How Society Uses Bureaucracy to Keep You Safe but Miserable

Your HR department is run by Billy Beane

“I don’t worry about action, just inaction!” — Winston Churchill

Have you heard the story of Barney the Bureaucrat? Barney had established himself throughout his long career making a comfortable salary, while working reasonable hours, with minimal stress. Barney has a formal sounding job title and defined responsibilities, yet when new acquaintances ask them what they do for work, it takes them at least 5 minutes¹.

This is not to say that Barney is lazy or shirks responsibilities. Barney’s role has been designed to make it structurally impossible for him to use his expertise to advance the goals of his organization above a replacement level. If Barney is doing a good job, nobody is complaining or is even aware of his existence.

When there are complaints, Barney has no decision making authority or role in shaping company policies, therefore he’s not held responsible, but likely gets hassled by his boss(es). Since there’s no reward in doing things well and only downside when things go awry, Barney’s goal is to not deviate from company policy, even when he doesn’t think it makes sense. There is no incentive to think critically. He just needs to follow the playbook and so long as there are few incidents, he can remain employed indefinitely. Perhaps with luck, Barney the Bureaucrat can gradually ascend to a more senior level. He still won’t have any role in shaping company policies, but at least he can earn a better salary and have a more impressive title.

Reading this, you might think I was describing a government position, but this applies to most jobs. This is rarely because of the employees themselves; the workforce is made up of Barney’s by design. This article will explain why, who benefits and how to avoid falling into a bureaucratic role (or enterprise).

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Bureaucracy: A Love/Hate Story

Bureaucracy gets a bad rap as a system of inefficiency, but in large organizations, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Big companies and governments intentionally design bureaucratic systems because they provide stability, reduce risk, and ensure continuity, even if this comes at the cost of innovation, agility, and individual autonomy. Here is why bureaucracy is deliberately embedded into large organizations and how it serves their long-term interests:

i. Centralizing Risk and Responsibility

One of the primary reasons organizations embrace bureaucracy is to centralize decision-making authority and limit the autonomy of lower-level employees. The idea is simple: If fewer people make decisions, there’s less room for error. To ensure individual employees cannot make their own choices, firms create rigid structures where decisions flow through layers of approval. This concentrates decision making into the hands of management.

Management is assumed to have a better understanding of the "big picture." Not to mention more experience, expertise, looks, Rolexes etc. Management makes the decision once, then sets it as the firms policy, until the next time they revisit that choice. Some firms frequently revisit and adjust policies if they aren’t working well but many don’t. Naturally this system will frustrate employees who actually care about doing what’s best for the organization, the customers or their colleagues.

These rigid approval layers make employees feel disempowered, because they are. The organization wants to ensure that they are insulated from individual mistakes. It’s impossible for any individual employee to understand every financial, legal or reputational ramification of a decision, but since decision makers generally sit at the top, in theory they should have the better grasp (the big picture).

This standardizing of processes and creating multiple levels of approval exists to mitigate the risk that employees behave outside the confines decision makers have created. The downside, of course, is that this approach stifles creativity and innovation. Lower level employees generally have more interactions with different departments, customers or constituents than upper management, giving them valuable insights about what works and doesn’t.

Bureaucratic systems handcuff their ability to act on these insights. Their job is to follow the playbook, not rewrite it. Most employees are better off this way, because star employees are rare.

ii. Star Employees are Rare & Expensive

In the 2011 film Moneyball the talented Brad Pitt portrays Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics Baseball team. In Major League Baseball (MLB) there is no salary cap and a wide disparity in the spending power between big market teams (New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox etc.) and small market teams. Oakland is a small market team, with a cheap owner. The film starts with Billy Beane attempting to convince his team’s owner to give him more money to retain one of his best players, Johnny Damon. They already lost Jason Giambi, another top player, to the Yankees and without Damon, they would have a large void to fill.

With much difficulty, he convinces the owner to authorize a higher offer, only to learn that Damon was still going to leave for the Red Sox, because they came in with another offer well above what Billy got. A few scenes later, Billy is in a room filled with player scouts and managers, attempting to find replacements for Damon and Giambi. After listening to the people in the room propose different players, Billy eventually out of frustration, tells them they need to accept the reality that there is nobody available as good as Damon or Giambi. Even if there were, they couldn’t afford them and they need to re-think their approach. The rest of the film chronicles the quest to field a competitive baseball team without star power. Without ruining too much of the film, they use analytics to spot undervalued players that fit their budget.

While Moneyball is a sports movie, Billy Beane’s plight is similar to what many hiring managers and recruiters face in large organizations. Despite many organizations claiming to be a family, the truth is, they are more like a professional sports team. Like Billy, managers have lofty department objectives, yet operate in a salary cap environment, dictated by their finance and HR departments. When the possibility of a new headcount opens and the job description is drafted, what is the first thing HR does? They benchmark what people in similar roles within the organization make and look for external benchmarks to try to determine going market rate to hire somebody with the target expertise required. While this is what virtually every HR department does, this approach almost guarantees they will not end up with a star.

A star is a known commodity. When the Oakland A’s lost Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi they were all-star players, considered to be among the best at their positions. The going market rate for players of their caliber was among the highest in the MLB, and well beyond what Billy could afford. This is why when they hit free agency, Billy had no chance of keeping them. If you are trying to hire a star, you won’t lure them with an offer that is consistent with what an average performer makes.

(for more on this see Why Benchmarking is Lazy: An Alternative to Benchmarking)

When a Linkedin post claims a company is looking for a star, you should ignore it. It should really say “We are looking for the best person who falls within these salary bands we’ve set for the role based on x-y years of experience!”. If somebody is a star performer, they will want to be paid like a star. The problem is, you won’t know if somebody is a star performer until after they join. Forking over a star salary for somebody who is only okay is the quickest way to ruin any financially constrained organization, whether it’s a professional sports franchise or business.

This is why organizations rarely make star level offers, unless it’s for the most critical roles ie. the executive level.

iii. Board Man Get Paid

“I am not a system player, I am a system!” — James Harden

There is a certain logic to this. Some roles a more impactful than others. The prevailing belief is that it’s impossible to win consistently in American Football, without a good quarterback (QB). It’s a very difficult role and few people can do it, which is why average QBs get paid more than top performers at other positions.

The CEO role is the most important job within a company and since each organization needs to believe they are hiring a star CEO, they justify going above market. For other roles, HR departments are rarely authorized to offer above market rates, making it difficult for them to land a star. Their best case scenario, is to try to find a diamond in the rough, just like Billy Beane. Unfortunately, HR can’t use analytics on potential hires like the Oakland A’s, therefore they can’t be confident they’ll consistently find and retain these future stars at scale.

Instead they try to recreate this performance in the aggregate by breaking complex jobs into smaller & standardized tasks. This makes it easier to find workers, and replacements can step in with minimal disruption. Instead of searching for unicorn candidates with rare skills, companies can hire from a larger pool of average candidates who meet baseline qualifications. While this reduces the upside potential of stronger performers, it ensures stability and continuity.

Rule of thumb to remember: The harder an employee is to replace, the less bargaining power the organization has. If you have tens of thousands of people who can step into a role immediately with no training, on a moments notice, it will be much easier to secure new hires at the market average price.

Since this approach requires more employees, you need more managers, levels of hierarchy and codified processes & procedures for these workers to follow. Great employees, by contrast, often thrive in environments where they have the freedom to figure things out on their own. They don’t need rigid guidelines or micromanagement to succeed. Unfortunately great employees like this are hard to find, more expensive to hire, and more likely to leave for better opportunities. Big organizations, faced with the challenge of hiring at scale, opt for the safer route: hiring competent but unexceptional employees who can follow instructions.

Bureaucracy: Helpful For Most People

This system actually works well for the majority. Most people are not star performers, so they benefit from the increased availability of standardized job opportunities. Managers and executives can justify their value by overseeing large teams, and bureaucracy adds more rungs to the corporate ladder, creating clear paths for advancement. Additionally, employees at all levels can often avoid individual accountability when things go wrong. Blame can be shifted to processes, other departments, external circumstances, or even the customers themselves. Over time, bureaucracy’s focus on minimizing mistakes rather than driving improvement erodes any sense of individual ownership.

For those who lack intrinsic motivation for their organization’s mission, this structure offers protection. The lack of accountability provides job security, as one under-motivated employee rarely disrupts the system. However, as more roles are filled with workers seeking minimal responsibility, the organization as a whole becomes less effective. Many companies unknowingly fall into this trap by designing jobs that are inherently unmotivating or that primarily attract candidates looking to avoid accountability. By cultivating a culture overly focused on risk reduction, they end up with teams dominated by "Barney the Bureaucrats" rather than an all-star squad capable of driving real progress.

Avoiding The Siren Call of Bureaucracy

If you are someone who cares about making an outsized impact on your organization, industry, or the world, the most important thing you can do is ensure that your motivation and drive are not stifled by a role designed to limit your individual contribution. Choose companies, career paths, and managers that empower star contributors. Your goal should be to identify the most critical role in the company that you can reasonably step into within a short to medium time frame. While this role might not immediately come with much autonomy, if you perform at a high level and make yourself indispensable, your company will likely do everything it can to keep you long-term.

When you identify meaningful areas for improvement within your organization, don’t just diagnose problems—come prepared with solutions. Better yet, start solving the problems and let your manager and others know that you’re working on them. Making your manager look good can be a valuable strategy if you trust they will reward your efforts. However, it’s even better if many people know you as the person who takes initiative and consistently adds value to the organization.

Over time, you will become too valuable to constrain, and people will naturally want to give you more autonomy. While this might not immediately lead to a higher salary, it will position you for more senior roles as they open up. In the nearer term, it could also grant you more influence over department or company policies.

Achieving this can take time and may require switching roles or companies several times before you find the right fit. Even then, your role or organization won’t be entirely free from bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is like weeds, it grows slowly beneath the surface until it eventually suffocates everything beautiful around it. Some bureaucracy will always be necessary, and there will always be a place for roles like Barney’s. However, don’t let the weeds outgrow the flowers.

Concluding Thoughts

Bureaucracy is a pervasive force, but it doesn’t have to define your career. To rise above its constraints, focus on solving meaningful problems, taking initiative, and demonstrating your value through action. Build a reputation as someone who makes things happen, and over time, you’ll position yourself as indispensable.

While bureaucracy has its place and will always exist, it’s up to you to ensure it doesn’t stifle your potential. Cultivate a career that aligns with your ambitions, and let your work bloom despite the system’s limitations. Don’t be like Barney the Bureaucrat, take action, and leave your mark.

If you are interested in maximizing your impact within your organization, check out this great article from Torsten Walbaum

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1. Usually the longer it takes to explain somebodies occupation, the less meaningful work they probably do or they just have poor communication skills.