The road to hell is paved with good intentions. No bureaucracy in public service or private enterprise ever starts out as anything but a step towards fairness and excellence, even at WTAMU. Yet, time and power jointly contrive to pollute legitimate ordering principles. Under these conditions, bureaucracy produces neither equity nor excellence. P. J. O’Rourke quipped, “Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.”
People are averse to excellence. It is hard to define, diffi cult to maintain, impossible to expect from everyone, and causes division within organizations. Those who can and those who can’t, those who have and those who don’t, those who will and those who won’t, those protected and those rejected. Wisdom and experience alone guide organizations to their full potential.
Accountability to processes rather than people, although critically important, is a sorry substitute for excellence. The thinking goes that if there are enough signature lines on a form, numerous offices that the form has to flow through, and people low enough in the food chain required to approve the form, leadership is alleviated from identifying and recognizing excellence. This perspective leads to bloated bureaucracies and the exasperation of nearly everything important in any organization of human beings. Process becomes purpose. The desire for excellence and the need for accountability lead to the development of organizational bureaucracies. While well intentioned, these bulwarks often fight progress and effectiveness in various settings, but “a tree is known by its fruit.” Here are some signs of management and leadership structures run amok where the pursuit of purpose is replaced by seemingly legitimate processes.