Certain words are beloved of bureaucrats; words like monitor, check, regulate, review, classify, and control. Observe something significant about these words. They all involve delay. Delay is the name of the bureaucrat’s game. Faced with an idea, an initiative, a suggested course of action, a possible solution to a problem, the bureaucrat’s normal response is “Whoa! Hang on a minute! Where do you think you are going? Hold your horses! Not so fast!”
Politicians worth their salt use “We will make things happen!” as their battle cry. But beneath their breath every cosy bureaucrat in the system whispers “Not if I can help it, they won’t.” It is not their job to make things happen. Making things not happen is much more what they consider to be in their line of duty.
I would not wish to be misunderstood. There has to be a bureaucracy to administer any company, Ministry or state. And delay is by no means a bad thing. If there were no mechanisms for review, control, and monitoring, all sorts of half-baked, utopian, reckless and dishonest schemes would see the light of day and drag the nation down. Delay, properly applied, is essential in order to reject the obviously useless and to correct and perfect the potentially useful.
