According to a story in Wednesday’s News and Observer, the sister university we all love to hate up in Chapel Hill hired an efficiency expert to tell them that it has “too many supervisors, bloated administrative costs and a bureaucracy that hamstrings everything from assigning courses to classrooms to purchasing supplies.”
First, I would like to thank the Captain Obvious Consulting Firm for telling UNC-Chapel Hill that it has a bureaucracy that dumps red tape and paperwork on faculty and students alike, making higher education that much more of a drag. But more importantly, I’d like for our University to come to a similar conclusion regarding our own bureaucracy, albeit without the expensive efficiency expert.
In a sense, we are slowly being bogged down by what German sociologist and political economist Max Weber called the “iron cage” of bureaucracy — in short, we become trapped by the rules, regulations, bylaws, amendments, exceptions and guidelines of our administrative systems. And right now, with the state legislature sharpening its axes as it prepares to lop off an enormous chunk of the budget, breaking out of this iron cage seems like a very good idea.
I’m not suggesting that we disband our administrative bureaucracy entirely — we need to have regulations and paperwork, to some extent. I merely suggest that we attempt to draw our bureaucracy closer to Weber’s ideal type: there must be rules regarding duties, powers, the chain of command and resources that each position has access to, and the organization is driven by merit and attempts to be beyond illicit means of influence.
How to achieve such an organization is probably well beyond us, but we can at least start to push towards reaching such a goal by respecting more of the rules and removing positions that serve little or no purpose. Remember the guy from Office Space whose job was to take the customers’ specifications to the engineers? We don’t have to hire the Bobs to tell us that we can probably get rid of such superfluous positions.
We need to push further, however. Perhaps we should listen to Malcolm Gladwell and his suggestion in The Tipping Point that we learn from Gore Associates, the company that makes Gore-Tex and other synthetics. Simply put, Gore relies on social forces to create a workplace that is filled with innovation, motivation and productivity without the extra levels of management. At Gore, the left hand knows pretty darn well what the right hand is doing — sales knows what the manufacturing people are working on and each of them know what the researchers are doing.
Surely the University can do the same. By putting the people who are tasked with administrative duties “on the same floor” as the people they are in charge of, we eliminate the middleman who tells the boss what research is doing, the messenger who talks about class responsibilities and the assistant who presents the report on the department’s fiscal outlook.
And again, we definitely do NOT need an efficiency expert to figure out that we should try to drive the University back onto the autobahn of innovation. We need to be innovators.
