Busting Bureaucracy
is designed to be given to people who are currently not managing so they might
participate in the decision to change, or so they will understand any change effort that the management team decides to undertake.
The goal of the book is to help you learn the following:
1. Your
organization is almost certainly organized using much or all of what is called the “
bureaucratic form”.
2. Virtually all organizations that use the bureaucratic form seem to suffer the same suffocating and immobilizing symptoms that people call “bureaucracy”.
3. Most employees blame their organization’s bureaucracy on senior management. They assume that management must want it, or it wouldn’t be tolerated.
4. Senior managers don’t want or like bureaucracy any more than the rest of the employees. The detestable effects of bureaucracy victimize everyone, regardless of level. Senior managers haven’t known what to do get rid of it. Executives have tried many things to eliminate bureaucracy, but the program of the year approach generally hasn’t worked, because they have been fighting symptoms, not the root cause.
5. The root cause of bureaucracy is the organization model, the bureaucratic form. Yet, the bureaucratic form is so pervasive that its destructive nature is seldom questioned.
6. If you were starting a new enterprise today, you could avoid bureaucracy by using a new organizing model called the mission-driven model.
7. Existing bureaucratic organizations can reduce the amount of bureaucracy by changing one or more of the basic organizing principles, either temporarily or permanently. This book outlines a set of step for de-bureaucratizing by changing basic organizing principles:
a. Make an assessment of the present state of the organization to learn how much permission to change and commitment to change is available from stakeholders and senior management.
b. Depending on the amount of available commitment, choose the optimal goal state: a modest goal, a moderate goal, or an ambitious goal.
c. The goal state will suggest the strategy for changing the organization. The strategy will range from a minimum effort based on re-organization and a new way of managing called continuous improvement.
8. People in the organization who currently aren’t managing will play a vital new role in the de-bureaucratized organization. The labor/management war, if it exists in your organization, must end. Everyone in the organization will need to act as one unified team, driven by a common mission, and aligned by a common vision of the new organization.
The book closes with a vision of what your organization might look like, and be like, when you have achieved your desired goal state. You will discover the rewards that come from working in an organization of empowered people who are satisfying or even dazzling their customers, and are doing so with few, if any, of the immobilizing and suffocating effects of bureaucracy.