Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
improvements have been affected where it takes just 20 days and seven
signatures for a product to be exported (Theunissen, 2006). Now if you are a
wealthy investor in Europe or America, where would you locate your business
and invest your money?
Similarly, in the age of speed, tight deadlines and responsiveness, would you
rather stand in a queue using the services of an unfriendly public postal provider,
or be treated in a quick, friendly and human way by an efficient private company
without any delays in service delivery? The same principle applies to all providers
of services. However, sometimes the public does not have a choice, especially in
the case of monopolies and public services. Who will forget the incident of a
member of the public who in a very threatening way refused to accept the nondelivery of service by the Department of Home Affairs last year? Why do we have
so many different layers of directors in the public service and what impact do
they have regarding service delivery chief directors, directors, assistant
directors, deputy directors ? Yet, bureaucracy is not limited to the public sector.
Even some private sector companies have created huge and powerful
bureaucracies.
World-class companies have created centres of excellence that know no rank or
position it is all about sharing and utilising expertise, and transferring this focus
on pockets of excellence to the whole organisation with the speed of lightning.
On the other hand, average and under-performing companies have created
pockets of incompetence that are ruled by bureaucrats, micro-managers and task
masters. Typically, the finance, purchasing and human resource functions
seemed to be the main culprits. Finance makes it as difficult as possible for the
business to get a cent out of the system. Purchasing is hesitant to acquire the
supplies needed by the business, and when they eventually do so, the poor
supplier must wait a long time to get paid. HR seeks to take their time to deliver
inadequate people services, and often works directly against the needs of the
business.
Unfortunately, most of us are powerless to influence bureaucracy at national or
governmental levels. Where we can indeed make a difference, is at the level of
our own organisations. For example, global powerhouse General Electric (GE)
instituted a culture to break bureaucracy down. They believe that success
requires a hatred for bureaucracy and all that goes with it. Royal Bank of
Canada believes that an organisation should centralise paper but decentralise
people. Staff should extricate out silly forms and policies that gridlock and
strangle learning. Fewer boundaries and fewer bureaucracies allow the lifeblood
of knowledge to flow quickly and freely throughout the organisation. If you have
a form that must be completed to make a manager feel powerful to approve or
reject something, an illusion is created that the manager is in control. You know
what? The manager is not the boss, bureaucracy is the boss! You dont even
have to think, the system thinks for you. In fact, bureaucrats have not only
_____________________________________________________________________
Bureaucracy
2
Management Today (April 2007)
created their own culture, but also their own language. Some well-known phrases
of bureaucrats are as follows:
The reality about bureaucracy is that it was not always there. No company is
started as a bureaucracy. Companies are born through the innovative spirits of
entrepreneurs, yet, as companies grow and expand through the life cycle of
business, bureaucracy becomes part of the fabric and culture of the organisation.
The moment it is part of the culture, it stays there. It is like cancer that simply
grows bigger and bigger, and the only possible cure is to cut it out, but it may be
too late. Companies fail to recognise that any request to satisfy a customer who
has a need that can not be accommodated by the current system, presents a
huge opportunity for innovation and growth. If the system cant do it, the system
must change. We need more entrepreneurs and leaders, and less managers and
bureaucrats.
The new world of work can no longer sustain bureaucrats, micromanagers and
the ridiculous layers, hierarchies and empires they have created. They operate
in a world that no longer exists. These people have been effective in the stable
industrial economy of the previous century. There is no place for bureaucrats in
the new dynamic business world a world that is driven by knowledge, speed,
action, flexibility and responsiveness. Todays managers are people who can
think out of the box, beyond channels and rules, and are often required to make
_____________________________________________________________________
Bureaucracy
3
Management Today (April 2007)
a decision on the spur of the moment. Your policy and rule book will not help you
if your customer has a new need for which you have not yet created a procedure.
Moreover, the customer is not going to wait for you to get your house in order,
and will simply knock on the door of your competitors, who are likely to be more
responsive. Today with the power of computers, the Internet and email, the
customer is even more powerful. He can simply send an email to ten or more
companies at once, blind copying all the others, and see which one will answer
first and display the required willingness and capacity to meet his needs. Then
he can sit back and smile, and just delete the answers he does not like, or
respond by confirming receipt and acknowledging that he has already been
helped by a competitor! To add salt to your wounds, he will even give you the
name of the competitor he selected, knowing full well that it is one of your biggest
rivals. With the business clock ticking 24 hours a day throughout the world across
all time zones, the sorry we are closed mentality will simply not work.
Let us turn to staff. Jack Welch says that hierarchies tend to make little generals
of perfectly normal people who find themselves in organisations that respond
only to rank. In the knowledge economy, most staff members realise that their
knowledge is the real asset of the company. Knowledge is power, not rank.
Knowledge workers know that if the company does not want to use their
knowledge, other innovative companies will gladly welcome them to come and
rather work for them. People want to add value and use their knowledge and
skills to innovate, improve and create a better workplace and better products and
services for customers.
However, todays knowledge workers, especially the younger generation who will
very soon run the economy, get easily frustrated with bureaucracy. They
understand the power of knowledge and the speed and flexibility of
communication, because they have send emails throughout the world before they
could drive a car. Furthermore, they do not want to be told what to do by a micro
manager who lives in the past and generates unnecessary non-value added work
just to keep staff busy. At the coal-face, staff members themselves know of
better, quicker and more effective ways of getting things done. If a company or
manager tries to use the bureaucracy to control them, employee frustration levels
will simply go up and they will eventually leave. They can no longer tolerate a
situation in which it is expected of them to lie to customers or show loyalty to a
company when they know very well that inefficiencies cause customer
dissatisfaction. The performance improvement consultant Geary Rummler puts it
succinctly when he said: If you put a good person against a bad system, the
system wins every time. That is the reason why talented people who are natural
innovators, are either directly or indirectly forced to leave their companies for
greener less bureaucratic pastures.
The management guru Tony Manning recently added his voice to those who
criticise inefficiency in the public service. He says that delivery is held hostage
_____________________________________________________________________
Bureaucracy
4
Management Today (April 2007)
by ignorance, and most leaders dont realise this. He goes on to say that the
worst leaders are the least accessible because they insist that the only way to
reach them is through the right channels. These leaders are oblivious to the
fact that few messages get where they are intended through these channels, and
those that make it are sure to be distorted. The result is that neither bosses nor
their people know what is going on.
Many suppliers can tell you long stories about how the bureaucracy of their
clients affects their business. For example, in the consulting industry, you are
expected to submit business proposals, and then have to wait between six and
18 months to get an answer, if you are lucky to receive a response. If you are
fortunate enough to be awarded the tender or contract, you enter the
organisation, and in dealing with the company you realise that you are now part
of a bureaucracy. Very often, because of tedious processes, incompetence and
red tape, you will wait months before you are paid, a situation that most small
businesses, in particular, can not afford.
If bureaucracy is the problem, what is the solution? Here are some practical
guidelines to transform your bureaucracy to a modern flexible and dynamic
company:
_____________________________________________________________________
Bureaucracy
5
Management Today (April 2007)
A good local example of how bureaucracy was reduced, is the South African
Revenue Service (SARS). With the right leadership focusing on the right things, a
huge government bureaucracy was transformed into a service orientated
dynamic institution. If you apply for a tax extension online, you get an answer
within seconds. Also, the border post between Zimbabwe and South Africa was
well known for being one of the slowest in the world, but with dramatic
reorganisation, resource allocation, leadership and staff commitment it is now
one of the fastest taking an individual on average only three minutes to pass
through. What makes this achievement remarkable, is that the long queues of
_____________________________________________________________________
Bureaucracy
6
Management Today (April 2007)
previous years have been completely eliminated. These two examples clearly
show that radical performance improvements can be attained if you develop a
new mindset and a commitment to break bureaucracy down. If some public
service organisations can perform like this, what about the others? Surely the
private sector can then also break bureaucracy down. Dynamic companies like
Discovery and Bidvest have created flat structures with minimal bureaucracy.
The Bidvest philosophy is that there is no corporate bureaucracy, no elaborate
structure or hierarchy. Every area is a performance area. In this way,
accountability and responsibility are firmly entrenched in the way of doing
business, because you can not pass the buck on.
Bureaucracy kills your customers, staff, suppliers, and ultimately your business. If
it takes five seconds to get a message from Johannesburg to London, why does
it take more than five days to get a message from the third to fourth floor of the
same building? Working towards 2010 and the challenges posed by the World
Cup, we need to raise our business performance to world-class standards, not
only to ensure an effective tournament, but also to enhance the sustainability of
our companies.
Bureaucracies sustain only four things: inefficiency,
incompetence, bureaucrats and a sick culture. The first sign of hope is when
there is an active acknowledgement by management that bureaucracy is bad for
business.
Once you know you have a problem, the next challenge is to energise people to
start changing the culture of the bureaucracy. Over time, and this may take
months or even years in firmly entrenched bureaucracies, the bureaucracy will be
incrementally broken down. Alternatively, if you have great leaders with insight
and a passion for excellence and the realities of the modern business world, a
bureaucracy can be eliminated much quicker.
It will take some effort, but
eventually the improvements in efficiency and outputs will justify this investment
to transform your company to a high performing world-class organisation. The
end-result is a win-win situation for all parties your staff, management,
shareholders, suppliers and ultimately the business as a whole.
_____________________________________________________________________
Bureaucracy
7
Management Today (April 2007)
REFERENCES
Brown, J. 2006. Red tape costs SA mining sector billions. The Star Business Report, 8 November, p.4
Corporate Reseach Foundation. 2006. Best Companies to work for in South Africa. 7
Corporate Research Foundation
th
Theunissen, G. 2006. Costs for Africa: Costs and bureaucracy stifle Africas exports. Finweek, 7 December,
p. 50
Manning, T. 2006. Strategy must make sense to make a difference: In the Public eye. Sunday Times, 10
December, p. 14
Welch, J. & Byrne, J.A. 2001. Jack: What Ive learned leading a great company and great people. London:
Headline
Welch, J. & Welch, S. 2005. Winning. London: Harper Collins
_____________________________________________________________________
Bureaucracy
8
Management Today (April 2007)