Even in our ultra-polarized era, the public and private sectors seem to have reached a consensus on the common scourge of our time: bureaucracy.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon can’t hide his disdain for it, mentioning some form of the word 21 times in his April letter to shareholders and going so far as to say it “kills” companies. Amazon.com Inc. CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his annual missive that people who are trying to build things hate it — that it frustrates and slows them down. Over at the State Department, Marco Rubio identified bureaucracy as the reason for the organization’s massive cuts and restructuring. And Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk famously waved a chainsaw in the air, pledging to slash through what he has called the “tyranny of bureaucracy” in the federal government.
Bureaucracy is an easy scapegoat. Who doesn’t hate waiting in line at the DMV, filling out seven pages of paperwork at the doctor’s office, or the headache that can come with getting an expense report approved?
But bureaucracy isn’t just inertia, disengagement and red tape. It’s also order and stability. While bureaucracy has evolved into a pejorative term used to describe complicated and pointless administrative procedures, bureaucracy is, at its core, an administrative system and way of organizing.
It’s the framework that provides the hierarchy and formalized rules that help an institution run. “The opposite of bureaucracy is not freedom and agility — it’s chaos,” says Mike Lee, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. “When you remove all the formal structures, things become opaque, less fair and power concentrates at the top.” Exhibit A: DOGE, which has managed to create more turmoil in the federal government than it has efficiency.