Ideas - Bureaumania: A 'Granular' Look at Corporate Red Tape

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

Bureaucracies were created to get the work done and get it done efficiently, according to 19th-century thinker Max Weber. So why are there more and more meaningless executive jobs that contribute nothing but soak up the pay? IDEAS examines the corporate tendency to "bureaumania.”

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey Greg, just wanted to circle back on that Q3 forecast and try and land the plane from a KPI standpoint. Look Patrick, you want to win-win, but I'm burning the candle at both ends here. Tell you what, let me easily put you on a quick hold and touch base with Darren using Zoom phone. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Hey, Patrick. Hey, you want to pick your brain on the Q3 forecast? So for anyone who's ever worked at a company with more than five employees, we know that our jobs can become an endless game of memos, forms, files, and meetings. So from a 30,000-foot standpoint, Darren is thinking we square the circle. Guess we're going to have to loop someone in from sales.

Online meetings, off-site meetings, virtual meetings, in-person meetings, meetings to plan meetings. Carl, Patrick, Greg, Nancy, and I have a drive-in powder. There's a kind of psychic life to what we call bureaucracy. Going to need to marinate on that. Can we put a pin in it? That bureaucracy has, over time, led us to a state of buromania, as though we're literally mad for it, even if we hate it. It is what it is.

The idea of bureaucracy is full of contradictions, like how it takes a lot of paperwork to manage and reduce paperwork. Even the meaning of bureaucracy, it turns out, is always just out of reach. The elephant in the room is this paradigm shift, which is just basically mission-critical, low-hanging fruit with no value add. So, seal the deal, gather the troops, and let's aim for the win-win. Copy. Roger that copy. Copy that Roger of my copy. Roger that copy of my Roger of your copy.

Copy that Roger of my copy of your Roger of my copy. Over. Contributor Tom Jokinen brings us Buromania, a blue sky, ducks in a row, granular examination into our love-hate or hate-hate relationship with corporate red tape, or what 19th century philosopher Max Weber termed an iron cage. 19th century philosopher Max Weber termed an iron cage. And if Max Weber was the philosopher of bureaucracy, then Franz Kafka was its poet. The road didn't lead to the castle. It only made towards it.

But then turned aside as if deliberately. This is from Kafka's 1926 book, The Castle. And though it didn't lead away from the castle, neither did it come any nearer. And though it didn't lead away from the castle, neither did it come any nearer. The German here is from Michael Haneke's 1997 film adaptation of The Castle. In both the book and the movie, the main character, whose name is Kay, tries to get to the castle, the center of the bureaucracy. It's where the mysteries that run the working world are revealed.

But the closer he gets to that center, the farther away it recedes. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? From the mouthpiece came a humming, the likes of which Kay had never heard on the telephone before. It was as though the humming of countless childlike voices. But it wasn't humming either. The officials are very well educated, but only in a one-sided way. In his own department, an official will see a whole train of ideas behind a single word, but you can spend hours on end explaining matters from another department to him.

And while he may nod politely, he doesn't understand a bit of it. Of course, that's all perfectly natural. You just have to think of the little official matters affecting yourself. Tiny things. You just have to understand that thoroughly, and then you will have plenty to occupy your mind all your life. That line, you can spend hours on end explaining matters, does that sound familiar? The main character, Kay, doesn't actually know what his role is within a bureaucracy that he doesn't understand. And I think that's the point of the castle, the anguish of being

caught in the system without a compass. You've been taken on as a land surveyor, as you say. But unfortunately, we have no need for a land surveyor. And it's fascinating that even today, we don't have any other term for this specific effect of bureaucracy than the famous term Kafkaesque. My name is Andrei Grubachich. I'm a professor at California Institute of Integral Studies and researcher at UC Berkeley and University of Coimbra. So Kafka was writing about this ever since Penal Colony, a book that was the first one to actually tackle this problem of something that is not just dehumanizing, but is completely impersonal.

The officer turned to the machine. It had been clear enough previously that he understood the machine well. But now it was almost staggering to see how he managed it, and how it obeyed him, his hand had only to approach the harrow for it rise and sink. Kafka's book In the Penal Colony was written in 1914, just before the end of World War I, and published in 1919. So bureaucracy for him is something that is impersonal, something that you can actually feel, something that can kill you. In Kafka's work, I mean, the classic example is Metamorphosis,

where Gregor Samsa wakes up as a monstrous insect. But then he said to himself, before it strikes a quarter past seven, I must be quite out of this bed, without fail. The Metamorphosis, Kafka's 1915 novella. By that time, someone will have to come from the office to ask for me. What a fate to be condemned to work for a firm where the smallest omission at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion. And his first concern is that he's going to be late for work. You know, there's no horror so great that it isn't overshadowed by the horror of having to go to the office.

I'm David Herring. I'm senior lecturer in Englishature at the University of Liverpool in the UK. You know, this is all very interesting because this element of bureaucratic alienation, of creation of this sense of helplessness, is something that, and I think Bertolt Brecht was one of the first people to say this about Kafka, not something that belongs only or specifically to totalitarian societies, but very much is a part of the modern condition. That IBMR work is related to the paperwork explosion. Bureaucracy is a layered concept. Specifically, the paperwork in an office. The simplest, most neutral definition is bureaucracy is how we exercise influence through formal structures in an organization.

It's governance through written rules. There's always been a lot of paperwork in an office. But today there is more paperwork than ever before. There's more than ever before. Certainly more than there used to be. My name is John Paul Ferguson. I'm an associate professor of organizational behavior and director of the MBA program at the Days Hotel Faculty of Management, McGill University in Montreal. If I had to boil it down to two keywords, I would describe bureaucracy as designed to enable impartiality and designed to enable accountability. My name is Daisy Chung, and I'm an assistant professor at City University of London. A second definition would be bureaucracy is a system that gives us efficiency at the cost of

inflexibility. And I think when people use the word bureaucracy, they really mean it as a stand-in for like red tape or excessive complexity or an inability to get things done because of political barriers. And then the third definition, which I think is probably the most commonly used, is it's any parts of a formal system that we do not like. Your call is very important to us. Your call is very important to us. Your call is very important to us. Your call is very important to us. We usually give credit for the term itself to Max Weber, the German sociologist, writing at the end of the 19th as one of the most sort of efficient and rational ways of organizing human collective activity. I'm Adria Scharf. I'm an associate director at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the Rutgers University

School of Management and Labor Relations. In 1905, Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. And in it, he talks of bureaucracy and bureaus interchangeably as features of the new economic order. He thought that the bureaus were really valuable, particularly in the public sector, because they brought consistency and uniform application of the law, you know, in terms of whether it's collecting taxes or handing out permits or whatever, that the Bureau would treat everybody the same. My name is Malcolm Bird. I'm an associate professor of political science at the University of Winnipeg. He called it an iron cage bureaucracy.

That's correct. What do you think he meant by that? Well, what he meant was that you had to separate your own emotions and to some degree, your own morality from your behavior. As a bureaucrat, you behave separately from your own emotions. And you have to kind of take on this personality of the Bureau. And he actually thought that this was all very good because it brought a sort of consistency to the behavior of the Bureau, particularly when it was interacting, like state bureaus do, with the

public. And so that everybody would be, in theory, treated the same, whether they were a high status or low status or had different sort of characteristics. The survival of an organization within a bureaucracy is not dependent on one particular person, one particular charismatic leader. There's sort of a stability to the structure. Stability. Until one particular bureaucrat upends the whole operation. One particular bureaucrat upends the whole operation. 1790s France. The guillotine.

The terror. Hundreds of thousands of arrests. Tens of thousands of executions. Until the revolution collapses in 1794. And out of all of this emerges a clerk. The clerk's name is Charles Hippolyte Labussiere. What Labussiere becomes sort of famous for right at the start of the 19th century is his claim to have brought down the terror from the inside. Ben Kafka is a New York psychoanalyst and distantly related, as it turns out, to Franz Kafka.

He's also the author of The Demon of Writing, Powers and Failures of Paperwork. And for him, La Boussière was an unlikely hero. He claimed that he had taken the documents that would sort of lead people to their deaths and destroyed them before they could ever be executed. Every day during the terror, Charles Labussiere's job within the bureaucracy was to select 25 files to hand to the revolutionary authorities. These files contained the names of people who were to be executed. But instead of handing the files over,

Labussiere destroyed them in his own unique way. He would sneak back into the office late at night and he would take the documents and soak them in a bucket of water that was used to keep the afternoon wine cool. And he would soak them and soak them until they began to turn into a paste.

And then he would take this paste and break it up into pieces and put it in his pockets and sneak it out past the guards. Then he would go to the public baths and continue to work the paste and distill smaller pellets, which he would eventually dispose of in the sand. In the 1927 silent film Napoleon, this scene gets played out,

only instead of disposing of the paper in the river in the Seine, Labussiere eats the files one by one. The movie has a shot of a cluttered office, followed by a wide shot showing paper stacked up to the ceiling, and then the close-up. Labussiere balls the paper up into his mouth while another clerk watches and does the same thing. The title card says, not a thief, but a chewer. And without paperwork, the bloodthirsty mania of the terror fades away bit by bit. In Bureau Mania, there's something similar. Mania is a very sort of popular

suffix in the 18th and 19th century, and it's a kind of fad diagnosis, maybe the first fad diagnosis, kind of frenzy, a kind of excitability, a kind of chaos, this kind of excited, frenetic, frenzied government that all of a sudden seems to be everywhere and doing everything and is also very unpredictable. Buromania applies to the corporate world too, maybe more so than in government. And business bureaucracy is even more mysterious. It's where the past and the present happen at the same time, as in this all-too-common mindset. We've always done things this way. Therefore, we still do it that way. Your call is very important to us.

Please hold. David Graeber was an anthropologist and the author of Utopia of Rules. He died in 2020. In 2012, he spoke at the School of Visual Arts in New York about the birth of corporate bureaucracy. The corporation was invented in colonialism, things like the East India Company. The British actually got rid of that after the South Sea bubble. They were very suspicious of corporations. And the period of the Industrial Revolution, the 19th century,

the period of the really greatest technological advance and change, were not periods of large corporations. They were periods of very small family firms combined with high finance. And, you know, much of the first half of the 20th century was a battle between America and Germany to see which would replace the British Empire as a sort of new hegemon. But both of them embraced very bureaucratic forms of capitalism in contrast to the British form. What we now have are what I would call bureaucratic technologies, and the internet is a perfect example. But everybody says, well, we still have creativity, we have the internet. Basically, what happens is we have

people using all sorts of creative energies and insights and innovation to create ever better platforms to fill out forms. So imagination now exists in the service of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, which thus encompasses every aspect of our lives. I mean, even right before I gave this talk, I got these. Three different pieces of paper I have to sign and fill out in order to get paid. Corporate accounts payable. Nina speaking. The 1999 film Office Space parodies life inside the corporate iron cage. Hello, Peter. What's happening?

Uh, we have sort of a problem here. Yeah, you apparently didn't put one of the new cover sheets on your TPS reports. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry about that. I forgot. Yeah. You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out. Bureaucracy is a catchword or a stand-in for this sense of alienation, the sense that you're just a cog in the machine.

Did you see the memo about this? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I have the memo right here. I just forgot. But it's not shipping out till tomorrow, so there's no problem. Yeah. If you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be great. And I'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo. Okay. Yeah, no, I have the memo. I've got it.

It's right. But I think as well, organizations, you know, large, complex organizations, so you can think of the public sector. You can think of, you know, large universities, corporations. Often what happens is that roles are created to respond to external stakeholders and demands that the organization has to manage. But in the process of doing so, you know, they create a lot of internal complexity. And I suppose a sense that your job is no longer connected to any greater inherent purpose or objectives. If my position in the bureaucracy is impersonal or not tailored to me as an individual, but rather is anybody can be plugged into it, perhaps then I don't know what others are doing. So does that create conflict and problems too of really not knowing what everybody else is doing?

Yes, I think absolutely. If you feel or if you perceive that your role is just a series of really specific esoteric tasks and responsibilities that have been bundled together, and most people's roles are like that, you know, especially as you move away from what you might think of as the core of the organization's value-creating, you know, purpose, then yes, you don't really know why your role exists or why other people's roles exist. Moving away from the core of the organization is just like Kafka's castle. And not really knowing why my role exists or why other roles exist is, you could say, a significant problem for a bureaucracy. But at the same time, it can add to the mythology and create something David Graeber has formally

analyzed. So I wrote this piece called On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. this piece called On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. It's a strange thing that there seems to be this peculiar way in which if you mention this to people, almost no one will deny it. But at the same time, no one quite knows what to do with it. It's like this gigantic embarrassment in our society. And I suggested that this is the reason why we don't have a 15-hour work week. And Keynes famously predicted in the 30s that we were almost up on the time that we should be working. Certainly half what we're doing now, probably considerably less. John Maynard Keynes was a British philosopher and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. And if you look at the kind of jobs that existed in Keynes' time, well, we have eliminated a lot of them. He talked about technological unemployment in the 1930s, and a lot of people thought, well, you know, it wasn't really true.

thought, well, you know, wasn't really true. Now, everybody's been saying the robots are going to take our jobs, you know, for the last hundred years or so. Unemployment stays about the same in the long run. Well, you know, maybe it's not such a threat. But I would make the opposite argument. I would say, you know, the robots have been taking our jobs for the last hundred years or so. But instead of replacing them, instead of redistributing the labor in a reasonable fashion, But instead of redistributing the labor in a reasonable fashion, we've simply made up completely meaningless, pointless jobs. You know, a lot of people who you would think had quite a lot happening day to day, you know, lots of really interesting tasks reported. I have no idea why my job exists. I don't really know what I'm doing all day.

I'm pretty sure that if I stopped doing my job, nothing would happen. There would be no ill effects of this job just disappearing. So I wrote this up. I said, well, maybe that's it. Maybe it's political. Maybe, you know, the reason nobody does anything about this is because it's actually pretty convenient to a system of finance-based capital where you're not even concentrating on making stuff and selling stuff as much as extracting rents or artificially creating debt. This is the sort of perfect division of labor for that. You have a certain amount of unemployed who you make fun of, and then you have the structurally unemployed who you give these meaningless jobs where you're basically buying their loyalty. You put them in these mock managerial positions. He really, I think, hit the

nail on the head and gave people this sense of being seen. It's like you're not the only one who feels like your job has no purpose. You're not the only one that doesn't understand exactly what you do. There are flunky jobs, which are basically people who just are there to make someone else look good. We need to talk about your TPS reports. Yeah, the cover sheet, I know. I know. Bill talked to me about it. Yeah. Did you get that memo? Yeah, I got the memo. And I understand the policy and the problem is just that I forgot. A lot of people sitting around offices say they basically don't do anything except like pass emails to someone and say, you know, that's spam.

Or, you know, they're just like there because if you don't have someone sitting at your desk, you're not actually a real executive. It's just we're putting new cover sheets on all the TPS reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that'd be great. Then you have what I call goons. Goons are people who are basically there to, you know, you don't need them unless somebody else has them. Sort of like armies, right? If nobody had an army, nobody would need an army. Same is true of corporate lawyers, telemarketers, all kinds of people like that. Hi, welcome to high tech's customer support. How can I help you? How can

I help you? So they often say, ah, this is a total bullshit. There's no need for this. The next one is I call them duct tapers. Duct tapers are people who are there to fix a problem that does not need to exist and everybody knows it. Are you thinking about kicking off a career in project management, but are still not a hundred percent crystal clear on what exactly does a project manager do? Well, in this video, I'm going to share with you just that. It'd be sort of like if you have a roof in the house, instead of getting a roofer, put a bucket down and hire someone to empty the water every half hour.

A lot of corporations do that. They'll hire someone just to deal with the damage of the fact that something is badly organized because it's easier than fixing the problem. So there's millions of those kind of people. Then there's box tickers. Box tickers are people who are there to allow an organization to say they're doing something that they're not doing. Being a project manager is an excellent job. I love what I do, but it's

not exactly sometimes what you think it is. And the problem with box tickers, of course, is that it takes up so much time that you could be spending actually doing the thing. box tickers, of course, is that it takes up so much time that you could be spending actually doing the thing. All right, so that's a box ticker. And then finally, taskmaster. Basically, middle management. There are people who are there either to supervise people who don't need supervising, which is most of middle management. Be the mother hen or the father rooster. Now, sometimes amongst us project managers, we'll say, yeah, what do you do? I babysit a lot. Now, if that's ever happened to you, please write it in the comments below. Like people write to me all the time.

They say like, I'm supposed to be making them work. They work all by themselves. And, you know, I have to pretend I'm doing something. So I make up these numbers and they also make up new bullshit jobs. There's a lot of people who do that. So, yeah, you are pushing a lot of paper, but it is important because that helps you keep people on track. Managers and executives are judged basically by how many people they have working under them. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 and to a documentary by contributor Tom Jokinen called Bureau Mania.

Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find Ideas wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Hey, I was on this date the other night, and we were at this restaurant. All right, guys, you guys ready to get started? Hang on a second.

Tripp, you ready to get started, buddy? We're all here. We should start. I just wanted to take a few minutes and talk about some ideas for the marketing strategy this year. So if you got one, just throw it out there. I'd love to hear them. Yeah. How long is this meeting supposed to last? Should be out of here in 30. Is that approximate or? On the one hand, bureaucracy is an

antidote to chaos. Everything gets put in its place. On the other hand, as George Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London, there's an instinct in us to create useless work just to keep everyone busy. The late anthropologist David Graeber had his own term for it. Bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs are jobs that don't do anything. Eventually, someone did a survey at YouGov, and they took stuff actually out of words that I'd used in the piece, does your job make a meaningful contribution to society? I discovered 37% of people in this

country believe that it does not. We're certain that it does not. 13% weren't sure. Only 50% were quite sure their job does do something. How did those jobs come to be? How is the system support bullshit jobs? It's a big question. John Paul Ferguson. One of the oldest ideas in economics is the idea of compensating wage differentials, which is a fancy way of saying if you do nasty or dirty or hazardous work, you should get paid more to do it. And yet when we look at society, we notice that the people doing the nasty, dirty, hazardous jobs are usually getting paid less. As a side effect of a lot of tendencies we have towards social inequality, it's no

surprise to me that we have a proliferation of bullshit jobs. The question is always why we accept this, but that's been a question throughout human history. Why do we accept the levels of inequality we see? Sure, but the bullshit job you would think is achievable, I mean, to take them out of the mix feels more achievable than eradicating inequality. It seems like something that we could pull off. If everyone in society agreed that bullshit jobs were bullshit, it might be easier to get rid of them. But I am always fascinated by my colleagues who work,

for example, in the finance industry, who will argue that they are genuinely creating a huge amount of wealth and prosperity for the economy, even though it's hard to point to what exactly is the specific dollar of wealth or prosperity that they have created. How do you spot somebody with a bullshit job? Is it something you can tease out of the process of a meeting to say, aha, that's one of them right there? I don't think it is quite as easy as that. And we need a better definition starting with the inputs to decide how we would detect a bullshit job. And I think that's doable, but I think it's a very hard thing to do from anecdote or from just day-to-day experience.

The economists already had a reply out. The argument they made was that this is the digital equivalent of assembly line labor. You know, our wealth in the period of industrialization was based on these assembly line jobs where people were just, you know, doing one thing all day long. And it was horrible and alienating, but it meant we had cars and planes and things. And nowadays, they said this is the same thing. They've robotized a lot of the production, but you have these complex supply chains and just-in-time production and containerized shipping, all this globalized stuff. It's really hard to coordinate. So even though the actual production has been increasingly digitized, you need these people sort of toiling

in the communicative mills. And their jobs are all chopped up into tiny pieces like the assembly line was. So they might think, oh, I'm not doing anything. But, you know, in the big picture, this is the basis of our wealth and prosperity. And so defining jobs that don't matter or jobs that don't contribute anything is, I think, more fraught than a lot of people realize. I think the best counter argument to that is my own experience in university. You have managers running it, but managers feel they're like they deserve to be something like what they would get, get something like what they would get in the corporate world. In the corporate world, it's just assumed that, you know, you need to have five or six flunkies or you're not a really important person. So, you know, they hire these guys as like deanlets or vice provosts or whatever. And they immediately assign them three or four minions. And they figure out what those minions are going to do.

So what do they do? They end up making up work for us to do. So suddenly I have to do time allocation studies all the time about what I'm doing with my time rather than spending my time actually teaching or learning anything. And the perfect accessory to flunkies and minions in the world of Homo Burecraticus? The meeting. So what we're doing is we're just coming up with some ideas for our new marketing strategy. Anyone? I think we should implement Pinterest. Oh, that's a fun idea.

What about a publicity event in the park? Interesting. But how are you going to plan around the weather? What if it rains? So we'll party in the rain. Meetings are supposed to have a practical function, like solving problems or sharing crucial information. Just want to emphasize there's no bad ideas here.

We're just brainstorming. Yeah, I'm just really thinking it'll be a huge waste of money to try to plan around the weather. Yeah, okay. We get your concerns. Nancy, thank waste of money to try to plan around the weather. Yeah, okay. We get your concerns. Nancy, thank you. Should we be moving on to the next topic? People certainly point to the meeting as a pressure point in the system to either represent how the bureaucracy works or doesn't work,

in how it's run, and in how frequently it happens. What's your take on the place of the meeting in the usual bureaucratic system? Yeah, I mean, I think meetings are a real bugbear. When you have meetings that don't have a particular purpose for every single person in the meeting, that's when people start to feel really demotivated. There was an interesting study done at Microsoft. And one of the problems they were having was people were really, in their staff surveys, reporting that they weren't happy. They were really unhappy at work.

They looked at all kinds of variables. Like, is it the boss? Is it the working hours? Is it having to work with people in different time zones? Is it, you know, like not taking enough vacation? Whatever. zones? Is it, you know, like not taking enough vacation, whatever. And they found actually that the single most powerful explanatory factor for these engineers unhappiness at work was having to sit in meetings with more than a couple of people in them. Hello, meetings are an essential

part of the life of every organization. And your ability to run effective meetings with your management skills is a critical part of your success in meeting management. Man's dream. Man's goal. A better way of life. Generally, people say to me, I'm spending 14 to 20 hours a week in meetings, often in video calls. There's a scientist from Stanford University called Nick Bloom who did some analysis. scientist from Stanford University called Nick Bloom, who did some analysis. And he said that everyone who works a hybrid job, on average, they're spending 20 hours a week in video calls. I'm Bruce Daisley. I'm a writer who specializes in the intersection of work and our lives. Formerly, I was a technology executive.

In fact, Bruce Daisley was a former vice president at Twitter, now called X. Let's face it, most meetings are useless, but they do serve a purpose. The meeting is a ritual. It's a kind of daily ceremony. It's a pageant that portrays who's in charge and who isn't. The boss performs and the staff applauds, thus confirming that the bureaucracy continues for another day. And attendance for this ritual is mandatory. I got worn down by excessive amounts of meetings I used to work at tech firms like Twitter and Google. And so I would very much try to ration the amount of time we spent in meetings. I had a period at Twitter, we set about trying to rebuild the culture. And what we found was

I still had a high number of people quitting work. And I would chat to them and say, look, can I ask what are the things that are motivating you to leave? And a lot of them would say, I just feel like I've got so many meetings. I've got so much online communication that I feel overwhelmed. I don't feel like I'm doing a good job. We did an audit of it. And people were, in that case, they're spending about 20 hours a week in meetings. I think the pretty intuitive finding was that if you're in a meeting with two or three people, everyone gets to talk, everyone's sharing ideas, there's a lot of feedback, that's a useful meeting. But if you're in a meeting with, you know, 15, 20 people, you're just going around in a circle reporting what you've

done, reporting what your priorities for the week are, that's just not very motivating, meaningful, or useful. Like, why do you need to know what 15 other people are doing all week? In the very first version of Amazon, Jeff Bezos told his employees, I want you to be able to do your job without feeling the need to tell anyone what you're doing. And, you know, he felt that excessive communication would slow down the organization. So don't do it. This particular study at Microsoft, they decided to try to reduce that type of meeting as much as possible.

And they found that to be a really effective intervention. The mythology of the meeting begins at Mount Olympus of ancient Greece, with 12 gods from Aphrodite to Zeus. At this meeting, they determined the fate of the humans down on Earth. The gods would throw thunderbolts at them to disrupt their lives, and that was called tragedy. So the fates of Jason and Medea, for example, are determined by a meeting of gods,

to which, by the way, Jason and Medea are not invited. I wish from that blue sky the white wolf of lightning would leap and burst my skull and my brain. But like virtually everything else about Buromania, to understand the phenomenon of the meeting, we have to go back to the 19th century. You have to look back to the creation of the general staff in a lot of militaries, and then the idea, the importation of that idea of a general staff as a thing that exists separate from just the day-to-day running of the firm, but also longer-term planning and thinking about sort of strategy as opposed to just operations, logistics, or tactics. People will often point to the experience of many, many individuals in many countries

during the Second World War passing through very large military systems and taking a lot of the habits of regular meetings before going into action, regular planning and logistics back into the corporation as a period when meetings really take off in North American industry. I think the continuing problem is, I will say as someone who teaches at a business school, we don't always teach people when you should and should not have a meeting. Yeah. Oh, that it seems organic or, or weirdly inorganic. It's, it's, or, or monstrous that, that, that the number of meetings that have to happen. I think for many people who organize meetings in the first place, like the, the amount of organizational life that boils down to, I do this because this is how I was

trained to do it when I started in this position is very large, of course. I think asking why we need to have a meeting and could we decide this based on some other form of communication is an important one. But notice the challenge. The challenge is that for many of us, when we don't like a decision that was taken, we're frustrated that we were not consulted. Unfortunately, the tools of modern work, calendars and messaging software have just created a version of work that the writer Cal Newport calls the hyperactive hive mind. At the tone, please record your message. report calls the hyperactive hive mind. It's just this explosion of constant interactions and exchanges between each other. And I think that's a version of work that no one has intentionally

created. And that's the challenge of contemporary work. I think it needs a reset, but we don't know what to reset to. Bureaucracy, the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists. The truth is that such a bureaucracy really is much more a parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause. and imperatives of cause. Bureaucracy, the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists.

It's a crucial observation by the writer David Foster Wallace in his 2011 novel, The Pale King. Bureaucracy is supposed to make the company, the institution, or the society run better, more efficiently. But instead, a kind of monstrous executive layer winds up eating away the innards until what's left is hollowed out.

30 years of looking at forms, cross-checking forms, filling out the same memos on the same forms. There's something in some of their eyes. I don't know how to explain it. An army of generals but no soldiers. A room full of vice presidents in a company that no longer makes anything or hires anybody. The Pale King is the unfinished third novel by David Foster Wallace. It takes place in a tax office in Peoria, Illinois, and the novel was never finished. I'm David Herring at the University

of Liverpool in the UK. But the main materials of the book really are character sketches or character profiles or portraits that are based around several workers at this tax office in Illinois, some of whom have worked there for a long time, some of whom are new, and some of whom are being transferred there from further away. My grandparents' building had a janitor. This old fellow fed the coal furnace every couple hours. He'd been there forever. He was almost blind from looking into the mouth of that furnace. The older ones here are like that.

Their eyes are almost like that. Well, I think Wallace is writing in a fairly long tradition of novels and stories that are about clerks and people who work within bureaucracy. One might envision a large and intricately branching system of jointed rods, pulleys, gears, and levers radiating out from a central operator, such that tiny movements of that operator's fingers are transmitted through that system to become the gross kinetic changes in the rods at the periphery. It is at this periphery that the bureaucracy world acts upon this one.

It is this that makes it a world instead of a thing. I think it's possible to trace a line back from The Pale King to Melville's Bartleby and to Kafka's short stories, which of course very often feature clerks and people who are associated with bureaucratic institutions. And of course, Kafka himself was a clerk as well. And then going into American literature again, you get past the Second World War and you start to get those kind of suburban novels, you know, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road or The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, which are about the new kind of suburban,

bureaucratic, public servants, civil servants. I would say bureaucracy is probably the major theme of the novel in the sense that the novel is an attempt to make palatable, not only palatable, but to give an affirmative account of bureaucracy. My name is Adam Kelly, and I'm Associate Professor of English in University College Dublin in Ireland. But he's also writing in a way that is perhaps unlike Richard Yeats or those kind of post-war American writers. He's trying to write towards something that maybe has something more in common with a writer like Kafka, almost something kind of mystical or kind of religious about the process of bureaucracy. In one particular strand of The Pale King, a narrative by one of the characters

called Chris Fogel, he speaks of his conversion experience to the IRS as literally a kind of religious experience. He's been spending most of his life as what he describes as a wasteoid. A layabout, someone with no real direction. And one day he's going into college and he accidentally finds himself in the wrong lecture theatre. And giving a lecture is this mysterious guy who works from the tax office. He seemed lithe and precise. His movements had the brisk economy of a man who knows time is a valuable asset. His complexion, though, was that of someone who had rarely been out in the sun.

He seemed at home in thrifty, fluorescent light. He is addressed by a person described as a substitute Jesuit who gives a kind of encomium to the life of a tax accountant and people who work in bureaucracies, speaking of them as kind of modern sacrificial heroes. I know every cobble on the road you are walking, he said. I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is in fact heroic. Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Heroism.

He finds himself mesmerized by this guy's speech about what it means to be a tax agent, what it means to be an accountant, what it means to work in the tax office, and what it means to work effectively for a kind of a power that is higher than just oneself. True heroism is you alone in a designated workspace. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care, Europe the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of property and care. With no one there to see or cheer. This is the world, just you and your job. So the tax office is really associated with the workings of the nation, of the country. It's the kind of heart that pumps the blood around.

It's considered to be a kind of essential element of the country. Gentlemen, you are called to account. What the bureaucracy of the IRS represents and acts as in The Pale King is a kind of substitute for the meaningfulness of religion and the collective project that religion provided to people for so long. Bureaucracy as religion. It's not as bizarre as it first sounds. The numbing repetition, the constant filling in of forms with numbers and codes, the perpetually spinning hamster wheel, the very mindlessness of it all can also be seen as mindfulness, a total absorption in the moment. Think of Buddhist meditation. In Wallace, the concept of desire, as in the concept of Buddhism, is always associated

with this idea of wanting and needing something for oneself, whether that's love or attention or drink or drugs or anything like that. And the way out of that is to move away into something else, into something beyond the self. So there are scenes in The Pale King where we see people engaged in this almost kind of transcendent sense of concentration. And in fact, in the notes for the novel, there is a suggestion that some of the characters have an almost kind of superhuman or kind of saintly quality to them. The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom, to function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human, to breathe without air.

to breathe without air. There is a character who has the ability to concentrate so purely that he's able to remain absorbed for hours and hours on end without looking up. And there's another character who, when he is completely absorbed, begins to levitate off the floor. One night, someone comes into the office and sees Drinian floating upside down over his desk, with eyes glued on a complex return. Drinian himself, unaware of the levitating thing, since it is only when his attention is completely on something else that levitation happens. So there's a sense that some of these people have these kind of almost religious powers.

that some of these people have these kind of almost religious powers. You know, if one concentrates on something just one moment at a time, from moment to moment, one can attain a kind of a much greater sense of being. So in his earlier novel, In Infinite Jest, it's the one day at a time mantra of Alcoholics Anonymous. All of these things, I think, for Wallace are underpinned by this sense of deliberately going through a very onerous and often boring process in order to understand or learn something valuable, a valuable lesson on the other side of it. But at the same time, there is a sense that the work that they're doing is incredibly boring. And he tackles the issue of boredom because it screams for attention. How does David Foster Wallace deal with the whole issue of boredom in the kind of work that they're doing, tax auditors? Rather than simply a description of boring bureaucracy, he tends to focus on the value

of boredom. What is it that we can learn from being incredibly bored? And the occasion for this incredible boredom is, for example, spending eight hours a day filling in forms that have nothing to do with your life in particular, but they're simply to keep this kind of abstract sense of the world around you kind of moving around. So he talks quite a lot about boredom as a quality that is actually important to the self. So why then this built-in hostility to bureaucracy and red tape that we all seem to share. There is a Freudian piece, how it all acts on our most basic wishes and fears. Again, Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst. This is his wheelhouse. Once we get all this paperwork, we get the people who handle the

paperwork. And, you know, sort of suddenly total strangers have this strange and total power over you. And that experience of being in the hands of another person, of needing their care, of fearing their wrath, always brings us back to our earliest experiences. It really makes us feel like children again. Okay, can you expand on that a bit? I mean, in what way does it make us feel like children again? Well, I mean, that what way does it make us feel like children again? Well, I mean, that is the point in our life in which we are the most helpless, the most dependent, the most needy. So there's then a sort of like a childlike rebellion against the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy represents us as a kind of parent? Absolutely. And you see people, I mean, I think of my own experiences with the university bureaucracy, going through all these sort of early stages.

First, you try to sort of ingratiate yourself to the powers that be. And then when you don't get what you want, you became angry and you become sullen or sulky. You become resentful and then you become infuriated again. Okay. But the thing with the childhood experience is you outgrow it, right? I mean, eventually, most people find that the parental authority has some legitimacy. Does that happen with bureaucracy? Yeah, I'm not sure we outgrow it all that much. I think we carry this around and then in moments of real anxiety or

distress, it comes back. Charles Hippolyte Laboussière, the bureaucrat who, by his own account, saved 1,153 lives in the French Revolution by mushing up the paperwork, wrote about what he did. The tigers that drank the blood of men, although seized by fear and suspicion, were not careful enough to suspect me. My neglected exterior and my frank and joking tone gave me an air of simplicity

that made me seem unimportant in their eyes. After the Terror, Baboussière became a celebrity in France. In 1802, his portrait was hung at the Louvre, and a prominent theatre put on a performance of Hamlet in his honour, since so many of the people that he'd saved had worked in the theatre. Among those attending were Napoleon and his wife Josephine, who herself had been saved by Labussiere. During this bloody period, horrible to remember,

I had the pleasure of saving many victims from the revolutionary acts at the risk of my life. After his proverbial 15 minutes of fame, Labusssiere, like a proper low-level bureaucrat, simply went back to his old life. But by then, people knew that the parasite of bureaucratia could be destroyed, not by an army, but rather bit by bit, one file folder at a time. bit by bit, one file folder at a time. I dared to be human in an era when humanity was a crime. You've been listening to Bureau Mania by Winnipeg contributor Tom Jokinen. Special thanks to Suzanne Dufresne, Corey Funk, and Dylan Longhurst at CBC Manitoba. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Nikola Lukšić is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.