Quotes About Bureaucracy

The word bureaucratie was coined in the early eighteenth century by Jean-Claude Marie Vincent, a French government minister. Translated as "the rule of desks," the label was not intended as a compliment. Vincent viewed France's vast administrative apparatus as a threat to the spirit of enterprise. (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.) A century later, in 1837, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill described bureaucracy as a vast tyrannical network.

In a bureaucracy, human beings are instruments, employed by an organization to create products and services. In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument—it's the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.

The question at the core of bureaucracy is, "How do we get human beings to better serve the organization?" The question at the heart of humanocracy is, "What sort of organization elicits and merits the best that human beings can give?

How, exactly, do the archetypical features of bureaucracy—stratified decision rights, formalized unit boundaries, specialized roles, and standardized practices—undermine adaptability, innovation, and engagement?

An organization's capacity for renewal should never depend on the capacity of a few senior leaders to learn and unlearn, but in a bureaucracy, it often does.

In the age of upheaval, the quantities of foresight and ingenuity required to run a large organization exceed the abilities of any single human being or small team—and the bar keeps going up. Simply put, bureaucratic structures ask more of leaders than they can deliver.

bureaucracy partitions activities into formally defined operating units, each with its own goals, team members, and budget. Where the aim of stratification is consistency, the goal of formalization is clarity. By precisely delineating roles and responsibilities, individuals know what they're accountable for, what decisions they can make, and what resources they control. It's hard to imagine how an institution could function without a formal organization, but perhaps we should try.

In consequence, our organizations are often less resilient, creative, and energetic than the people inside them. The culprit is bureaucracy—with its authoritarian power structures, suffocating rules, and toxic politicking

The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship, and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

You see, I'm from your government, and I'm here to help you.

It's a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful! They're hobbled by their paper shufflers, like all politicians. More so, in a way.

In high school, I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor's Office of Los Angeles, and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done, and nobody was really interested in getting anything done.

Temporary teams of trusted people are generally sent to all Departments and to major agencies of government to assist in planning and to acquaint the incoming administration with the civil servants and bureaucracy that will remain in place in the new Administration.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

Getting things done in this country, if you want to build something, if you want to start a company, it's getting to be virtually impossible with all of the bureaucracy and all of the approvals.

In all great business very large errors are excused or even unperceived, but in definite and local matters small mistakes are punished out of all proportion." This is one reason politicians are risk-averse, and why modern government administration seeks to minimize risk and avoid failure through a mindless bureaucratic process that delivers mostly mediocrity.

Our tax code is so long it makes War and Peace seem breezy.

there were no artificial obstacles, things that are insisted upon that make it hard for people to get any work done — things like bureaucracy, security, refusals to share with other people.

When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, "Well, what do you need?

Then there was the libertarian or anarchist socialist, the proponent of self-management and mutual aid and the enemy of bureaucracy, party and state power.

This was fine with Katrina Vross, a weary, short, baggy-eyed chain-smoker with the put-upon air of many Russian bureaucrats whose attitude suggested that any question you might ask was a major imposition on their time, a reflection of your own stupidity, and a confirmation that life was an endless series of debilitating repetitions.

For 47 years, the U.K. has been forced to follow rules set by Brussels bureaucrats, many of whom have never set a foot on British soil.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.