frequently of attempts at “bureaucracy busting.” But bureaucracy turns out to be hard to bust, leading even Weber to despairing exaggeration: “The only real way to rid oneself of an established bureaucracy,” he says, “is to simply kill them all, as Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome, or Genghis Khan in certain parts of the Middle East.”31

Incoming politicians vow to do away with bureaucracy, but in the end find it essential for exercising power, and instead of destroying it, wind up trying to direct it to their own ends. Frederick the Great’s attempts to abolish serfdom were frustrated by his inability to control the bureaucracy, which thought him naive and uninformed.32 Hitler’s genocide, as we’ve seen, was abetted by his bureaucratic talents. As it was co-opted by trolls looking for sustenance, the US’s Paperwork Reduction Act, predictably, produced paper. The Government Paperwork Elimination Act, just as predictably, produced even more.

New CEOs, as soon as they’ve located the restrooms and the nearest Starbucks, begin promising to do away with red tape and “bloated” bureaucracy, to the wild enthusiasm of shareholders and the press. Paul Adler, Professor of Management and Organization, Sociology, and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California, cites an article praising the leadership abilities of one new CEO, who “trashed two fat books of policies and replaced them with just 11 important ones,” saying that “Those rules, aimed at one percent of employees, handcuff the other 99 percent.”33 There’s no reference to the institutional knowledge that might have been trashed in the process, or of what replaced the rules. GE, famously, undertook a transformation intended to reduce its paperwork. “Unfortunately, it is still possible to find documents around GE businesses that look like something out of the National Archives, with five, 10, or even more signatures necessary before action can be taken.”34

The political scientist and public administration expert James Q. Wilson, in his book Bureaucracy, writes about the US government’s procurement system, which is governed by the FAR (Federal Acquisition Rule), a monumental*** document of six thousand pages. The problem with fighting procurement waste, he says, is that as soon as waste is discovered, more rules get added, resulting in even more waste.

If despite all your devotion to the rules Congress uncovers an especially blatant case of paying too much for too little (for example, a $3,000 coffee pot), the prudent response is to suggest that what is needed are more rules, more auditors, and more tightly constrained procedures. The consequence of this may be to prevent the buying of any more $3,000 coffee pots, or it may be to increase the complexity of the procurement process so that fewer good firms will submit bids to supply coffee pots, or it may be to increase the cost of monitoring that process so that the money saved by buying cheaper pots is lost by hiring more pot inspectors. Or it may be all three.35

He gives a specific example: a case where the army, because of rules intended to reduce waste, had to spend $5,400 and 160 days to get competitive bids for spare parts that cost $11,000. For all that cost and effort, they saved only $100 in the end.36

One reason why bureaucracy-busting initiatives have little chance of success is that they’re centrally managed, and centralization tends to require more bureaucracy. Graeber even frames an “iron law of liberalism” that says that “any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.”37

Nevertheless

Nevertheless, I’m going to show you how to bust bureaucracy. More specifically, I’m going to give you some ideas on how to digitally transform your organization even when bureaucracy is holding you back.

By digital transformation I mean adopting continuous innovation and change, risk reduction through agility, rapid sensing of market and competitive changes, and business flexibility. Most large enterprises, whether public or private sector, are not set up to move any faster than a glacier. And bureaucracy, as Frederick the Great and GE discovered, melts slowly.

Let’s be clear on what we plan to bust. It’s not Weberian bureaucracy, per se, that we hate. It is something like this:

Bureaucracy (n): immovable obstacles to what I am trying to accomplish that come from somewhere else in the enterprise and frustrate me. Examples: MD-102, Paperwork Reduction Act, new covers on TPS Reports. Used in a sentence: I am about to kill myself because of all this bureaucracy. See also: death, waste (human and process), and dung beetles.

Bureaucracies have three characteristics according to this definition: they’re stubborn, they’re obstacles, and they come from elsewhere.

Stubborn. Constraints are unappealable “no”s. They don’t take account of my special circumstances, and probably reflect an earlier understanding of good practices or a reaction to a situation that occurred long ago.

Obstacle. Constraints are frustrating what I’m trying to accomplish. I’m trying to do what’s right for the organization, but I’m being prevented.

Elsewhere. Someone outside my team is imposing the constraints, and I had no say in formulating them. Someone is wielding power over me, and I don’t like that.

Emotionally, this is what we hate about bureaucracy, right? And we tend to label organizational experiences as bureaucracy when we feel these emotions, whether they fit the Weberian definition or not. We’re not talking about the Venerable Immortals of the Ten Continents and Three Islands here, who presumably mean us well and try to support us (though being “venerable” and immortal perhaps makes them suspect). We mean the Crabby Trolls of the Nine Audits and A Million “No”s.

*	Of course, there has been a tendency toward constitutional monarchies in the modern era and even during medieval times in Britain. -au.
†	Note Schwartz’s indirect reference to Moby Dick and whales here. Leviathan is the huge monster of the sea cited in the Bible, and the term is often used to refer to whales. -ed.
‡	That is, happily drawing the connection between whales and state bureaucracies. -ed.
§	No lie. For details you can refer to Giulia En ders’s Gut: The Inside Story on Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ. -au.
¶	Though his canonical work, Economy and Society, wasn’t translated into English until 1947. -au.
**	Note that many people writing on bureaucracy appear to be confused by Weber’s use of the word “ideal” and think he was saying that bureaucracy is an ideal way to manage an organization. In fact, Weber is using the term “ideal” in the sense of archetype, or essential characteristics, as in the Platonic ideal of bureaucracy. -au.
††	Everyone seems to have their favorite way of summarizing Weber’s points in a bulleted list; some have five characteristics, some six, some seven. In Economy and Society, 956–958, Weber’s actual list seems to be: (1) jurisdictional areas, (2) office hierarchy, (3) written documents (“the files”), (4) office management (technical specialization), (5) full-time working capacity of the official, and (6) general rules. But in Weber’s text he restates these in many ways. My list is pretty typical. Other characteristics are sometimes listed as “career orientation,” “achievement-focused advancement,” “efficient organization,” “up-focused or in-focused,” and “administrative class.” -au.
‡‡	This is a reference to the story of the Monkey King, as told in Chapter 12. -ed.
§§	Waterloo: Napoleon’s 1815 defeat by the British and their allies, after which he was exiled to the island of St. Helena. Agincourt: battle in 1415 in northern France wherein the British defeated the French army. One mile away: see Battle of Borodino in Schwartz’s War and Peace and IT. -ed.
¶¶	Mr. Schwartz is referring to the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson (1955), about the struggles of a military veteran in cookie-cutter suburbia and bureaucratic officedom. -ed.
***	As a running gag throughout the book, Schwartz uses a different synonym for “large” every time he mentions the six-thousand-page FAR. -ed.