How We Beat the Nazis with Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy, like anything else, can be done well or poorly. When talking about bureaucracy we should keep in mind how we feel when people use the word "technology" to refer exclusively to harmful or inept applications of technology.

So here's a story that might divide HN into two camps:

I met a guy through a friend and it turned out we were both in software development. I told him a humorous story about a really awful bureaucratic situation at work, and how I was able to manipulate management to do what I wanted. He said, "Sounds like a lot of leadership," and I replied, "Oh, yeah, there was leadership all over the place, it was awful, but in the end the right thing got done." By the expression on his face I could tell he had never heard "leadership" used in a negative way before. He actually used "leadership" to refer to what I did to solve the problem. "Devious obsequiousness" would have been a better term, but he was trained to label any kind of effort with a positive outcome "leadership."

So, I wonder how many HNers think "leadership" has positive, negative, or neutral connotations....

Key admonitions:

(a) Organizations and Conferences (1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." (2) Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. . . . (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five. (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. (7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. (8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision - raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

(b) Managers and Supervisors (1) Demand written orders. . . . (7) Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. . . . . . . (10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work. (11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done. (12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files. (13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do. (14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.

Nothing wrong here. Just a lot of lawyer-types trying to get things done in the way they know best :).

The comment on the submitted blog post about the Reich Ministry of Production being destroyed by a British bombing raid is food for thought. The claim is that killing bureaucrats of the Nazi government raised German military production for the remainder of the war--probably not the result the Allies intended.

It's amusing to read the documents now, but this was serious stuff during WWII. I first learned about it when I read "IBM and the Holocaust" (http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/) by Edwin Black. There was a French bureaucrat who was part of occupied France's government who practiced this form of bureaucratic sabotage. I wish I could remember his name. He was eventually found out by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp.

PLEASE REFRAIN FROM COMMENT POSTING unless your post has been approved by committee and submitted in triplicate, color coded forms.

I would need to see a lot of good attribution/documentation to be convinced this is not a forgery. I have seen so many different versions of this that it stinks like an urban legend. It is the "organizational man" version of the "protocols of the elders of Zion" and is often attributed to the 1950s "communist 5th column working in the US."

Where are the six sigma standards for this people? This post clearly isn't up to code.

What is old is new again

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443

I think we've proven time and time again that "anal" Beurocracy is absolutely a destructive and time consuming force :)

It's probably one of the most disruptive ideas in that handbook!

(the handbook has been posted here in the past too; I can't find the commentary around that just now)

This is also known as work-to-rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

from comments: "Another one, not yet ripe in 1943, is to require non-job-related mandatory annual training in such areas as diversity, sexual harassment, ethnic sensibilities, etc. Especially as critical deadlines approach. Use outside consultants to provide training. Put the whole requirement under a cost sink department like HR. Tie HR performance bonuses to 100% compliance goal."

Hilarious. I had to go through one of these time wastes for "customer support training" recently: the outside consultant's one advice was: "don't say 'no problem' to a request because it may imply negativity."