Most organizations employ various internal functions to help management to comply with government and regulatory agencies (e.g., filing forms to report the number of injuries in a factory or filling out SEC documents to report the sale of company shares by executives). There is increasing concern about the costs of these regulatory functions, as well as their administrative burden. To this end, a host of instruments - the Standard Cost Model, for one - have been developed to simplify these functions.

Continue reading "Reducing Bureaucracy"

The management of a Fortune 100 company recently decided they could no longer support the Experimental Lab in their R&D department. The lab had become a huge bureaucracy that was not creating value for the company, and its innovations, when weighed against its operating costs (almost $1 billion), failed to justify its existence. The company management decided that before downsizing the lab, they'd give it a chance to reinvent itself. The lab's management then embarked on a participative planning process with its stakeholders to redesign it into a self-sufficient profit center.

Continue reading "Bureaucracy Transformed"

In the rational mechanistic model of organization according to which bureaucracies are designed, the social system is viewed as a means to attain group goals and objectives. Changes in organizational patterns are thus viewed as tactics to improve the level of efficiency. In other words, employees are considered cogs in the machine. This runs contrary to the fact that individuals are searching more and more for meaning from their work.

In order to transform bureaucracies, we need to change the bureaucratic/mechanistic mindset to a socio-cultural systemic one. In this view, an organization is a complex system composed of purposeful human beings. When a purpose appeals to the moral conviction of employees, then they are capable of acting with conviction and self-determination without being micromanaged. And when organizations operate with a clear and well-aligned purpose, then they become great and influential.

Continue reading "The Mechanistic Mindset and Bureaucracy"

It's clear from our readers' comments that, when it comes to navigating bureaucracy, they could use tips from a pro. Seek no further. BusinessWeek has enlisted the noted author, professor, and business consultant Ram Charan to help you chart a course through corporate quicksand.

Post your questions here and Ram will answer them as part of BusinessWeek's upcoming double issue "Business@Work."

Don't hold back; let him know what's really on your mind. Confused about whether to stay in a maddening maze of process? Ask him how you know when it's time to go. Frustrated by layers of management that make it hard to be heard? Ask him how you circumvent middle managers to get noticed. It's all fair game.

I'd like to excerpt a comment submitted by a reader "C.P." and invite other readers -- as well as our resident guru John Pourdehnad -- to comment on his/her insight. C.P. writes:

"Bureaucracy is the common denominator between the intrinsic "lust" for power and those that seek refuge from its umbrella effect of pro-limitation. [...] Negotiating a bureaucratic system comes down to a few pressing factors:

1. Comprehension: of your work/system of work (cannot negotiate or work within the confines of a bureaucracy without knowing what you are responsible to-do).

2. Identification: knowing who and why the underlying factors of "the/a" bureaucracy exists and who the primary suspects are that construct the strain on inquiry/productivity.

3. Confirmation: once confirmed, you must begin the process of evaluating your "profit & loss" within the situation/s. Choice becomes the optimal tool for negotiating a bureaucratic system and must be analyzed by the incumbent" to define the chances for growth and non-growth as they pertain to negotiating the confines of a bureaucracy.

These are just a few of the initial steps to defining the larger characteristics of bureaucracy. Ultimately the answers to solving the non-productiveness of bureaucratic systems (is an individual process).

But, if the properties of the bottom line begin to represent a pride in new ideas and innovation (bureaucracy will slowly become irrelevant to all public, private and social indexes)."

So what do you think? Is C.P. on to something?