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I suspect that this is the nature of org evolution. Any project has a certain probability of success/failure. When a failure means exit/promotion pause... then continuing to deliver projects is just rolling the dice. Eventually the smart people in an organization wise up and move to less measurable parts like management. It doesn't make sense to disallow this - as you smart/successful people moved into the bureaucracy and keep the training wheels on. On the other hand, it can get out of hand - particularly when hiring in a bureaucracy from the outside world.

I find this view interesting if you think the origin of the concept (of bureaucracy) illustrates the transition from arbitrary management towards a rule-based, rational (and very much productivity enhancing) approach...

Great for work that is amenable to strict process. Getting burgers out in 3 minutes for example.

Also great when you want national resources managed by policy and not by cronyism. I get the modern trope that bureaucracy = bad, the whole point I'm trying to make is: the concept was first proposed as an idea of improvement in administration in the 1800s.

One half of people think that bureaucracy is bad because it's in the way of the work they are trying to get done.

The other half think it's bad because they can't steal everything that's not nailed down.

And sometimes stealing everything that's not nailed down is the way work gets done, i.e. disruption. Trying to manage this out based on some anodyne rules out of a committee makes for a perfectly harmonious but completely static, risk-averse organization of little potential.

It's like trying to censor speech. You get rid of "bad" speech but you also get no interesting speech. Is it really worth it?

Most things have a golden middle amount, where its great in the right amount but sucks if you have too much or too little. Bureaucracy is no exception. Trying to make a large group of people work towards a common goal effectively is really hard without some management. Too much though is extremely stifling.

The thing is, it's needed. You can't have an organization without some level of bureaucracy. It's what ensures an organization, works and remains to be a functional organization.

But it's very nature is anti productive. By this I mean, documenting, discussing, approving, and creating boundaries, all work to slow down an organization, even though it's necessary to ensure the wellbeing of the organization. As a specific example, organizations often have separation of duties for certain things (like activities involving pay to avoid embezzlement from happening), but doing so naturally slows down the handling of these activities. If one person has to do his part, then write documentation to instruct what they're trying to do and what they need someone else to do, send those instructions to someone else, wait for their approval, and then send it to someone else to process it... all of this is slower, than if the person who wrote the instructions, skipped writing the instructions, and approved and processed it themselves. But obviously that can result in some bad situations, and hence why some bureaucracy is inevitably necessary.

A lot of things that we categorize as bureaucracy were created as a reaction to something bad happening. Someone shipped the product with an obvious security flaw -> every new product needs security review; some product had a name that violated someone else's trademark -> making committee gets created; someone kept expensing insane meals -> let's create clear expense guidelines; managers keep approving things that violated the expense policy -> let's higher auditors who review every expense report.

This will keep happening to even the most incompetent person cannot do anymore harm. Meanwhile top performers leave. AFAIK the best way out of this has been Netflix's "freedom and responsibility". You expense crazy meals, you get a warning. You do it again, you are fired.

Tell me more about this Netflix “freedom and responsibility”. The natural trend towards inefficient “process for all the things” hits hard as a really deep insight.

Security for example. Every new things needs security review. How does this fit into the Netflix “freedom and responsibility” concept?

> bureaucracy were created as a reaction to something bad happening

Probably, but not every bad thing happening requires a response. Sometimes mistakes or bad things happen, and you just say, "use better sense next time", and then you move on.

Most people have been taught to do a Root Cause Analysis and improvement plan for everything.

that's still good. The missing piece is taking into account the cost of these "processes" throughout their lifetime when deciding whether or not to add yet another procedure.

This is a good way of explaining how the iron law of beurocracy appears to those on the ground as creep sets in. The first series of changes (security, legal, expense guidelines) seem to be reasonable solutions because they directly effect the output of the business and could expose huge liability.

The pernicious part happens when those ancillary functions become conflated with the business itself, at which point it is far too tempting to further expand the beurocracy to service those functions (i.e. auditors). My sense is that the most despised rules in most organizations are such second-order attempts to service the beurocracy.

An common example might be the procurement department, whose purpose was originally to facilitate and track purchases for the business. Maybe at first they managed and distributed credit cards to employees. However, this is still inconvenient when employees make innevitable mistakes. Instead of dealing with this inconvenience, credit cards are eventually taken away from employees and an online procurement portal is set up and/or people are expected to file reimbursement paperwork after trips. Now the beurocracy has effectively shifted its own burdens onto individual employees while making the process slower, more complex, and more expensive. Despite all of this procurement will now be considered a core pillar of the business because executives look at all that sunk cost and fallaciously conclude that the procurement beurocrats are indespensible.

Meanwhile, there isn't really a similar mechanism at play to protect people doing the actual work.