Recently Martha Payne, a nine-year-old girl, was photographing her school lunches and writing about them on a blog.  She did this for fun, as writing practice, and as a way to raise money for Mary’s Meals, a charity helping to provide food for impoverished children in Malawi.  She was doing this independently, on her own initiative, and without any organizational affiliation or team of editors.  That’s a recipe for trouble.  Martha should have been learned better in school.  Not surprisingly, her independent initiative led to some bureaucrats becoming afraid of losing their jobs.  The Argyll and Bute Council thus ordered the school to tell Martha to stop taking photos of her lunch.

This cease-and-desist order didn’t eliminate the bureaucratic threat.  Undoubtedly aided by her status as a cute, nine-year-old girl, Martha’s plight attracted a huge amount of attention from Persons Acting Without Job Descriptions (PAWJDs) across the Internet.  The PAWJDs forced the Argyll and Brute Council to change its decision.  Millions of such cases around the world go unnoticed and unchanged.  But even one change is too many.  This bureaucratic emergency went from bad to tragic.  More change, possibly even in school lunch menus, may be forthcoming.

Directly ordering Martha to stop taking photos of her lunch is far from bureaucratic best-practice.  A top-notch bureaucracy would instead have sent her a 66-page incomprehensible legal document, with a cover letter from a London solicitor.  This document would formally inform Martha that she must apply for a license to take photos of her lunch.  The document would set out the lengthy application procedure for licensing, specify possible photographic rights differentiated by fruit and vegetable, and describe dire penalties for unlicensed lunch photography.  Any respectable bureaucracy could have ensured that Martha would not photograph her lunch without fear, uncertainty, and doubt until she become old enough not to want to.  Direct commands are the actions of tyranny, not bureaucracy.

In other bureaucratic news this month, Ryan Tomayko at the hugely successful Internet firm GitHub explains GitHub’s organizational secret.  As Horowitz’s Law of Crappy People instructs, GitHub makes everyone a manager.  Mr. Tomayko explains:

It’s often cited that GitHub doesn’t have managers.  In my opinion, a better way to describe the phenomenon would be to say that everyone at GitHub is a manager.  Instead of assigning 100% management duties to individuals, the basic role of management is spread between 1.) every single employee, and 2.) a set of custom in-house tools that serve to keep everyone in the know with regards to other projects.

Other firms that want to be as successful as GitHub should also adopt bureaucratic best-practices.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer has, among his many plaudits, the high honor of being selected Bureaucrat of the Month.  Despite Ballmer’s distinguished record of achievement, Eric Raymond has suggested that Microsoft should replace Ballmer:

You know, at this point Microsoft’s board ought to replace Steve Ballmer with an orangutan.  Screaming a lot and flinging feces in all directions seem to be the job requirements; the orangutan would cover that for a few bunches of bananas a week, and its strategic decisions couldn’t possibly be worse.

Prudent bureaucrats should be starting to formulate plans to defend their jobs if they are being threatened with being replaced by orangutans.  A good first step would be to establish a company meal policy that forbids eating bananas within the office or during lunch.

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.

Among myths and misunderstandings of the Titanic’s sinking, particularly regrettable is the lack of appreciation for the Titanic’s postal clerks.  These five men devotedly sought to fulfill their job assignments, even to the point of their deaths:

During Titanic’s frantic final hours on April 15, 1912, Titanic’s postal clerks, along with steward Albert Theissinger and several others, desperately tried to save the 200 sacks of registered mail by dragging them to the upper decks and possible safety.  Theissinger was the only survivor to recall seeing the mail clerks alive.  When he finally abandoned the seemingly suicidal task, the five mail clerks — Americans Oscar Scott Woody, John Starr March, and William Logan Gwinn and British postal workers James Bertram Williamson and John Richard Jago Smith– were still frantically at work, sloshing waist-deep in freezing water.

All five postal clerk went down to their deaths with the sinking Leviathan.  Ship steward Albert Theissinger, who was not a government bureaucrat, abandoned the ship and survived.  He latter recounted, “I urged them to leave their work.  They shook their heads and continued at their work.”  Think of the Titanic’s postal clerks when you think of civil servants in countries experiencing dire government budgetary crises.

In other bureaucratic issues this month, Bill Adair wrote an excellent profile of “Tom Haueter, a bureaucrat who may have saved your life.”  Adair observes:

And one thing to keep in mind about bureaucracy: It can be a good thing. It can put the brakes on impulsive political responses and make sure agencies thoroughly consider the impact of their actions.

We concur wholeheartedly.  Bureaucrats have in fact saved the world.

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 an important and insightful recent article, Tatiana Yu. Borisova has shown the enduring importance of bureaucracy.  She shows that “old bureaucratic means of writing and distributing legislation to the local soviets” became dominant within months after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.  The Bolsheviks adopted internationally standard bureaucratic language, including “a particular syntax (complex syntactical constructions), a particular vocabulary (conservative and filled with special terminology), and a system of broad formulations.”  This scholarship indicates the need for deepening and intensifying the reconstruction of socio-economic systems worldwide by coalitions of expert bureaucratic organizations committed to overcoming the worsening economic crises and fiscal imbalances that threaten the unity of governing bodies that are crucial to the continuing welfare of the people, especially women, children, and the disabled, who face grave danger from forces attacking the foundations of equitable and self-governing states.

In other bureaucratic news, Max Zografos was fired from Microsoft.  Among other problems, he failed to appreciate the importance of meetings:

Microsoft culture expects you to be in meetings. Calendars need to be decorated with sufficient colourful blocks, to signal over-activity.

Dig a bit deeper and you’ll realise that Microsoft meetings are a way to diffuse and evade responsibility for decisions. Yes – let’s spend weeks and weeks “reviewing with stakeholders.” It’s so much safer that taking swift decisions ourselves. The company places no trust on the individual to make the right decision on their own.

Since being fired, Mr. Zagrofos states that he has “Never been so content, fit, and healthy.”  While that may be true, as exemplary bureaucrats, we hate to see anyone get fired.  The lesson is obvious: schedule and attend many meetings, and maintain your position.

Yahoo’s top manager has decided, “It’s time for Yahoo! to move forward, and fast.”  From a bureaucratic perspective, that sounds bad.  However, the plans for moving forward involve a corporate reorganization.  That’s bread-and-butter bureaucratic work.  In 2009, a prior Yahoo CEO also did a reorg to help Yahoo move faster and become more customer-focused.  Hence Yahoo’s bureaucratic specialists should be well-prepared to implement this reorg.

Bureaucrats need to stick together, or they risk falling like dominoes.  Consider media developments in Britain:

Some journalists shrug at the news that BBC local radio may lose its station managers. Bon voyage, bureaucrats! But shrugs turn to shivers when it emerges that the corporation’s next director general need never have made a programme, or indeed edited anything. And now Johnston Press, commanded by a former BBC digital wizard, begins to abolish editors for individual papers themselves, merging and melding from Edinburgh to Leeds as though they were, well, managing local radio stations.

Managing and editing is critical, generic bureaucratic work.  When one manager or editor falls, others face increased risks.  The only solution is to advocate for an increased number of managers and editors.

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.

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Reference: Borisova, Tatiana, The Legitimacy of the Bolshevik Order, 1917-1918: Language Usage in Revolutionary Russian Law (March 20, 2012). Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. 05/LAW/2012.  Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2028951 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2028951

Mushroom management typically is associated with organizations filled with dead wood.  But what if your organization contains some employees that show signs of life?  Have no fear, mushroom management can still produce results.  Move those employees to windowless offices and assign them TPS reports. If necessary, order trepanation for them.  Then lean back and wait for their personal development.

Crappy newspapers executives are historical leaders in mushroom management.  John Paton, who apparently isn’t a crappy newspaper executive, is advocating change in the newspaper business.  A lot of change.  Nothing is worse for bureaucracy than change.  He must be stopped.  Repeat until succeed must proceed.

Another honored management approach is Linus Torvalds’ kernel management style.  Torvalds decisively advocates non-decision-making:

The name of the game is to _avoid_ having to make a decision. In particular, if somebody tells you “choose (a) or (b), we really need you to decide on this”, you’re in trouble as a manager. The people you manage had better know the details better than you, so if they come to you for a technical decision, you’re screwed. You’re clearly not competent to make that decision for them. … So the name of the game is to _avoid_ decisions, at least the big and painful ones. Making small and non-consequential decisions is fine, and makes you look like you know what you’re doing, so what a kernel manager needs to do is to turn the big and painful ones into small things where nobody really cares.

Producing large reports helps to avoid making decisions, or least to avoid making any decisions that anyone can locate and complain about.

Ben Balter has proposed post-forking for enhancing WordPress editorial workflow.   With such an innovation, “any content becomes either publicly or privately collaborative.”  This combines all the benefits of editing with all the benefits of meetings.  It’s potentially a huge contribution to bureaucracy.

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.

If highly developed economies are to escape economic collapse, they must better utilize bureaucratic innovation.  Narrow-minded innovation review committees tend to favor entrepreneurs, while giving short shrift even to fully and properly completed bureaucratic innovation applications.  The enormity of the cost to the economy is of magnitude that makes it difficult to be stated properly and fully even with extensive staff effort that has been devoted to the task.  Think of whales.  Before the development of modern industrial economies powered by the extraction, processing, and distribution of petrochemicals that now present the specter of resource depletion not to mention global warming and the heating of the atmosphere due to human activity in all its wastefulness, whale oil burned brightly.  With the advent of electricity, opportunities for innovation were overlooked:

Imagine a whale oil convention a hundred years ago where the speakers about electricity only came from within the ranks of the whale oil industry. One session is dedicated to new innovations in oil lamp manufacturing where the oil is lit by a spark of electricity. Another looks at the benefits of listening to the radio while resting with the soft light and therapeutic fragrances of scented oil lamps. Still another examines innovations on the future use of electricity in steamship navigation equipment.

No one got these important ideas.  These innovations were lost to posterity.  Women and children suffered.  Don’t let that happen again.  Bureaucrats vastly outnumber entrepreneurs.  We must embrace bureaucratic innovation.

In other bureaucratic issues this month, Stephen Wolfram has clearly articulated a fundamental law of bureaucracy: “people don’t want answers, they want reports.”  WolframAlpha is gaining the ability to generate reports — reams and reams of charts, graphs, and tables — automatically.  WolfamAlpha technology will radically increase bureaucratic report-generating productivity.   However, the most important part of a report is its cover sheet.  If WolframAlpha could also generate attractive and appropriate cover sheets, every bureaucrat could have a fresh, impressive-looking stack of custom reports on her or his desk.

A veteran of countless bureaucratic battles recently shared some wisdom.  If you’re in a bureaucratic battle and you find yourself in a hole, dig deeper.   Deeper holes offer more protection.  So as bad as the situation may get, never give up.  Keep digging.

The Early Times, covering the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, reports:

Bilal Ahmad of Lalbazar is working as head assistant in Department of Higher Education at Civil Secretariat. In early 1990s, he got his sister-in-law No:1, namely Kousar Jan, appointed as Laboratory Assistant in Government Degree College Baramulla.

Later, on 01-05-2001, Bilal Ahmad managed to engage his sister-in-law No:2, namely Shubeena Tabasum, engaged on College Local Fund at Government College for Women M A Road Srinagar. In the list published on 19-02-2012, she stands appointed as Library Bearer at Serial No: 7. According to the college staff, she had revealed to her colleagues about her selection and had relinquished her charge in December 2011 when the final appointment list was being finalized.

Someone should prepare a full report, with cover sheet.

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.

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.