Organizational Theory

"The state—or, more precisely, the Communist Party—has no choice but to accommodate this new class because it depends on it to stay in power. And under Communism, the officialdom grows by leaps and bounds for the simple reason that inasmuch as all aspects of national life, the economy very much included, are taken over by the state, it requires a large bureaucracy to administer it. This bureaucracy is the favorite scapegoat of every Communist regime, yet none can manage without it. In the Soviet Union, within a few years of the Bolshevik coup d’état, the regime began to offer unique rewards to its leading cadres, which in time evolved into the nomenklatura, a hereditary privileged caste. This spelled the end of the ideal of equality. Thus to enforce the equality of possessions it is necessary to institutionalize inequality of rights. The contradiction between ends and means is built into Communism and into every country where the state owns all the productive wealth. True, periodic attempts have been made to shake off the grip that the Communist officialdom secured on the state and society. Lenin and Stalin tried purges, which under Stalin led to mass murder. Mao launched his “Cultural Revolution” to destroy entrenched party interests. None of these attempts succeeded. In the end, the nomenklaturas won out because without them nothing would work."

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

"When despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not in the person of the king only that it resides. It has the appearance of being so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice and in fact. It has its standard everywhere. Every office and department has its despotism, founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille, and every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the person of the king, divides and sub-divides itself into a thousand shapes and forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case in France; and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible, there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of duty, and tyrannises under the pretence of obeying."

"Earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it."

"Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them."

"It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence."

"Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity."

"The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting — so that the big people don't always win — is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy. And with the bureaucracy comes the territoriality — which is again grounded in human nature. And the incentives are perverse. For example, if you worked for AT&T in my day, it was a great bureaucracy. Who in the hell was really thinking about the shareholder or anything else? And in a bureaucracy, you think the work is done when it goes out of your in-basket into somebody else's in-basket. But, of course, it isn't. It's not done until AT&T delivers what it's supposed to deliver. So you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies. They also tend to become somewhat corrupt. In other words, if I've got a department and you've got a department and we kind of share power running this thing, there's sort of an unwritten rule: "If you won't bother me, I won't bother you and we're both happy." So you get layers of management and associated costs that nobody needs. Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. They're too slow to make decisions and nimbler people run circles around them. The constant curse of scale is that it leads to big, dumb bureaucracy — which, of course, reaches its highest and worst form in government where the incentives are really awful. That doesn't mean we don't need governments — because we do. But it's a terrible problem to get big bureaucracies to behave."

"Bureaucracy can have dehumanizing effect upon employees, making them more like machines, especially those at the lower levels of the organizational hierarchy"

"A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy."

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."

"Bureaucratic thought does not deny the possibility of the science of politics, but regards it as identical with the science of administration."

"My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

"Project management has long been discussed by corporate executives and academics as one of several workable possibilities for organizational forms of the future that could integrate complex efforts and reduce bureaucracy.... This approach does not really destroy the vertical, bureaucratic flow of work but simply requires that line organizations talk to the other horizontally so work will be accomplished more smoothly throughout the organization"

"There are more agriculture bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country."

"Besides, the paper pushers refuse to let the world end until every form is turned in, timestamped and properly initialed. Apocalypse is the last gasp of bureaucracy."

"If you have ever wondered how [a totalitarian] regime can maintain control without breaking a sweat—or a rib—Hamilton College’s Alexsia T. Chan’s “Beyond Coercion: The Politics of Inequality in China” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025) offers some clues about the art of bureaucratic suffocation. Forget tanks in Tiananmen or surveillance drones buzzing overhead. The Chinese state, Chan argues, has perfected a quieter, more elegant form of repression: political atomization. It’s repression by red tape, domination by document, and inequality by design."

"Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts."

"Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept."

"As specialists and bureaucrats, human beings become tools, able to make systems of exploitation and even terror function efficiently without the slightest sense of personal responsibility or understanding. They retreat into the arcane language of all specialists, to mask what they are doing and give to their work a sanitized, clinical veneer."

"The bureaucracy is the most dangerously hidebound and conservative force; if it ends up by constituting a compact body, which stands on its own and feels itself independent of the mass of members, the party ends up by becoming anachronist and at moments of acute crisis it is voided of its social content and left as though suspended in mid-air."

"Everyone knows how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as a meritocratic system is. The first criterion of loyalty to any organization is therefore complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power. ... As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true."

"Bureaucracy is where fun goes to die."

"Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves."

"Stupidity multiplies unnecessary procedure, intelligence decreases it; therefore stupidity is the more functional from the bureaucratic point of view."

"The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."

"Human bureaucracies, and most alien ones, are slow by design, their response times slowed to a crawl despite all the technologies we employ to make their progress visible to the naked eye. That’s because they’re still subject to all the delays native to organic life: the mistakes, indecision, the malice, the covering of asses, and the reluctance to transmit even the most urgent message until after a leisurely break for lunch."

"What bosses do: decapitate heads in the name of the freedom of the free markets. It’s bureaucracy terrorism—not different from the other terrorism that marches rampant in the streets—oh, bureaucracy terrorists name the other terrorists cowards, but what are they—sinister cowards—because they cripple your resources. They take away your office, your computer, and your friends."

"Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress."

"The bureaucratic culture which prompts us to view society as an object of administration, as a collection of so many 'problems' to be solved, as 'nature' to be 'controlled', 'mastered' and 'improved' or 'remade', as a legitimate target for 'social engineering', and in general a garden to be designed and kept in the planned shape by force (the gardening posture divides vegetation into 'cultured plants' to be taken care of, and weeds to be exterminated), was the very atmosphere in which the idea of the Holocaust could be conceived, slowly yet consistently developed, and brought to its conclusion."

"Le courant des affaires devant toujours s'expédier, il surnage une certaine quantité de commis qui se sait indispensable quoique congéable à merci et qui veut rester en place. La bureaucratie, pouvoir gigantesque mis en mouvement par des nains, est née ainsi."

"Malum est consilium, quod mutari non potest."

"Ha'atid hu ma she'kore be'zman she'anachnu asukim be'letachnen (העתיד הוא מה שקורה בזמן שאנחנו עסוקים בלתכנן)."

"And when those who disbelieve plot against thee (O Muhammad) to wound thee fatally, or to kill thee or to drive thee forth; they plot, but Allah (also) plotteth; and Allah is the best of plotters"

"That (is the case); and (know) that Allah (it is) Who maketh weak the plan of disbelievers"

"I sit and talk to God And he just laughs at my plans"

"Everybody has plans until they get hit."

"A wise man should never resolve upon any thing, at least never let the world know his resolution; for if he cannot arrive at that, he is ashamed. How many things did the king resolve in his declaration concerning Scotland, never to do, and yet did them all?"

"A wise man once said that to do a great and important work, two things are necessary: a definite plan, and not quite enough time."

"A good plan is a simple plan."

"We must discipline ourselves to convert dreams into plans, and plans into goals, and goals into those small daily activities that will lead us, one sure step at a time, toward a better future."

"ومكروا ومكر الله والله خير الماكرين"

"Plans fail when there is no consultation, But there is accomplishment through many advisers."

"In the space of two days I had evolved two plans, wholly distinct, both of which were equally feasible. The point I am trying to bring out is that one does not plan and then try to make circumstances fit those plans. One tries to make plans fit the circumstances."

"The class of people who most willingly enter into secret societies are those who live by their wits, careerists, and in general people mostly light minded, with whom we shall have no difficulty in dealing and in using to wind up the mechanism of the machine devised by us. If this world grows agitated the meaning of that will be that we have had to stir up in order to break up its too great solidarity. But if there should arise in its midst a plot, then at the head of that plot will be no other than one of our most trusted servants. It is natural that we and no other should lead masonic activities, for we know whither we are leading, we know the final goal of every form of activity whereas the goyim have knowledge of nothing, not even of the immediate effect of action; they put before themselves, usually, the momentary reckoning of the satisfaction of their self-opinion in the accomplishment of their thought without even remarking that the very conception never belonged to their initiative but to our instigation of their thought."

"In order that our scheme may produce this result we shall arrange election in favor of such presidents as have in their past some dark, undiscovered stain, some "Panama" or other-then they will be trustworthy agents for the accomplishment of our plans out of fear of revelations and from the natural desire of everyone who has attained power, namely, the retention of the privileges, advantages and honour connected with the office of president. The chamber of deputies will provide cover for, will protect, will elect presidents, but we shall take from it the right to propose new, or make changes in existing laws, for this right will be given by us to the responsible president, a puppet in our hands. Naturally, the authority of the presidents. will then become a target for every possible form of attack, but we shall provide him with a means of self-defence in the right of an appeal to the people, for the decision of the people over the heads of their representatives, that is to say, an appeal to that same blind slave of ours- the majority of the mob."