SMASHING THROUGH THE BOUNDARIES: BUREAUCRACY'S GOING DOWN!

Bureaucracy: that cancerous growth upon the human psyche.. I think the West needs a paradigm change. Bureaucracy is the diminution, the strangling of human potential. The West needs to replace "systems" with frameworks for human opportunity and growth. We are more valuable than parceled value, stronger than the delegitimized edifice of institutional inertia. We have got to liberate our power to think, not becoming boxed into deviationist dancing on the "head of a pin". The West experienced Enlightenment and Counter-enlightenment. Haven't we the gumption to ascend to that Higher Age calling upon our collective Mind and Will?? There is nothing pathetic about the bureaucratic norm; bureaucracy aims to eliminate even human Pathos from its soul-starved void. The dustbin of history is littered with heresies: elimination of bureaucracy will be the First Frontier to an unadulterated future full of promise and prosperity. 'Declaring war on bureaucracy is not unlike declaring war on, say, cancer or drugs' - Jack and Suzy Welch 'What you want instead is an organization where ideas flow freely up, down, and sideways, along halls, in elevators. A business where an idea's value has nothing to do with the stripes on the shoulder of the person behind it and everything to do with their insight and creativity' Kenneth argues that bureaucracy is never optimal. Hence, 'mission driven' organizations must subdue and, ultimately, eliminate the 'bureaucratic form'. He is not a fan of Weber! Weber on bureaucracy: 'From a purely technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings.  It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability.  It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it.  It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks' On his contradictory attitude thereto: 'The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of superiority and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones. No machinery in the world functions so precisely as this apparatus of men and, moreover, so cheaply... Rational calculation . . . reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself into a somewhat bigger cog. . . . The passion for bureaucratization drives us to despair ' 'It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones--a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative systems, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ...is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics. . . we were to deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life'