Bureaucracy is like Pornography, it's hard to find anyone than won't pretend to be offended by it but there's a lot of it around."
Bureaucracy is familiar, complex and systemic, well-defended, serves a purpose and is self-replicating.
Bureaucracy: from the French bureaucratie, the rule of desks. Coined by Jean-Claude Marie Vincent, a French government Minister in the early 18th century.
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." - Thomas Paine
" We are most alive when we have the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, and excitement of venturing into the unknown." - Edmund Phelps, Nobel laureate
Chinese state-owned enterprises generate 20% of the output but account for 3/4 of all corporate borrowing.
Market are decentralized and firms are not by definition.
"When the top guy is the smartest guy in the world, you've got a real problem" - Former GE staffer to Fortune´s Geoff Colvin
" Nothing kills your culture like layoffs." Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines.
"All significant breakthroughs are break-withs old ways of thinking." - Thomas Kuhn
Bureaucracies are set up to produce maximally reliable products, not barely working prototypes.
Law of requisite variety: If a system is to remain viable, it must be capable of generating a range of responses as diverse as the challenges posed by its environment." - Ross Ashby
"Although centralization reduces deviation from the norm, making things appear to run more smoothly, it magnifies the consequences of those deviations that do occur. It concentrates turmoil in fewer but more severe episodes, which are disproportionately more harmful than the cumulative small variations." -Taleb/Gergory Treverton
"One of our principles is to give responsibility to the person that carries out of different task because he knows a lot about it." - Edouard Michelin (Founder of Michelin tires)