Apologies to John Wanamaker for stealing this quote and applying it to bureaucracy rather than advertising. Yet there’s no better way to summarize the challenge of bureaucracy in today’s corporate world.

The New York Times recently published “Death by a Thousand Papercuts” — an excellent column about modern bureaucracy by columnist David Brooks. In that column Brooks looks at the “growing bureaucratization of American life” noting that the result will “redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.”

Brooks notes the extraordinary economic costs of bureaucracy in America.

• Within healthcare alone expert David Himmelstein thought that in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”
• And across the economy, “growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P.”

He also offers a useful hint around the connection between bureaucratic growth and Trump’s dedicated MAGA followers. Listen with an open mind and I find, within MAGA screeds, conspiracy theories, and screams for attention, a constant theme about those who lose out within heavily bureaucratized America. In truth, this bureaucratization demands a narrowly defined type of individual and loses to society a tremendous amount of human value when individuals cannot thrive within its narrowness.

Let me also note that growth in government is not tied to party. Certainly liberals in the US have a reputation for building new bureaucracies. Bureaucratic creep, though, is driven by all politicians through legislation. Every time a legislator gets a new rule passed — perhaps a conservative wanting to eliminate certain books from school libraries — they expand the bureaucracy by adding more bureaucrats and more paperwork. Locally, when our Oregon legislature passed a law mandating that “all high school graduates be taught CPR” they forced the district to build a new bureaucratic program to comply with the law. The programs relied on existing teaching staff but required more bureaucracy.

Government bureaucracy, though, isn’t my primary concern. Bureaucracy in business is where things are tremendously out of control. Narrow bureaucracies have taken over many corporate cultures. Preferring rules to effectiveness, this bureaucracy created today’s micro-management by metric and has shifted career success in a company to success in bureaucratic politics — not achievement.

Yet it is Nothing New — Consider The Organization Man from 1956

Brooks partly suggests this bureaucracy is the result of companies building structures of safety within the current climate of regulation. This has truth but also follows an ideological tendency to blame government for bureaucracy. In reality, corporate bureaucracy thrives for far different reasons. In part, it has been built by executives hoping to turn the unpredictable challenge of doing business into a fully predictable discipline. MBA programs aid and abet this approach given the many ways in which an MBA degree is a study of management through bureaucracy.

This is also not new. In 1956 William Whyte published the Organization Man — a sociological study of corporations which includes three chapters focused on the “Fight Against Genius.” His observations apply today starting with genius:

Customarily, whenever the word brilliant is used, it either precedes the word but (cf. “We are all for brilliance, but …”) or is coupled with such words as erratic, eccentric, introvert, screwball, etc. To quote Mr. Steele again, “While industry does not ignore the brilliant but erratic genius, in general it prefers its men [and women] to have ‘normal’ personalities.” (p212)

If [administrators] get scientists to be good company men like other normal people, they won’t be bothered much by scientists’ following their curiosity. The policy will keep out that kind of scientist. For what is the dominant characteristic of the outstanding scientist? Every study has shown that it is a fierce independence. (p211)

That’s only a start. Here’s a more concerning truth (we still see today) about hiring practices:

If the criteria set up by many personnel men were to be applied across the board, the majority of US corporation executives would be out of a job tomorrow. (p141)

And, finally, corporate inability to comprehend the people who do what matters most: