How many of the below described senior bureaucrats do you know in your organization or other, private or public, bureaucracies?
"There is a remarkably distinctive smell emitted by fearful bureaucrats. It is acrid, rank and seems to cling to the clothing and the hair. Acting like a pheromone, it drives senior management to form small defensive herds from which to scream homicidally at middle management that they must not tell junior staff who can fix the problem what is going on because everything, including what has just been reported on the radio, is secret." (1).
During my 34-plus years in a State bureaucracy I saw this all too often--Especially as the civil service became more-and-more political and less and less committed to "service" by public servants. This disease or toxicity appears to be specially rampant in universities and is inversely proportional to the relationship between the effective Public (NOT political) control of any bureaucracy and directly proportional to the tenure of the senior bureaucrats and the amount of discretionary money involved in their programs.
(1) Macinnis, Peter
Poisons: From Hemloc to Botox and the Killer Bean of Calabar
Arcade Publishing, New York, 2004
ISBN 1-55970-761-5
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