ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I can’t tell you how honored I am, and how fortunate, to have worked with the passionate and hard-working civil servants, both trolls and chaos monkeys, at DHS. I thank them for putting up with my provocations when they were just trying to do their jobs. Among the government folks who taught me the meaning of bureaucracy and how to work within it (and who appear in some of the stories I tell in the book), I’d include Keith Jones, Tracy Renaud, Rendell Jones, Larry Denayer, Leslie Hope, the folks at PARM and OIRA, Ken Moser, Suzi Rizzo, Sarah Fahden, Chad Tetrault, Mary Kay Rau, Tammy Meckley, Rafaa Abdalla, Mike Hermus, Luke McCormack, Chip Fulgham, Richard Spires …

Josh Seckel was responsible for much of our chaos monkey strategy and led the creation of our splendid bureaucratic artifacts, MI-CIS-OIT-003 and 004. A lot of our bureaucracy became more visible when a few of our friends from US Digital Services dropped in to help us, including Eric Hysen and Stephanie Neill.

I learn every day from my teammates at AWS. With them, I’ve explored the worlds of digital transformation and how it can be stopped dead by poorly implemented corporate bureaucracy, and I’ve gained some perspective on my earlier government experience. Thanks to Phil Potloff, Miriam McLemore, Jonathan Allen, Thomas Blood, Phil Le-Brun, Xia Zhang, Clarke Rodgers, Joe Chung, Jake Burns, Ishit Vachhrajani, Bryan Landerman, Tom Godden, and Gregor Hohpe.

Thanks to my reviewers: John Millay, who did the crucial work of making sure I wasn’t saying anything outrageously stupid about Weber or Merton; Jonathan Allen; Jennifer Anastasoff; and Thomas Blood. And Professor Paul Adler, who let me borrow so many of his ideas.

And, of course, to the inspirational Gene Kim and all the folks at IT Revolution, especially my editors Anna Noak and Leah Brown. I’m hoping to recycle all the extra commas they deleted from this book into the next dozen or so books I write.

And Jenny, who let me use the comfy armchair every morning to edit the manuscript. She still doesn’t believe that Moby Dick has anything to do with bureaucracy.