Killing Bureaucracy at Work

Last week while sitting in one of many meetings, the presenter started talking about "restructuring" this meeting for 2008. This is normally a 1 hour, weekly, cross-functional meeting where people from various teams share status updates. It already sounds boring and bureaucratic right? Well it's going to get even worse this year. The meeting is breaking into 7 sub-teams plus a "steering committee." Each of these teams will no doubt have their own meetings.

So we just went from consuming 10 hours of a week (1 hour times 10 meeting attendees) to monopolizing more of people's time that they could otherwise spend being productive.

As this was announced, I hope nobody saw me roll my eyes and scribble in my notes, "This is bureaucracy at it's finest." But why is bureaucracy so bad and what can we do about it?

Jack Welch happened to cover that topic in the December 24th, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek.

"It sucks the life out of a business. It turns normal people, granted a smidgen of authority, into rule-bound technocrats and twists candid conversation about real issues into jargon...

Make people uncomfortable about scheduling formal presentations, especially if they involve slides in a darkened room. That practice is a total bureaucracy enabler. It makes idea transfer to one-way and ceremonial! What you want instead is an organization where ideas flow freely up, down, and sideways, along halls, in elevators."

So the next time you're thinking of giving a PowerPoint presentation, do everyone a favor and ask yourself "Why?" Instead, focus your efforts on more informal, frequent, and open sharing of ideas.

Full article - BusinessWeek.com - Death to Bureaucracy