Bureaucracy is a powerful word: Utter the word at a boring party and in the twinkling of an eye, you have a wild one on your hands. Businessmen and entrepreneurs loathe the word; corporate managers smile, and then wince privately ; common people shudder at the thought of yet another queue and delay; and the bureaucrats, they smile a condescending `you-don't-know-it-all' smile. Bureaucracy, as a word, is much misunderstood. For a bureaucrat, that's life, and there's no question about it; For an academician or a philosopher, it stands for a rational-legal system; For a linguist, it means a government office; and for all others, the word is confusing.
What the concept actually stands for is something that every manager seems to ideally want -- clear cut rules and firm procedures, and a proper delegation of authority and responsibility -- the concept provides an illusion of certainty. At the same time, the strict adherence to the system also means that, when the system is not allowed to change, over a period of time it becomes irrelevant. Bureaucracy simply does not stand for a government office; ant enterprise that operates within rigid premises is a bureaucracy.
One must realise that bureaucracy, in practice, is what human beings do with it. It is only a tool -- a tool that can be used to maim or to make lives better. To use an example, it is like an electric chainsaw. When it is used to cut timber and build houses, it is constructive, and useful to society. When it is used to hack a person to death, it is destructive. Now, just because one *can* use a chainsaw for murder, it makes no sense to ban the chainsaw. It is the wielder of the chainsaw that matters; it is the purpose of the person that matters. Now, using the chainsaw as an example, in itself, is deliberate: A chainsaw, even for constructive purposes causes problems - environmentalists will agree. And a bureaucracy, even in government, causes problems. The user of the chainsaw has to take steps to control the fall-out to the environment like sawing coupled with afforestation. The same holds good for bureaucracies. The people in bureaucracies have to make sure that the fall-out of such a system is not detrimental to the purpose of its existence.
One thing that is clear is that a bureaucracy is best used in certain conditions, certain environments and for certain purposes. For the purpose of government, a bureaucracy is indispensable. Here again, the bureaucracy, as a tool, has to be used properly -- that is the point. One can't use anything other than a rational-legal form of governence because of the promise of equity and justice in terms of philosophy and the sheer number of people to be serviced in terms of common sense. And bureaucracy, as a system that exacts discipline and obedience from its members, is most useful in organisations that need humans to carry out certain procedures but also requires them to work in complete harmony with no glitches in the process. One example is the military, which requires immediate obedience.
In terms of applications in corporates, the best application can be made in customer service and in logistics. One might wonder how bureaucracy can be applied in customer service and in logistics, which require fast responses and intricate and meticulous planning. Again, the matter depends on the interpretation and the application of the concept of bureaucracy. Imagine an organisation that has logistics and customer service with the kind of effectiveness that the military has. What has happened over a period of time is that people in bureaucracies -- government and otherwise -- have lost their focus on the purpose of their organisation's existence.
The form, the structure, the system -- whichever way one looks at bureaucracy -- was designed by human beings. Oftentimes, the system rules the organisation, becoming some sort of Frankenstein, where the creator has lost all control and is feeling helpless. The issue, then, is not whether bureaucracy is good or bad. It is whether it has been applied the right way and at the right place. What one needs to do is to take a fresh look at the concept, assimilate the advantages, and make enough changes in the design to alleviate the fallout of the disadvantages.
For this, most people need the benefit of hindsight, and this is where we have run into trouble: ``It has never been done this way before.'' As Arie de Geus writes in `The Living Company', which, incidentally, is one of the books reported in the books section in this issue, ``Every act of decision making is a learning process.'' This is because every decision creates a new reality, one more given, and the opportunity to build a future in terms of more `what ifs'. But one also needs to keep in mind the way in which bureaucracy has lorded it over its masters, the people. Members get addicted to the system simply because the concept seduces that part of the members' minds that wants to conform, to be a part of a stable and continuing organisation.
A bureaucracy provides a perpetual and certain reality within itself. The worrying fact is that it also helps its members run away from the real world, where the reality is more complex, much more discontinuous and just totally different from the comfort of one chair, one desk, a load of files, routine work, getting to know your immediate boss and a few immediate subordinates.