The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organizat — Bureaucracy

"Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress."

"Everyone knows how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as a meritocratic system is. The first criterion of loyalty to any organization is therefore complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power. ... As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true."

"Project management has long been discussed by corporate executives and academics as one of several workable possibilities for organizational forms of the future that could integrate complex efforts and reduce bureaucracy.... This approach does not really destroy the vertical, bureaucratic flow of work but simply requires that line organizations talk to the other horizontally so work will be accomplished more smoothly throughout the organization"

"My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

"The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting — so that the big people dont always win — is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy. And with the bureaucracy comes the territoriality — which is again grounded in human nature. And the incentives are perverse. For example, if you worked for AT&T in my day, it was a great bureaucracy. Who in the hell was really thinking about the shareholder or anything else? And in a bureaucracy, you think the work is done when it goes out of your in-basket into somebody elses in-basket. But, of course, it isnt. Its not done until AT&T delivers what its supposed to deliver. So you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies. They also tend to become somewhat corrupt. In other words, if Ive got a department and youve got a department and we kind of share power running this thing, theres sort of an unwritten rule: "If you wont bother me, I wont bother you and were both happy." So you get layers of management and associated costs that nobody needs. Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. Theyre too slow to make decisions and nimbler people run circles around them. The constant curse of scale is that it leads to big, dumb bureaucracy — which, of course, reaches its highest and worst form in government where the incentives are really awful. That doesnt mean we dont need governments — because we do. But its a terrible problem to get big bureaucracies to behave."

"In every bureaucratic system the shifting of responsibilities is a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms of political science, that is, as a form of government—the rule of offices, as contrasted to the rule of men, of one man, or of the few, or of the many—bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership."