Mark Schwartz, author of leadership classics A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value, reveals a new (empowering) model for the often soul-shattering, frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare we call bureaucracy.
"Bureaucracy has never been discussed in such an entertaining and educational way before. Learn how to clean out the organizational ‘scar tissue’ that is slowing you down."
—Adrian Cockcroft, VP Cloud Architecture Strategy, Amazon Web Services
Mark Schwartz, author of leadership classics A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value, reveals a new (empowering) model for the often soul-shattering, frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare we call bureaucracy.
Through humor, a healthy dose of history and philosophy, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat, Schwartz shows IT leaders (and the whole of business) how to master the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler to create a lean, learning, and enabling bureaucracy.
For anyone frustrated by roadblocks, irritated the business can’t move fast enough, or suffering under the weight of crushing procedures, this book is for you. No matter your role, you need a playbook for bureaucracy. This is it. With this playbook, you can wield bureaucracy as a superpower and bust through it at the same time.
"Mark Schwartz turns the tables on bureaucracy, offering a practical guide to stripping out a labyrinth of rules and replacing them with simplicity, ease, and automation. His version of a benevolent bureaucracy paves the path for digital transformation and facilitates creativity and innovation."
—Kimberly Johnson, COO, Fannie Mae
In a previous post I revealed how IT is the biggest, baddest bureaucrat on the block. But to overcome bureaucracy, we need to separate those of its aspects that are problematic from those that are not, and focus our efforts on the former. We must disengage from the metaphysical pathos and reengage in a particular way. Let’s now identify the actual bad stuff.
Making Bureaucracy Lean, Learning, and Enabling
I’ve been thinking a lot about bureaucracy. And the first thing I want to point out is that bureaucracy is not just a problem in the public sector, in government. It’s something that companies have to think about a lot. In my role at AWS I meet with about 120 senior executives from large enterprises each year, and consistently they tell me that their biggest problem or one of their biggest problems in transforming is bureaucracy.
If you’re an IT geek, don’t fool yourself into thinking that because you love to get things done quickly and effectively, and because you rebel against rules imposed on you, you’re free from the bureaucratic urge. No, it’s more likely that you have an impressive ability to optimize processes and implement controls by turning people’s freedom into constraints. You, mon semblable, mon frere, are probably a bureaucracy savant.
Quick Guide To DevOps For The Non-IT Business Leader
Think carefully about what success looks like. In the digital world, it looks like speed, flexibility, controls, and leanness—not like making plans and following them. It’s these new IT practices that will bring you those benefits. They have already brought them to the many other enterprises that have started down the path and, in some cases, disrupted industries.
If you want to unlock your enterprise’s digital transformation, you must change not only its relationship with technology, but its relationship with its technologists. Conventional wisdom has settled on a way of integrating IT into the enterprise that hasn’t been very effective up to now...
It might seem like a stretch to compare the business environment to a battle, but a set of common characteristics seems to exist between war, ICUs, business in the digital era, and IT. Each of these, including the business enterprise, is an example of a complex adaptive system (CAS)—a self-organizing system (a concept that draws from evolutionary biology) in which individuals pursue their own objectives and interact in complex, ever-changing ways.
“Mark has done it again: with his usual wit and verve, he has cut past normal lazy blather about ‘bloated bureaucracies’ to get to the truth about their place in the world. In doing so, he outlines not only why bureaucracies are necessary, but how they are best fought through a deep understanding of their internal logic and weak points. [The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy] serves as a handbook on how to fight the good fight not just for IT, but for the world too.”
—Ian Miell, Cloud Native Consultant, Container Solutions
As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, Mark Schwartz uses his extensive CIO wisdom to advise the world’s largest companies on the obvious: time to move to the cloud, guys. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, change leadership, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile practices in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or just confused and much poorer.
Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value, A Seat at the Table, and War and Peace and IT and the winner of a Computerworld Premier 100 award, an Amazon Elite 100 award, a Federal Computer Week Fed 100 award, and a CIO Magazine CIO 100 award. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
“My brain continues to turn around quantum bureaucracy. How to get the right amount of it at the right time and in the right place, but no more and not there unless you look. Maybe Schrodinger’s Bureaucracy is something I need to work on and think about…Great read, and I’m so thankful to Mark for writing this book to reform bureaucracy. With his insight into razor-bearing sumo monkeys, we can progress toward a more modern way of managing. Like Jonah, I felt trapped with no way to determine my own direction. Mark provides great tools for guiding the whale.”
—Josh Seckel, Specialist Leader, Deloitte Digital
DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019