Bureaucrats Are Nice People.

Published: Jan 15, 2004

Application

This may be difficult to accept after you have just suffered a frustrating encounter with one.

Most bureaucrats don't kick dogs. Some go to a place of worship each week. Almost all are kind to old ladies and children.

Why can they be so mean to small business operators?

Part of the answer lies in the function they must fulfill to continue receiving a reasonable pay.

Bureaucrats must follow rules to survive. Small business operators often must bend the rules to solve a problem. Right there – they're destined to disagree on how things should be done.

We offer a lot more on this in our section on bureaucracies. Surf over for stuff on Weber, Fayol, prizes awaiting for someone who finds a better system and a lot of answers for questions you were afraid to ask.

Stories

The ugly pipe

Between a freeway and a federal building was a huge rusty pipe rising like a serpent over a service road submerging again at the base of the building's foundation. For a long time I believed it was a rusty sewer main until one day I met a senior bureaucrat from the building. I asked him if he had any budget for some art work to cover the ugly pipe. That's when I learned the federal government spent over a quarter of a million for that piece of ART.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Submitted by: NephewGerry

The bureaucrat in the front row

I used to learn a lot by attending the annual conference of Transactional Analysis practitioners each year in Washington, DC. The conference coordinator asked me to present a workshop. I was hesitant because I didn't feel I could offer anything new to these clinical psychologists and human resource experts.

He kept pressing until I revealed I had been developing some insights into bureaucratic behavior.

As I was nervously preparing the room for the presentation a very senior federal bureaucrat entered the room and sat immediately in front of the podium. I demanded to know why he was attending a workshop for neophytes.

He said he wanted to know what we were saying about bureaucrats. We knew him to be responsible for training and development for a very large department.

It was a great session. I moderated such a lively debate between the bureaucrat and the analysts that there was not enough time to espouse all of my theories.