Organizational Complexity Quotes

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

When I came here I thought I worked for the President. But I didn’t realize that I also worked for 534 other people at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue who all think that they are presidents.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

The chances of catastrophe grow as organizations grow in number and size, and as internal communications become more time consuming and less intelligible.

Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.

The White House is a huge organization, first and foremost.

A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it's harder to turn quickly.

We are a very big and vast Government, and naturally, every ministry is becoming bigger and bigger. It becomes, therefore, essential that there should be proper coordination.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

What drives me crazy is when you have a supervisor in government, and they report into 12 other supervisors. That's unacceptable.

In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.

A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees ... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one.

One of the worst features of the existing system is that the employees have a constant risk in their employer. If he is not competent to manage the business with success, they suffer with him. Capital also is dependent on the skill of the captain of industry for the certainty and magnitude of its profits. Under these circumstances there has been a great demand for men having the requisite ability for this function. As the organization has advanced, with more impersonal bonds of coherence and wider scope of operations, the value of this functionary has rapidly increased. The possession of the requisite ability is a natural monopoly. Consequently, all the conditions have concurred to give to those who possessed this monopoly excessive and constantly advancing rates of remuneration.

The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.

Farmers have more Associations, and Bureaus, and Clubs, than they have pitchforks.

Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.

Excessive bureaucracy is distracting, time-consuming, and destructive to creativity.

Campaigns are crazy things. They're half startup, half enterprise.

Deep learning is a very capital-intensive area, and it's rare to find a company with both the necessary resources and a company structure where things can get done without having to pass through too many channels and committee meetings.

We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

I confess to a prejudice against officialism and a dread of bureaucracy.

The more the planners, the worse the plans.

Francis Ford Coppola is completely unconventional. He has a strong sense of loyalty. Great eyes. It's a diabolical undertaking in terms of organization and leadership.

Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.