Murphy's Law of Bureaucracy

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Murphy's Law of Bureaucracy

Once you have these three features ~ Hierarchy ~ Rules ~ Specialization ~ you have a Bureaucracy.

1. The spirit of public service will rise, and the bureaucracy will multiply itself much faster, in time of grave national concern.
2. If the first person who answers the phone cannot answer your question, it's a bureaucracy.
3. A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
4. Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve.
5. In a bureaucracy, accomplishment is inversely proportional to the volume of paper used.
6. A meeting is an event where minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
7. A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.
8. It should be impossible to distinguish, from a distance, whether the bureaucrats associated with your project are simply sitting on their hands, or frantically trying to cover their asses.
9. If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy; God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.
10. An inexorable upward movement leads administrators to higher salaries and narrower spans of control.
11. Any bureaucracy reorganized to enhance efficiency is immediately indistinguishable from its predecessor.
12. The effort expended by the bureaucracy in defending any error is in direct proportion to the size of the error.
13. If it can be understood, it’s not finished yet.
14. Never be the first to do anything.
15. Give a civil servant a good cause and he’ll wreck it with cliches, bad punctuation, double negatives and convoluted apology.
16. A committee is twelve men doing the work of one.
17. Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
18. A continuing flow of paper is sufficient to continue the flow of paper.
19. If a problem causes many meetings, the meetings eventually become important than the problem.
20. The person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again.