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The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler Paperback – 13 October 2020
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Product details
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1950508153
- ISBN-13 : 978-1950508150
- Customer reviews:
Product description
Review
"A must read for leaders trying to break the vicious circle of 'it can't be done' in complex organizations. Based on history, sociology, and his own experiences, Mark Schwartz explains the different perspectives on bureaucracy and how to bust it with practical steps. The perfect handbook for transformation under constrained circumstances."--Renato Garcia Pedigoni, CDO, Grupo Boticário
"A remarkable and eye-opening journey on bureaucracy written with spark and wit. It will give you a completely different perspective on bureaucracy--particularly entering the next normal. A must-read for all who want to realign and shift bureaucracy towards learning instead of using it as a Schimpfwort (a great word)!"--Eveline Oehrlich, Chief Research Director, DevOps Institute
"A shrewd and entertaining account of how bureaucracy becomes entrenched in social organizations and of its encumbering effects on the process of change. But its greatest value is in the sharing of strategies and tactics for knowledge workers trammeled by bureaucracy to--like Sumo wrestlers--turn the weight of the red tape to their advantage and become innovator-makers."--Renata Brogan, Solutions Architect, Women in Tech, Women in IT
"As someone that has been a cog in large, faceless corporations, I found bureaucracy stifling enough to abandon the heavy-handed rules and processes of large enterprise for the startup world. But even startups can become victims of senseless and unbending rituals. I discovered that bureaucracy has no preferred host. You may not come to love bureaucracy, but you will appreciate the wisdom in Mark's sage advice. In his battles with the Leviathan that is the USCIS, he brings levity and plenty of Moby Dick references as he deftly avoids the traps set by the devilish MD-102 by channeling the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler and become a force for positive change."--Mark Birch, Founder, Enterprise Sales Forum; Founder DEV.BIZ.OPS
"Bureaucracy has long been a major impediment to transformation. With his usual style of complementing his progressive thinking with a variety of literary references and wit, Mark provides an engaging, insightful, and balanced view on a topic that could easily make one's eyes bleed! In this book you will find a practical guide to busting bureaucracy and turning it into a force for good, all while staying true to the modern techniques of Agile and DevOps--with the help of a Monkey, a Razor, and a Sumo Wrestler."--Keith Madsen, SVP, Cloud and Advanced Technology, Bank of America
"Bureaucracy has never been discussed in such an entertaining and educational way before. Learn how to clean out the organizational 'scar tissue' that is slowing you down."--Adrian Cockcroft, VP Cloud Architecture Strategy, Amazon Web Services
"I identified with every chapter. Although we tend to think that bureaucracy is a disease and there are no magic recipes to change our way of thinking, we can always think of leaving it on the light side of the force."--Laura Caceres, Operations Director, DevOps LATAM
"Informative, interesting, and thought provoking piece that raises the veil on bureaucracy. It elucidates bureaucracy's history, evolution, practices, approaches, perceptions, and learnings. This book comes with a great deal of objectivity that propels the mind to seek innovative ways to create an enabling bureaucracy!"--Ikoabasi Akpan, Sales Manager, Air France-KLM
"It takes great curiosity to deeply understand organizational bureaucracy, great courage to challenge it, and pure genius to know how to bend it to your will. In this book, Mark delivers a razor-sharp analysis on all of the above and then shares with us a comprehensive roadmap to a better future, where bureaucracy finally becomes the organizational enabler it was always intended to be."--John Walsh, Business Relationship Manager, PepsiCo
About the Author
The Playbook to Becoming a Black Belt Bureaucrat
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The Monkey probes and provokes, learns how the organization really works—its politics, dynamics, people’s hidden motivations—then uses those learnings as a lever to move the unmovable. The Monkey does so with good humor and a light touch, along with an annoying persistence and lack of fear. He’s the iconoclast who questions what’s obviously true. He’s not bothered when he’s pinned under a mountain of bureaucracy, because sooner or later he’ll move the mountain. He winks as he disrupts and smiles—because after all, this is kind of fun. |
The Razor is the enforcer of bureaucratic parsimony. The Razor strives for minimal viable compliance and strives to achieve its desired controls with as little whale bulk as possible. The Razor trims bloated bureaucracy into lean bureaucracy; ponderous whales into sleek and speedy marlin; trolls into trainers. A visit to the Razor provides a shave and a haircut that costs less than two bits and makes a whale spiffy and fun to swim with. |
A sumo match can be a delicate balancing of forces, where each wrestler is trying to find exactly the right moment to apply exactly the right amount of force to exactly the right place to get the opponent off balance. If you push too hard, your opponent might simply yield and you’ll go flying. If you don’t push hard enough, then your opponent will push you and you’ll go flying. Our ally the Sumo Wrestler meets bureaucracy head-on and pushes with just the right strength at just the right point to win the match. |
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Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon.com

Even startups can become victims of rigid and nonsensical rituals. Bureaucracy is not about the form of organization, it is about people and how we organize ourselves and our work. That is the lesson that I took away from The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy. Mark Schwartz does an excellent job through the many funny and sometimes maddening stories he shares that we humans are all bureaucrats of species Homo bureaucraticus.
You may not come to love bureaucracy after reading Mark's book, but you will appreciate Mark's wisdom and sage advice through many years leading IT as the Chief Information Officer of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. In his battles with the Leviathan that is the USCIS, he brings levity and plenty of Moby Dick references as he deftly avoids the traps set by the myriads of confounding policies and procedures like the infamous MD-102 by channeling the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler and become a force for positive change.
Who is this book for then? For anyone looking to break through the redtape and silos and inertia that prevent innovation and stall transformation. Once you understand the nature of bureaucracy, Mark's insights can help you navigate around the roadblocks and leverage the power of bureaucracy to usher along organizational change.

Reviewed in the United States on 14 October 2020
Even startups can become victims of rigid and nonsensical rituals. Bureaucracy is not about the form of organization, it is about people and how we organize ourselves and our work. That is the lesson that I took away from The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy. Mark Schwartz does an excellent job through the many funny and sometimes maddening stories he shares that we humans are all bureaucrats of species Homo bureaucraticus.
You may not come to love bureaucracy after reading Mark's book, but you will appreciate Mark's wisdom and sage advice through many years leading IT as the Chief Information Officer of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. In his battles with the Leviathan that is the USCIS, he brings levity and plenty of Moby Dick references as he deftly avoids the traps set by the myriads of confounding policies and procedures like the infamous MD-102 by channeling the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler and become a force for positive change.
Who is this book for then? For anyone looking to break through the redtape and silos and inertia that prevent innovation and stall transformation. Once you understand the nature of bureaucracy, Mark's insights can help you navigate around the roadblocks and leverage the power of bureaucracy to usher along organizational change.


More importantly, Schwartz harvests insights from literature to support his musings on the human condition expressed through... IT bureaucracy. Why does this matter? For one thing, Schwartz is a former CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. It's not hard to make a case for the human impact of slow or inefficient digital services in that realm. Yet - the impact of human behavior as codified and expressed through bureaucratic rules fundamentally drives, shapes or blocks progress in every field of human endeavor.
Digital transformation - that overused term that describes the fundamental shift of much of our lives to online experiences - requires a deep understanding of the nature of human beings and human interaction. I've spoken to (or read) many technology leaders who've expressed some variation of: "Technology is the easy part. People are hard."
Schwartz addresses the people part, I'd argue, better than any other technology leader I've come across. Bureaucracy, essentially, represents our shared agreements about how we should, collectively, interact to get things done. Schwartz offers clear guidance, rooted in experience (and literature), on how to push bureaucracy to become agile and adaptive - supporting the behaviors and processes required by the digital age.
It's not a roadmap. It's better than that. It's insight into how and why humans create the rules and systems that allow us to cooperate to do extraordinary things - and how we can begin to update those rules and systems to accommodate the dizzying pace change in the digital age.

There is lots of great advice on how not just to reduce, but make the processes and functions of bureaucracy of use to delivery.
He has a great writing style that makes it easy to read and fun analogies that make learning and understanding easy.
Definitely recommending to everyone who wonders how to get through their red tape.
