The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler

by Mark Schwartz

Mark Schwartz, author of leadership classics A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value, reveals a new (empowering) model for the often soul-shattering, frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare we call bureaucracy.



Through humor, a healthy dose of history and philosophy, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat, Schwartz shows IT leaders (and the whole of business) how to master the arts of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler to create a lean, learning, and enabling bureaucracy.



For anyone frustrated by roadblocks, irritated you can’t move fast enough, suffering under the weight of crushing procedures, this book is for you. No matter your role, you need a playbook for bureaucracy. This is it. With this playbook, you can wield bureaucracy as a superpower and bust through it at the same time.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Leadership, Management, Software, Technology, Buisness

378 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 13, 2020

Reviews

[Mindaugas Mozūras · Rating 5 out of 5]

Consider bureaucracy for what it is: a way to impose a structure on the world to link general principles to actions.

The book gave me a new lens to think about bureaucracy. The word "bureaucracy " is a scary one, and is mostly seen negatively. Yet, some structure is inevitably necessary to maintain our ability to create and build. The author argues that people hate bad bureaucracies, and simply don't use the word "bureaucracy" when bureaucracy is done well.

As I work in an organization that has rapidly grown to more than 2000 people, the amount of structure and processes has also increased. This book taught me how to think about the opportunities and problems related to processes and how to influence them to create a better bureaucracy. I found it valuable, and I intend to recommend it to some of my colleagues.

[Vetz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skip to Part 3 for the good stuff! The message was excellent the context of the story was poor, since it feels like a salesman trying to sale you something you already want to buy. A lot of wasted time hearing them tell you why it's great, when really you know it's great. That's why you're interested in the product they're selling.

He spends the first third of the book in Part 1 explaining why bureaucracy is hindrance to Agile. Part 2 is a bit better but not by much in helping the reader understanding the challenges bureaucracy presents to Agile and DevOps.

I also didn't appreciate the references to bureaucracy and the Nazi party. It's a far stretch to tie to modern corporate/government bureaucracy, and the atrocities they committed to the Jewish communities and Europe. It seemed more of a fear based argument. There are better analogies out there, such as transportation references or other government social programs he uses later.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book's goal is to emphasize the necessary tension between innovation and bureaucracy. If you want a cathartic read with philosophical allusions and quirky analogies, go through Part 1 and 2. Skip to Part 3 if you want to get practical with Schwartz's main principle take-aways.

This book provided a welcomed companion for me; a project manager working cross functionally in a centre of excellence between the business intelligence and information system teams within a publicly funded hospital. Highly recommended!

[Jonathan Mckay · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a really poorly written book .

[David Wagner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actively want to love the book and Schwartz´s writing style, I really do. I love footnotes, references and application of prose and philosophy ideas to everyday life. And I got plenty of that. The question iS: did I get any substance?

And there it gets wonky. Big part of the book is spent convincing you that you need some sort of bureaucracy - but at the moment you are reading the book, the chances are you already know that. There is no need to convince the reader that the thing is not evil per se and lot of the content could have been one talk. Or an email. Or...a footnote, really. And the references, oh how wild they do get. Not only repeating some misconceptions: Not only the reference is a bit distatesful, but also the Nazi regime was not really a pinnacle of bureacracy and organisation, see Bloodlands for example. The Moby Dick gets a lot of love, while Hobbes is sadly out of the scope and some of the references seem much more like the author showing off than something of substance.
However, to be effective, I will try to sum up the idea:

a) the monkey finds problems and causes distruptions
b) the razor cuts away the unneeded fat
c) the wrestler fights using delicately balanced pushes in the organisation

Few common mistakes in large scale organisations are mentioned (especially the "cost of oversight" vs "benefits of oversight" problem gets a lot of well deserved attention), some suggestions are made (and the infamous Gantt chart manned by 20 managers is back) and lot of suggestions how to get more agility are quite good. However, it sometimes feels a bit like Schwartz is becoming a victim of his own point of view: it is easy suggesting that _everybody_ should have some basic managerial and IT skills when you possess both, it´s much harder to get that actually working. And while integration ideas are great, there are no big pointers how to actually move past the point where projects and teams become so big and unwieldy they gather a lot of administrative friction. And "do smaller projects" is an answer if you can deploy singular pieces of software or solve a problem using capacities of a number of well motivated and paid employees, but in my opinion and experience will be much more problematic when you are working in more constricted environments.

All in all, a meaningful read with few caveats and permeating feeling that the author himself could have used his own proverbial razor to the book and trim it down to 50% or less. And in the meanwhile produce another volume, actually focusing deeply on philosophy. I would love to read that!

[Oksana · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting view on bureaucracy, never thought about it from these different perspectives. There is a LOT of bureaucracy around us: Medicine, science, industry - all sit on the back of the bureaucracy. But even practices that are intended to be less bureaucratic - agile and devops - are bureaucratic too, with the difference that manual controls are being replaced with automatic.
What is good in bureaucracy? What is bad?
How to deal with it? How to turn it to work for what you need?
Written by the person who definitely know what he is talking about!

✔️ Turn problem solving successes into problem solving routines

✔️ Lean , learning and enabling - 3 characteristics of positive bureaucracy

✔️ Conway's Law states that “Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations

✔️ Bureaucracy - rule of nobody

✔️ To think is easy, to act is hard. But to act in accordance with your thinking is even harder

✔️ How to solve the problem - Turn bureaucracy against itself

✔️ Doing vs watching. What is he cost of watching ?

❗️I enjoyed listening to this book because working in technology I totally understand what Mark Schwartz is taking about. The question is what will be my next move to deal with it.

[Piet van Dongen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it! One star for the combination of prose, humor, and quality content, it’s the perfect combination of business and novel. One star for the references to surreal and bizarre literature, it’s exactly the right thematic decor for a book on (busting) bureaucracy. One star for the lightheartedness, while addressing a very heavy and seemingly insurmountable topic. The fourth star is for the playbook, for actually managing to create practical advice using multiple perspectives and combining them with the first half of the book.

The fifth star is missing, because much of the ‘proof’ is anecdotal and tied to Schwartz’s experience as CIO of USCIS; his current position at AWS must have brought much more data points and experience, and there are references to research, but I would have been more convinced if the arguments and playbook would have been substantiated more. On the other hand: digital transformation seems to be an art, and more precisely one where we must combine research, experience, best practices, gut feel, and social skills.

Highly recommended for anyone that is aware of bureaucracy and wants to make their lives and that of their colleagues and/or clients better.

[Dovydas Ceilutka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot. The author uses his experience as a Chief Information Officer in a governmental organization to explain that bureaucracy is not inherently evil. In (almost) all cases it exists, because the control and observability, which it attempts to provide were needed or thought to be a good idea. Unfortunately, it is very easy to get bureaucracy wrong and end up using $10 to supervise the expenditure of every $1. However, no organization can exist without bureaucratic rules, because they provide form, structure, and set expectations for how work is expected to be delivered. It can be thought to serve the same function as bones serve in a body of an animal - it can enable the animal to move fast (e.g. cat) or it can make the animal slow, but well protected (e.g. tortoise).

[Jeremiah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly literate and way more interesting than the title suggests. Schwartz knows bureaucracy, he was the CTO for the US DHS. It's an agile IT leader ship book about how to make peace with bureaucracy and sumo style use bureaucracy to drive organization excellence and transformation. Counterintuitively, " you fight bureaucracy by creating more of it! " (P270) Interested in how the chaos monkey God, the way of the sumo, and the razor can effect bureaucratic change? References to Melville, Nietzsche, Kafka and Chinese epic, Journey to the west. Five stars.

[Todd Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started in a larger institution out of university it was the early 2000s and waterfall project management was the flavor and methodology of change management. It was what was trained for and success was measured in the artifacts of Waterfall.

The narrative is a collections of the current trending art of the methodologies in change management blended with The 5th Discipline the Learning Organization. These include Agile, devOps, Lean, and SecDevops. It is a pleasant understanding of these methods as they grind with the institution of a large organizational structure.

[Hugo Brisson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tough review since the author did succeed and making me think of bureaucracy in a new way with usable tools that can achieve better more fit-for-purpose bureaucracy that actually help create value instead of preventing it. However, I couldn't connect with the style of the author nor with the analogy of the "monkey/razor/sumo" core to the book hence my 3 stars review, would have gave it a 3.5 if it was an option.

[Ziqin Ng · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skimmed through this because it was due at the library. The real meat of the book ie what you came for is in Part III “the playbook” and the rest was preamble that was a bit too specific to the IT sector to be of interest to me.

[Michał Węgrzyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome, well written tale of humans creating and fighting bureaucracy.

Essential for everyone in a corporate environment just to maintain sanity.

With clever mental models and personal examples this one is gold.

[Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book pretty funny and really appreciated the author (Mark Schwartz') source filled, comedic, yet philosophical look at the good/bad/to-be-interpreted views of large workplace bureaucracies in action.

[Anthony Fawkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, Schwartz has a really engaging writing style and diverse experience across traditional and modern organisational structures. I got a lot out of this book and recommend it to anyone who is interested in corporate governance and how to improve it in a pragmatic way.

[Jess Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the second half of the book but almost stopped reading before I got to the good stuff. I really really enjoyed Mark's other books but this one was just okay for me.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big fan of all of Mark's work and his quirky writing style

[Jari Pirhonen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author studies pros and cons of bureaucracy and how to make bureaucracy compatible with lean and agile way of working.

[Gregor Gosepath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for work... actually a must read for many managers..
actually a must read -- must follow book

[Augustinas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining, well written book, that changed my mind on the topic, highly recommended.

[Stefano Iulli]

**Statistic**

==Lenghth==

☐ Short.
☐ Medium.
☑ Large.

==Audience==

☐ Kids.
☐ Teenagers.
☐ Males/Females 18-25
☑ Males/Females 25-39
☑ Adults 40+

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

The style thoroughly surprised me and had me chuckling and at times laughing probably when I was not supposed to. I have to read it in order not to be distracted.

[Stefan Oldroyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really struggled to get into the book. There were some good parts to it but found the addition of random kafkaesque/ moby dick quotes annoying rather than funny and think it could have been distilled down a lot further.