The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy

Praise for this book

• 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.

• Mark Schwartz turns the tables on bureaucracy, offering a practical guide to stripping out a labyrinth of rules and replacing them with simplicity, ease, and automation. His version of a benevolent bureaucracy paves the path for digital transformation and facilitates creativity and innovation.

• Mark has done it again: with his usual wit and verve, he has cut past normal lazy blather about ‘bloated bureaucracies’ to get to the truth about their place in the world. In doing so, he outlines not only why bureaucracies are necessary, but how they are best fought through a deep understanding of their internal logic and weak points. [The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy] serves as a handbook on how to fight the good fight not just for IT, but for the world too.

• My brain continues to turn around quantum bureaucracy. How to get the right amount of it at the right time and in the right place, but no more and not there unless you look. Maybe Schrodinger’s Bureaucracy is something I need to work on and think about…Great read, and I’m so thankful to Mark for writing this book to reform bureaucracy. With his insight into razor-bearing sumo monkeys, we can progress toward a more modern way of managing. Like Jonah, I felt trapped with no way to determine my own direction. Mark provides great tools for guiding the whale.

• Reading Marks' book is like meeting that old friend you never hanged out with and who ends to be your best friend. Bureaucracy is one of those friends that we are often focused on fighting....The reality is it can become one of our best allies.

• Whether you have fallen in love with bureaucracy or hate it, you should read this book....Once again, Mark manages to combine exciting storytelling with tangible analogies form history and daily life.

• A must read for leaders trying to break the vicious circle of 'it can't be done' in complex organizations.

• [The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy is] a must read for government and business leaders as they embark on digital transformation. It will make you a better digital leader by giving you the knowledge to use bureaucracy as a digital accelerator.

• It take 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.

• Mark uses three levers as themes, each with usable playbooks, that will give you the confidence and early wins to maintain momentum as you break through the barriers most organizations face.

• This fascinating book will make you rethink bureaucracy and give you actionable tools to manage in increasingly complex environments.

• Informative, interesting, and thought provoking piece that raises the veil on bureaucracy.

• Mark provides an engaging, insightful, and balanced view on a topic that could easily make one's eyes bleed!

• Mark is to bureaucracy as Sun-Tzu is to the art of war. Read this book to capitalize on the good intended from bureaucracy and have the scissors you always hoped for to reshape it to be enabling, learning, and lean.

• Reading this book made me realize the obvious: One does not simply kill bureaucracy... he has to simply transform.

• ... it's 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.

• Mark Schwartz has written a classic bureaucracy that will always be relevant. A very readable, insightful, playful, useful, and enjoyable book that will help readers who are bureaucrats of any flavor.

• 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.

• A remarkable and eye-opening journey on bureaucracy written with spark and wit.

• You may not come to love bureaucracy, but you will appreciate the wisdom in Mark's sage advice.

• Mark has done it again, giving us IT professionals insights into how we, with our software and our creative development processes, can change heavy, unproductive bureaucratic corporations into adaptable, human-friendly, value-driven bureaucratic corporations that we all love to work for.