Tag Archives: bureaucracy

Delta shows you how your airline luggage travels

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Delta Airlines put together an interesting 2:34 video about what happens to your luggage from check-in to coming off the luggage belt at your destination.

I know plenty of people have lost luggage (it has happened once to me as well, delivered by UPS two days later) but this video brought an idea to mind: large systems like this which require a large number of employees and machines across cities around the world might also be considered quite efficient and remarkable. Perhaps we could argue about what constitutes an acceptable rate of error or delivering luggage to your final destination and weigh this against alternative forms of delivery such as paying to ship the luggage by private companies. More broadly, we could ask whether it is fair or realistic to expect mechanized/large-scale systems of today to be perfect 100% of the time (or perhaps we don’t mind until it is our luggage that is lost). Indeed, the luggage delivery systems of today for the tens of millions of airline passengers might have been unimaginable even 60 years ago.

Could someone design a better and cheaper system?

Also: is an app for tracking your luggage simply a means to help reassure passengers and to show them that most of their luggage does indeed make it to the right place?

Can Weber’s concept of charismatic authority predict a decline for Apple?

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One analyst suggests that Apple without Steve Jobs will decline because as sociologist Max Weber suggested, organizations change after their charismatic leader is gone:

Weber described three essential business categories: Legal/bureaucratic, traditional, and charismatic, with the latter companies typically helmed by individuals with the “gift of grace.”…
“Followers and disciples have absolute trust in the leader, fed by that leader’s access to nearly magical powers. Charismatic authority repudiates the past, and is in this sense a specifically revolutionary force.”

According to Colony, Apple chose a “proven and competent executive” – Tim Cook – to succeed Jobs. Nevertheless, the analyst believes the new CEO’s “legal/bureaucratic approach” will prove to be a mismatch for an organization that feeds off the gift of grace…

“Apple’s momentum will carry it for 24-48 months. But without the arrival of a new charismatic leader it will move from being a great company to being a good company, with a commensurate step down in revenue growth and product innovation,” the analyst predicted.

I guess we can wait and see if Weber’s ideas apply to this situation. Weber described this transition after the loss of a charismatic leader as a process of routinization where the group bureaucratizes this charisma.

A few things make this process more messy:

1. At one point, Steve Jobs didn’t have this “magic” either such as before he was inventing things or when he stepped down from Apple. This suggests that context matters: certain ideas are produced or take off based on a variety of other circumstances.

2. Judging by the recent stock price, investors don’t seem too worried about Apple’s future. At what point will they and other start publicly suggesting that the loss of Jobs is a really big hurdle to overcome? Is this an “acceptable” reason for a company to plateau?

3. Shouldn’t one measure of a good leader be the ability to empower others to take over and do well (or even better?) in the future when that leader is gone? If so, perhaps we should be asking whether Jobs was equipping others at Apple to succeed after him or not.

4. Is this an inevitable process for groups that lose a charismatic authority?

Learning from the organizational structure of al-Qaida

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Studying organizations is hot today and here is some real-world evidence: US Special Operations forces were aided in their search for terrorists by mimicking al-Qaida’s structure.

One of the greatest ironies of the 9/11 Era: while politicians, generals and journalists lined up to denounce al-Qaida as a brutal band of fanatics, one commander thought its organizational structure was kind of brilliant. He set to work rebuilding an obscure military entity into a lethal, agile, secretive and highly networked command — essentially, the U.S.’ very own al-Qaida. It became the most potent weapon the U.S. has against another terrorist attack.

That was the work of Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal is best known as the general who lost his command in Afghanistan after his staff shit-talked the Obama administration to Rolling Stone. Inescapable as that public profile may be, it doesn’t begin to capture the impact he made on the military. McChrystal’s fingerprints are all over the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite force that eventually killed Osama bin Laden. As the war on terrorism evolves into a series of global shadow wars, JSOC and its partners — the network McChrystal painstakingly constructed — are the ones who wage it.

Very interesting. This story suggests that factors manpower, equipment, and even charismatic leadership can only go so far: an organization’s structure is vital to its outcome.

Several Weberian thoughts that I have:
1. If this course of action is now considered a success, would the rest of the Armed Forces (and even other organizations) be willing to change their organizational structures? Is this the end of bureaucracy in the Armed Forces or could there be other global situations or battlefields where a traditional bureaucratic structure works better?

2. The article places a lot of emphasis on General McChrystal and his finer and lesser moments. Is McChrystal a classic example of a “charismatic authority” and if so, can his work be routinized? In his forthcoming book, will McChrystal put himself at the center of the story? Since it sounds like JSOC has moved on without him with his ideas, was McChrystal’s ultimate role to introduce these ideas and then bow out? And if McChrystal is good at solving such problems, where could he be put to best serve?

A final thought: how would the American public respond to this idea that adopting al-Qaida’s ideas is what can make America (and its military) great? Is this American pragmatism at work?

Hard to imagine the complex, modern world without bureaucracy

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It is common these days to hear complaints about bureaucracy, often related to the amount of time it takes to get something done or the waste involved in completing a large project. But it is hard to imagine the world we have today without bureaucracy:

For instance, as a student sociologist, I was taught that bureaucracy was essential to an ordered society. A system of administration, based on a division of labour, designed to undertake a large body of work in a routine manner, was deemed essential to advanced economics.

Yet the term is now used to denote obstruction, complication and sheer bloody-mindedness to produce the opposite outcome.

I guess the modern image is one of an army of pen-pushers, or more accurately, dedicated e-mailers, committed to frustrating the desired outcomes or value for money of any project…

We all need the right skill mix, effective teamwork and the most efficient use of defined resources to serve the public well. In that sense, strategic planning is as essential to the desired outcomes as the obvious contribution made by good service delivery.

So, there is a case for bureaucracy, although it is wise to avoid that term. Demonising particular roles and functions is dangerous. It must be always the quality and quantity of product that counts.

Max Weber wrote about how bureaucracy made modern society possible. It is remarkable to think how large societies are actually able to function. Take the United States: it has its problems but considering that it has over 300 million relatively wealthy people from all around the world, has a large land mass, and has undertaken numerous major projects over recent decades, things still get done and life is decent or good for many residents.

This commentary also hints at what Weber suggested was the possible problem with bureaucracy: a soulless, “iron cage.” The term today has a negative connotation often linked to the reduction of individual freedom. Thus, battles about bureaucracy are all around us: how much should you have to pay for your license plate? Should the government require restaurants to put calorie counts next to the menu? Should you be required to have medical insurance? And so on. It’s not bureaucracy that is really the issue: it is how it runs.

It then becomes a “framing” issue as people seek to avoid the “bureaucracy” label. The trend in recent decades has been to suggest governments, large or local, should be more business-like. Businesses are still bureaucracies – any organization can be a bureaucracy – but they have different goals and different methods of operation. Additionally, they are perceived as being less wasteful and more able to change course (both which are not necessarily true). In the current era of tight budgets, all levels of government are looking for ways to trim costs while maintaining service levels. As the commentator suggests, government needs to be more efficient and cost-effective.

The iPad as magic

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Sales of Apple’s iPad have been impressive. Virginia Postrel argues that the appeal of the iPad is in its magic:

When Steve Jobs appeared on stage last week to unveil the iPad 2, which hit stores Friday, he said, “People laughed at us for using the word ‘magical,’ but, you know what, it’s turned out to be magical.”

Apple has long had an aura of trend-setting cool, but magic is a bolder—and more provocative— claim…

With its utterly opaque yet seemingly transparent design, the iPad affirms a little-recognized fact of the supposedly “disenchanted” modern world. We are surrounded by magic…

“Between a wish and its fulfillment there is, in magic, no gap,” wrote the anthropologist Marcel Mauss in “A General Theory of Magic.” Effortlessly, instantly, the magical alters reality with a tap of the finger or wave of the hand. Sound familiar?

This argument reminds me of Max Weber’s claims about the rationalization of the modern world. On a broader scale, Weber argued that bureaucracy, efficient for dealing with large groups of people, would lead to a “iron cage” where everything would be routinized. Postrel argues that even though the iPad is the product of modern bureaucracies (even Apple is a bureaucracy though it positions itself as the anti-bureaucracy, usually referring to Microsoft, with a charismatic leader), it is magic in that the user has little idea of how it all works, is unable to open it up and “look under the hood,” and it is like an extension of oneself.

This could be one explanation for the iPad as magic. There could be some other reasons as well: its size, the vibrant screen, the Apple brand, and its positioning as the most popular (and the first mass-market product?) of the burgeoning tablet market. Another explanation could be this: the iPad brings joy or happiness to its users in a way that many modern products do not. While laptops are often intended for work and new cars are functional transportation options, the iPad is there for enjoyment. In a disenchanted world, this is an re-enchanting product in the same way that the Microsoft Kinect (with its own impressive sales) is magical: it is meant to be used for fun.

Will the magic decline over time as more products offer the same possibilities? Probably. But for now, the iPad may have just cornered the short-lived market on magic and re-enchanting its user’s worlds.

Japan’s difficulty in tracking people over 100 years old

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Japan is known for having a high life expectancy: according to 2008 public data, the world’s life expectancy is 69, the US’s is 78, and Japan’s is 83. With this higher life expectancy, Japan has a large number of centenarians, people who are over 100 years old. But there is a problem: the Japanese government has had problems keeping track of this population group.

More than 230,000 Japanese citizens listed in government records as at least 100 years old can’t be found and may have died long ago, according to a government survey released Friday.

In August, the Justice Ministry ordered a review of records that found about 77,000 people who would be at least 120, and 884 people who would be 150 or older. The head count followed a flurry of reports about how elderly people are falling through the cracks in Japan as its population ages rapidly and family ties weaken.

In all, the survey of family registration records nationwide found that 234,354 centenarians were still listed as alive, but their whereabouts were unknown, the ministry said.

While this could be chalked up as simply a bureaucratic problem, the news story suggests these findings line up with concerns about how the elderly are treated in Japan. This then could be a larger issue that concerns social and family relationships and the fabric of Japanese society.

Stress and social hierarchy

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The latest issue of Wired has a fascinating article about stress. In addition to its effect on our physical bodies, the articles examines how stress is produced from being part of a social hierarchy. According to some studies cited in the article, being at the bottom of a social ladder produces harmful stress. This is not just because of the work but because those at the bottom have less control over their work. Those who we might consider to have “high-stress jobs,” such as doctors or lawyers, don’t feel the same negative effects of this stress since they have more control over their daily activities. Those working low-trust jobs, particularly in bureaucratic organizations, have higher death rates than those at the top, even controlling for other factors.

Apparently, the article is not available online but you can read some of the opening here on a Wired blog.