Too Big to Succeed

We’ve all seen how bureaucracies seem to be the least effective when most needed and I can’t help but wonder why this is the case? Are they destined to fail? Are they infiltrated with incompetents? Just crazy enough to be true, but I doubt it.

Let’s start a business, you and I. OK, now we need some employees. Who’s going to oversee them? Well, I guess we’ll need a manager for that cuz you and I are involved in the frying of bigger fish. Payroll? We need an accountant and office manager. Oops: someone got hurt and is filing a workman’s comp claim. We need to get an insurance guru that knows how to handle that. And, before you know it, we’ve got us a bureaucracy! Each of those main players we’ve brought on will, in time, need their own main players and the corporate layers will grow accordingly.

Further dilution and separation of responsibilities will occur as a matter of course and in the name of “efficiency”. You and I are happy because our company seems to operating at its fullest potential. Our organizational chart is a thing to behold, what with its universe of divisions and departments. Life is good.

Until the operation goes very much awry and decisions are needed now so actions can follow immediately thereafter. A fire? No problem: who’s got the key to the fire extinguishers? Well, let’s check with the Fire Prevention Unit. That guy’s on vacation, though. Who’d he place in charge? Can’t tell by looking at the chart. Hell, let’s break the lock. Who authorizes the breaking of corporate property? Don’t know. Where’s the crash axe? We stored them with the fire extinguishers. It made sense at the time.

The Keystone Kops would have been proud to play a part in our little skit. But this kind of comedic catastrophe plays itself out every day yet the bureaucracy survives. We have a panel to study what went wrong and why, rearrange or realign the departments, maybe fire a few scapegoats, and then proudly proclaim that the system is now safe and ready for anything. Until that “anything” occurs, of course. Does it come as a surprise to anyone why we have come to distrust a bureaucracy? I wouldn’t think so and it follows that our distrust flows surely to our governments (local, state, and federal) because they seem to have perfected the art of bureaucratization. So what do we do about it?

Accept it. “What?”, you shout. Well, with some exceptions, but the nature of a bureaucracy is no different than that of a scorpion or rattlesnake. Sooner or later, when dealing with one or the other, you are likely to be bitten. It is simply the nature of the beast in question. A bureaucracy, though, is man-made and can be altered (over time) to provide a more streamlined and timely response to problems. That involves the elimination of many departments and their associated personnel and is precisely why it will not occur overnight. Shrinking through attrition is the most equitable solution, I’d say, and, in the meantime, I’d suggest that every bureaucracy has a Disaster Czar with ultimate authority and control. And even then, problems would arise, but hopefully fewer and smaller ones.

No one can deny that corporate and governmental ne’er-do-wells use a bureaucracy for political or professional cover when things go wrong on their watch. Conversely, many good folks with honorable intentions get chewed up in the same grist mill. And we just can’t tell one from the other, can we? All we can do is try to simplify the structure that leads to such undesirable conclusions. In the meantime, however, we are left with debacles similar to the current BP mess in the Gulf of Mexico. We have a corporate bureaucracy trying to co-exist with a political one. It’s like watching two teenagers learn to waltz: countless missteps and bruised toes.

Many conglomerates in the financial crisis were labeled as too big to fail and were subsequently offered public assistance. I submit that many of our bureaucracies are too big to succeed and must be simplified and allowed to atrophy so as to reach a size that lends itself to greater success. (How about starting with the IRS?)