We are very pleased to issue a Bureaucratic Performance Award to Ali Kazma for his outstanding O.K.  With his O.K., he has demonstrated rapid and highly efficient rubber-stamping.  Like Kim Schmahmann’s Bureau of Bureaucracy, Ali Kazma’s work is finely crafted.  His concern for time exceeds even that of Hanne Darboven’s pioneering 27K-No8-No26.  His work connects to the working world in a way that Paul Kelpe’s art never did.  Ali Kazma’s work provides a model of bureaucratic excellence and an outstanding contribution to our organization’s mission.  All his colleagues speak highly of him.  He focuses on his job description, has never failed to attend a meeting, and always answers the phone promptly.  He brings his work home with him and eats his lunch at his desk.  Here’s your award.  Congratulations.  We are very pleased to issue …

In other bureaucratic issues this month, the Canadian Legal Education Annual Review recently published an article entitled, “A Novice Lawyer at the Art Gallery.”  The article “analyzes the new lawyer’s transition from the legal writing genre of office memorandum to the legal writing genre of advocacy brief.”  We believe that such a transition is misguided.  With an appropriate cover sheet, an office memorandum informs as well as any other type of lawyerly document.

Maria Thompson Corley at the Board Street Review appropriately urges everyone not to quit their jobs.  She insightfully asks: “when you come right down to it, what job isn’t important?”  Every job is important. Learn how to hang on.

Recent research shows that chimps’ ability to throw shit correlates with brain development.  So instead of complaining that bureaucrats are throwing shit at you, recognize that shit-throwing indicates intelligence.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

Bureaucrats working late on the holidays preparing the perfect cover sheet or carefully editing, copying, and filing documents may, with the flicker of a fluorescent light, wonder whether their work can stand against the forces of darkness, change, and innovation.  In times of crisis, when defensive walls must be high, thick, and impenetrable, bureaucrats must work longer and harder.  There is no other way.  Failure is not an option.  If some bureaucratic procedure isn’t producing the desired results, don’t give up.  Practice makes perfect.  Keep repeating the failing procedure until it succeeds.

For those for whom work requirements allow for a free evening sometime during the holidays, we suggest sitting at your desk and watching a video of Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company performing Ludovic Jolivet’s profound dance, Yoy Y Vengo.  This dance captures the rhythms of a typical bureaucratic work week.  Despite its striving for modernity, modern dance has largely overlooked the significance of office chairs for movement.  Voy Y Vengo rightly places the office chair at the center of modern movement.

Pragmatic Euphony has a fascinating description of how the Chinese selected bureaucrats in the fifteenth century.  Bureaucrats took civil service exams over three days while living in a tiny little exam room: “The only movement allowed was the passage of servants replenishing food and water supplies, or removing human waste.”  Such an exam is excellent preparation for bureaucratic work.

As learned literary critics have expostulated, nursery rhymes encode transgressive semiotics.  Proper regulation of offensive nursery rhyme significations is imperative in a society that respects international human rights law.  Bureaucrats have stepped up to this unpleasant job.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

Most persons approach bureaucrats only with trepanation.  Given the importance of bureaucracy, that’s unfortunate.  Nonetheless, this bureaucratic obstacle can be removed.  According to Wikipedia, “Trepanation is perhaps the oldest surgical procedure for which there is forensic evidence, and in some areas may have been quite widespread.”  Trepanation probably helped to support the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza and other monumental bureaucratic achievements.  Modern public health bureaucracies should set up mass trepanation programs to help ensure that our children, who are our future, are prepared to live healthy and happy lives in bureaucratic society.

But what about bureaucrats’ children?  After suffering generations of abuse, many bureaucrats have evolved thick skulls.  A thick skull makes trepanation more difficult and dangerous.  However, trepanation is probably less necessary for bureaucrats’ children.  Since bureaucracy begins at home, bureaucrats’ children from an early age are likely to harbor less fear of bureaucrats.  Bureaucrats are also likely to have fewer children than less resolutely committed workers.  For the aforesaid reasons, we tentatively conclude that a program to explore innovation in technologies for trepanation in the case of thick-skulled children is not warranted to be pursued at this time.

In other bureaucratic news this month, the Library of Congress has established a wonderful online collection of blank historic forms.  Historians have sadly neglected bureaucratic history, including the important history of forms.  Persons interested in becoming better educated can enjoy hours of informative reading in this form collection.

Reading through some of these forms this past Friday evening, I came across an intriguing dog license from Reading, Massachusetts in 1860.  Some jurisdictions today require dog licenses via the appropriate form, but they only issue a dog tag, not an actual paper dog license.  Given the choice between a small metal tag and an actual paper document, the paper document is clearly superior because it can be filed much more regularly.  Note also that the Reading dog license explicitly specifies “male dog.”   This suggests either discriminatory practices or separate licenses for male and female dogs.  The latter much better honors bureaucratic ideals.

Tripp Babbitt considers whether bureaucrats are getting a bum rap.  He correctly recognizes that they are.  He astutely observes:

If we are to fix government, we need everybody engaged and the bureaucrats are in the best position to see the problems and identify ways to fix them and help fix the systems they work in.

We encourage all concerned citizens to write that sentence on an index card and make copies of the card and hand them out whenever they hear bureaucrats being made fun of.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

With entrepreneurial threats emerging across the Internet, formulating strategic plans to establish working groups to improve organizational security must be considered imperative by all essential bureaucracies. Fortunately, Google is here to help.  An organization totally lacking any managerial hierarchy recently attempted to infiltrate Google News.  With the help of a form letter, Google tentatively rejected the intrusion.  That letter noted:

We don’t include sites that are written and maintained by one individual. We currently only include articles from sources that could be considered organizations, generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information.

This letter also noted that this policy applies only at this time and is subject to future reconsideration.  That’s good bureaucratic practice.  We suggest that Google reconsider and strength its tripartite organizational threshold criteria (TOTC).  A respectable news organizations needs more than multiple writers and editors.  It needs many, many editors, including sub-editors, section editors, division editors, and managing editors.  Writers should be separated at least into headline writers, opinion writers, feature writers, news writers, and beaten writers.  A meeting to establish a committee to redraft the TOTC should be scheduled immediately.

In other bureaucratic news this month, winterspeak has declared, “Accountants don’t notice that macroeconomics is wrong because they are imaginationless grinds.”  Persons who are always imagining things belong in mental hospitals.  Grinding out work, day in and day out, has built this world into what it is today.

YouTube is launching more than 100 new channels of exclusive video content.  Not one of them is squarely addressed to bureaucrats and bureaucratic interests.  Merely claiming that these new channels are “original” is no excuse for this inexcusable exclusion.  Without a stream of programming like Desk Set, Office Space, La Meurte de un Burócrata, and Groundhog Day, YouTube will never be able to absorb a huge amount of viewers’ time.

Eric Schmidt, a Google high-level manager, is criticizing government bureaucrats.  This is a clever strategic faint.  But the careful reader can see through it.  Consider Schmidt’s statement:

Mr. Schmidt recounted a dinner in 1995 featuring a talk by Andy Grove, a founder of Intel: “He says, ‘This is easy to understand. High tech runs three times faster than normal businesses. And the government runs three times slower than normal businesses. So we have a nine-times gap.’ All of my experiences are consistent with Andy Grove’s observation.”

In other words, Schmidt recognizes the value of a policy calculation that Andy Grove made about 16 years ago.  That’s called enduring value.  For those lost in the day-trading mentality without any sense of enduring value, realize that bureaucracy is forever.  Bureaucracy will continue to exist long after Intel has produced the last x86 microprocessor chip for a desktop computer.  Google is betting that the tortoise will win the race.  You should be, too.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

Rubber stamping is typically thought to be perfunctory work.  That’s not true.  A rubber-stamping bureaucrat considers carefully and at length which rubber stamp to use.  In the Department of Planning at the Government Printing Office, bureaucrats had to manage a huge number of rubber stamps arranged on tall rubber-stamp trees.  Many bureaucrats have similar arrays of rubber stamps.

A well-developed bureaucracy considering a report requesting approval to document a proposal to form a new department does not merely stamp “approved” or “rejected” on the report.  It might be stamped “further edit” or “insufficient documentation.”  It might be stamped “in process,” “circulating,” “filed,” or “refile.” It could be stamped “reconsider,” “reconsider again,” “2nd reconsideration,” or, alternatively, “reconsider again and again.”  Documents must be triaged into “preliminary,” “draft,” “redraft,” “daft,” and “trash.”  The number of strokes and stroke force also matters for the impression.   The sight of a bureaucratic in a yellowing dress shirt, perspiring, tie askance, vigorously and repeatedly rubber-stamping a report would make clear to anyone the effort that goes into the work.

Matt Mullenweg’s revelation of Automattic’s creed has seriously damaged confidence in Automattic’s prospects for joining the ranks of leading bureaucratic companies.   Of particular concern is Automattic’s creedal statement, “I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me.”  Expert bureaucrats learn to be incredibly focused on their job descriptions.  Automattic needs to edit thoroughly its creed if it wants to be able to recruit expert bureaucrats.

The European Union is a bureaucratic leader.  That strength is particularly important in the current economic crisis:

Gunther Oettinger, the top German representative in the European Union, proposed that a bureaucratic invasion force be sent from Brussels to Greece to seize the struggling country’s assets “without regard to resistance.”

If Brussels had not engaged in a massive bureaucratic buildup, it would lack the strength to take over Greece.

Countries struggling with government debt need not just good taxes, but great taxes.  As Mark Cuban has insightfully declared, “Bureaucracy and Paperwork is the Greatest Tax on Small Business.”  Small business is a key engine of job creation.  Taxes on small business have to make the leap from good to great.  Payroll taxes, property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, and other taxes for small business should be immediately reviewed with the objective of considering how to implement a revision of regulations restructuring and deepening the contribution of bureaucracy and paperwork to the taxation of businesses categorized as small under the operative regulations for business-size classification.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

In a recent post that attracted widespread admiration on the Internet, Paul Buchheit declared, “I am nothing.” Excellence in execution of this statement would propel Buchheit into the ranks of leading bureaucrats. Buchheit, however, was the creator and lead developer of Gmail at Google, and he current acts as an angel investor and entrepreneur.  These activities raise serious questions about his merits as a bureaucrat.

Talking and writing about nothing is not enough.   Real-world bureaucratic success always depends on execution: doing nothing.  Top-ranked bureaucrats engage in self-effacement day in and day out, year after year.  They remain tranquil in the midst of turbulent activity, they provide brick-solid, consistent service, and they survive through shakeups, reorgs, and mission-statement pivots.   Buchheit’s curriculum vitae is not bureaucratically rich enough for him to deserve admiration among leading bureaucratic voices.

In other bureaucratic issues this month, Judy Sims is rooting for AOL.  She observes:

Think about it, this is a company that has had eleven straight years of layoffs and more executive firings and re-orgs than any single human being can possibly keep track of. (I believe the major re-org count is three this year alone.)

AOL is one of the few companies that have successfully made the transition from Internet pioneer to highly effective bureaucracy.  We are delighted that one AOL department is continuing to mail computer disks, now targeted to acquiring new senior-citizen customers.

AOL’s excellence is exemplified in the agenda for an internal all-hands meeting for TechCrunch after AOL’s announced its acquisition of that company.  The meeting ran for 3.5 hours.  The first hour of the meeting was entitled, “Welcome/Opening Comments.”  The heart of the meeting was a one-hour “HR Orientation” that included topics such as “Badge Photos” and “Fill out Paperwork.”   Meetings bring people together and help to make a bureaucracy great.

Daniel Lemire analogizes computers to bureaucrats.  As computers become pervasive and vital to everyday life, Lemire’s analogy gains force.  Among Lemire’s insights:

One of the cheapest ways to improve the speed of a bureaucracy is caching. Keep track of what worked in the past. Keep your old forms and modify them instead of starting from scratch.

Put differently, bureaucrats invented caching long before microprocessors began using it.  Perhaps caching should be renamed bureaucrating, and a cache renamed a bureaucrater.  Both computers and organizations could then be ranked by the size of their bureaucraters.  A respectable, modern organization should have at least a 100K bureaucrater.  The Chinese government has the best potential for building an organization with a 1 Meg bureaucrater.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

Big, immobile stones in a shady, moist atmosphere support a beautiful matrix of moss, lichen, ferns, and other greens.   The same is true for organizations and bureaucracy.  Even with the sound of a tremendous waterfall nearby, bureaucrats remain as placid as moss on stone.  There are no better models of peace and tranquility than moss and bureaucracy.

Among key bureaucratic issues this month, Research in Motion (RIM) Senior Management recently had to deal with a panicky open letter from a RIM employee warning of dire dangers for the company.  RIM Senior Management responded:

RIM recently confirmed that it is nearing the end of a major business and technology transition. … it has become necessary for the company to streamline its operations in order to allow it to grow its business profitably while pursuing newer strategic opportunities. Again, RIM’s management team takes these challenges seriously and is actively addressing the situation.

This response is a model for bureaucratic excellence. The “it has become necessary” phrase has a tranquility that surpasses that of many passive constructions.  Moreover, its referenceless “it” encompasses the cosmos.  Note also that the above text would remain just as effective if RIM were replaced with another organization’s name.  Responses that foster easy re-use make bureaucratic organizations more efficient.

Additional open letters from RIM employees have subsequently appeared.  These letters indicate serious weaknesses in bureaucratic swimming skills:

Whenever something goes wrong (incident, problems, even non-customer impacting) a lengthy and involved process of finger pointing starts, and without fail, a new process is born. And, sadly, since the announcement came out about the financial problems and layoffs, it’s become worse. Many of the managers are saying we need to rely more heavily now than ever on process. To those of us who need to deal with this process, which consumes days of work generating documents that no one will read, it’s an obvious case of CYA on the managers part. If they say ‘but we followed the process!’, they seem to hope their heads won’t be on the line. We are no longer a company that is innovative and energetic, we are drowning in paperwork.

Employees well-trained in bureaucratic swimming will not drown in paperwork.  A good start for such training would be careful study of RIM Senior Management’s model bureaucratic response.

JoelBlog documents an intricately and exquisitely engineered registration process for AT&T DSL.  A commenter explained the secret to this work:

What is called AT&T now is actually SBC, a Baby Bell with a penchant for out-sourcing. SBC bought Cingular, AT&T, Pacific Bell, lots of other companies. … SBC brought with them metric tons of bureaucracy, all running in IE {Internet Explorer}.

If you want to build web forms that fully exploit the special powers of IE, you need to develop massive bureaucratic muscle.

Feral farting camels produce a lot of methane.  Australia’s Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) has proposed to cull the camels.  Culling farting camels is a common-sense approach to reducing emissions.  A more excellent bureaucracy would have developed attachable bags and a network of collection centers to put that natural gas to use.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

A corporation’s esprit de corps depends on having frequent, long meetings.  Despite the grave dangers currently confronting economies across the world, some irresponsible bloggers are urging the reinvention of the bored meeting.  That’s a waste of time.  The bored meeting has already been invented.  Why invent it again?

Venture Capitalist Brad Feld richly displays the extent of faulty reasoning and missed appreciation.  Feld writes:

I hate board meetings.  I probably have 100 per year which means I’ve gone to well over 1,500 of the past 15 years (I’m sure the number is much higher). The vast majority are excruciatingly inefficient – three to four hours that could be handled in 45 minutes.  And even then, it’s unclear that the information covered was particularly useful to the entrepreneurs and management, who are the ones the board meetings should be useful for in the first place.  And they don’t merely waste three hours – they burn a day in advance “getting ready” and who knows how much time after following up on random things generated by me and my fellow board members.  Toss in travel (since we invest all over the country, I lose a lot of time to traveling) and it just sucks.

If a three-to-four-hour meeting could be handled in 45 minutes, then the reports presented at the meeting lack quality and importance.  Management should be advised to hire additional staffers to prepare better cover sheets.  Ensuring that board meetings are interesting requires good bureaucratic leadership, a proper organizational structure, and leadership commitment to full participation in the meeting.

In another bureaucratic issue this month, Scott Adams, who has probably done more than anyone to increase appreciation for bureaucracy, has sadly failed to follow best bureaucratic practice for resolving conflict between himself and a horde of crazed Internet critics.  One honored bureaucratic procedure is a mediation meeting.  That probably wouldn’t be possible in this situation.  Hence Adams should have appointed a commission to write a report analyzing the problem and recommending steps to move forward to formulating a plan to establish an organization to address the problem.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

After the world-renowned Carnival of Bureaucrats included a picture of a wounded Raggedy Ann, the media has been filled with lurid accusations and fabricated stories.  To set the record straight: Douglas Galbi is not a functionary in any bureaucracy that wounded Raggedy Ann.  Douglas as a young child loved Raggedy Ann, and they were together for a number of years.  He would never do anything to hurt her, although her head did come off when she bashed one of his brothers with his help.  She has now completely recovered and is in smiling good health.

Occasionally a form gets lost, a record gets mis-transcribed, and the wrong person is tortured or shot.  Everyone knows that bureaucratic errors occur.  Few realize that they are part of an effective operating plan.  In the most progressive bureaucracies, the error program is so important that it’s mentioned at least in an appendix to one of the chapters of the organization’s mission statement.

An error program helps to develop fault tolerance.   As the Netflix tech blog recently explained, “The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly.”  Netflix, in a move probably intended to compete with cable and network-television bureaucracies, instituted a formal program of failure:

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS [Amazon Web Services] is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

Well-developed bureaucracies embrace failure as part of their normal operations.  A bureaucracy that fails constantly builds a reputation for consistent service and encourages fault tolerance among its customers.

In other bureaucratic issues this month, Cisco continues its business blunders with an ill-informed management restructuring.  Cisco reduced the number of its management councils from nine to three and its management boards from forty-two to fifteen.  Cisco has thus increased its vulnerability to Horowitz’s Law of Crappy People.   One news report insightfully described this management restructuring as “shedding bureaucracy.”  Shedding bureaucracy indicates a failing company.

Without increasing its appreciation for middle management, Google runs the risk of following Cisco. Google lets its engineers spend 20% of their time working on projects not established through Google’s bureaucratic hierarchy.  Back in 2008, Google’s recently deposed CEO Eric Schmidt described this rule as a means to foster innovation:

The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives. [This is] a systematic way of making sure a middle manager does not eliminate that innovation. … It means the managers can’t screw around with the employees beyond some limit.

Middle management is not a problem; it’s a solution in search of a problem.  Is there any wonder that Eric Schmidt is no longer Google’s CEO?

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.