“The job is no longer any fun. I feel like I have spent the last seven years atop a giant marshmallow kicking down, only to watch as it slowly moves back to its existing shape.”

So said William O. Spencer, the retiring CEO of Sherwin Williams paint company of Cleveland, Ohio in 1978.

I didn’t know Mr. Williams., but as a consultant I heard change leaders express similar frustrations about the maddeningly resilient inertia of the status quo.

During the privatization of British Airways, Colin Marshall complained about his predecessor “Roy Watts and his civil servants.” At General Motors, my work was described as “unfreezing the frozen middle.” Now I read about young software engineers of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) describe “the tyranny of bureaucracy in the Deep State.”

It is true that the establishment, whether in a company or a government agency, is resistant to change. It might be worth examining why that is. To simplify, let’s talk about the development of bureaucracy in a small business.

An entrepreneur has an idea and gets together in a garage with a few friends. At this point organizationally, they are in the everyone does everything stage. They experiment a lot, build a prototype, test it technically, operationally, and with customers, and then launch. Soon they begin to specialize their roles. Someone oversees marketing; someone else steps back to handle hiring and onboarding, which morphs into HR, etc.

Then some problems occur. Maybe there is an operational problem and they standardize the process with written procedures. Or there is a legal problem and they develop rules of what you can say or do. To ensure the results they’ve promised to their funders they develop metrics. Procedures and metrics beget more procedures and metrics.

Something else goes wrong and someone says, “Criminy! Why did you do that? Look, before you try something like that again, come get my approval!” Inspections and approvals beget more inspections and approvals.

Pretty soon you have multiple steps in every process, managed by levels of overseers, inspectors, and approvers. Every single procedure, process step, or metric was created for a good reason, to improve quality, safety, legal compliance, and so on. Every single layer of management, or step in a procedure, or rule is owned by someone whose job it is to make sure it happens just so, and Voila: Bureaucracy!

Customers complain it takes too long. Suppliers say you are too rigid. And anyone who wants to change it is sitting atop Spencer’s marshmallow watching as “it slowly moves back to its existing shape.”

Bureaucracy is much in the news, because of the belief shared across the political spectrum that the US federal government is too big, too slow, too restrictive, and (for some) has a progressive political bias. I read three articles recently that inspired this post.

David Brooks, the New York Times “lefty conservative” (his words) wrote that we find ourselves in a new populist political era, one of several major zeitgeist shifts over the last hundred years. Brooks describes a few world shifting political moments, the 1930s totalitarian movement, communism, fascism, New Deal social democracy -welfare state,1960s liberation movement, the free market liberalism movement of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Brooks’s message to Democrats: “Hey wake up to the change. Stop being institutionalists; reform institutions to respond to the people, or those who speak populist language will keep stealing your lunch money.” Well, Duh!

Next I read Nathan Levine’s piece in the New York Times. Levine writes a Substack newsletter called “The Upheaval,” which examines ”at least three simultaneous revolutions: a geopolitical revolution driven by the rise of China; an ideological revolution consuming the Western world; and a technological revolution exacerbating both of the former.”

Levine’s treatise, examines how the management class usurps the upper class (capital) and uses the language of populism to assume power. He quotes George Orwell:

“… scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people,” hungry for “more power and more prestige,” would seek to entrench “a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves.”

Levine notes “DOGE’s cuts have been relatively shallow and occasionally haphazard,” and therefore “managerial expansion will only continue to grow, the siren song of employing the managerial apparatus to achieve desired political and policy goals (such as on defense) and liable to lead only to steadily higher budgets and more bureaucracy,” and concludes:

“Still, the administration’s anti-managerial revolution is the most determined and meaningful effort in decades to disrupt the status quo of how America is governed, and for whom. It represents a fundamental transformation in the right’s conception of politics, the embrace of a class war that appears here to stay.”

So, maybe we won’t get rid of bureaucracy, but replace it with right-wing bureaucracy, and the working class still gets screwed? Ouch.

The third article I read was by Gary Hamel, and Michele Zanini co-authors of the book, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them. Hamel and Zanini move down from the 30,000 foot level, to suggest a few ideas about what to do about bureaucracy:

Hamel and Zanini suggest:

1. “Cut administrative bloat– Eliminate the endless box-ticking and redundant reviews that waste time and money.
2. Shrink managerial ranks– Reduce management positions by more than half to match the Clinton-Gore reform proposals from 30 years ago
3. Pursue moonshot goals– Set ambitious targets across all agencies, and give teams freedom to innovate.
4. Turn agencies into laboratories– Allow unprecedented experimentation across all departments.
5. Measure real-world impact– Link funding directly to measurable performance outcomes.
6. Listen to front line employees– Make every federal appointee spend 100 days asking “What slows you down?” and ‘What stifles your creativity?’

Hamel and Zanini remind us, “We’ve done this before. Remember eliminating small pox, and the space race.”  I concur and I’d add look at how Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro shepherded the repair of the bridge on I-95 near Philadelphia.

To be clear, I support Hamel and Zanini’s suggestions. They are applying corporate change methodologies to combating governmental bureaucracy. It might work.

It is certainly a better approach than DOGE’s: close down the regulators we don’t like, commandeer a bunch of data, “ship software,” and fire a bunch of people, and “expect that they’ll figure it out.”

If you are trying to change a company and combating bureaucracy, it is worth noting some things that are assumed or, at least, not stated in the Hamel and Zanini prescriptions:

1. Specify and allow people to internalize the Why of the Change. Change is about internalizing insight and choosing to act to achieve an agreed result. There is an overarching why. At British Airways it was customer service and profit. I’m not sure we have an agreed purpose of government – what specifically we want government to do and at what level – federal, state, local, but that would help. Also there is a “unit why” for each part of the organization, cabin crew or ramp work, and agency by agency.
2. Be clear about the What and How of the Change. I came to understand that there are three distinct growth capabilities in change, Innovation (step change, reinvention), Improvement (incremental, faster, better, cheaper) and Integration (getting everyone on the same page). Different organizations or departments need different capabilities at different times. Things like moonshots or experimentation fit into Innovation and differ within the context of risk, e.g., safety. Delayering, spans of control, process step and approval streamlining are used in Improvement. Integrations of changes within and across units is the single most critical capability for change that sticks.
3. Measurement is a two edged sword. People behave according to how they are measured. Most bureaucracies have too many metrics. So streamlining metrics is as important as measuring the real world impact, a results measure. You must also have the upstream measures, process measures, leading indicators, that guarantee the real world impact. Finally you must measure sustained results, so the marshmallow doesn’t win.
4. People on the front line do have the answers. We’ve all worked in places where “those guys up there just don’t get it.” I have a tremendous respect for the people doing the work, but they must have all the information. So, transparency must go along with autonomy. And if you don’t take their advice, tell them why, or they’ll never trust you again. And the marshmallow “slowly moves back to its existing shape.”

Back in 1978, the reporter who interviewed Bill Spencer and struck marshmallow comment gold, asked Lee Iacocca, fresh off his Chrysler turnaround, what he thought about Spencer’s reaction.

“Well, I certainly sympathize with the frustration,” Iacocca smiled, “I also clearly see his problem. The way you change a marshmallow isn’t by kicking it from on top; it’s by heating it up from below.”