Knocking Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy seems to work against progress. Institutionalized decisionmaking is about avoiding mistakes and (thereby) preserving jobs. According to Jack Welch, the successful former boss of General Electric, good leadership isn’t about your success. It’s about the success of others. Welch told Wall Street Journal editor Holman Jenkins, “It was up to me to get great people.” And to dump those who didn’t measure up. (WSJ Opinion Journal, 2.11.06).

Bureaucrats don’t want to be fired, and they don’t want to be measured. It’s why businesses run better than governments, and why management reform tries to make government more entrepreneurial.

Jenkins talks about Welch’s current interest in fixing education, and says Welch

fumes about the Democratic Party and its lockstep with the teachers unions. "They fight vouchers. They don't like charter schools. They don't like taking care of these kids. They like bureaucracy. How, morally, can they do it? It shocks me."

Reviewing a study of successful flim directors, Richard Schickel similarly knocks bureaucracy for its negative impact on motion pictures:

The truth is, whatever “system” is in place is geared to the creation of shambling mediocrity. That’s what bureaucracies do best. What really interests us are the exceptions, the films that over the years claim our continuing interest. We do not like to believe that their greatness is accidental. We need to believe in intentionality, the self-conscious assertion of a ruling sensibility.
(Los Angeles Times, 2.12.06)

Whether or not Jack Welch is, like a great film, an “accident,” these two different sources agree bureaucracy is the enemy of good.