Management Perspectives

B usiness bureaucracy is an ageold challenge which plagues most large organisations, but Thinkers50 author and Hack Future Lab founder Terence Mauri asks, “Is enough being done to reduce excess bureaucracy that is like a leadership tax on learning and innovation?” Too many leaders are drowning in ‘Excess Bureaucracy,’ meaning too many rules, duplicated processes, unnecessary meetings, best practices that have become ‘broken practices,’ and silo behaviours that slow down decision-making, and ultimately, harm innovation efforts.

One of our time’s most ironic paradoxes is that technology changes fast, but humans don’t. Leaders are suffering from a common-sense gap, with excess bureaucracy outstripping our human brains’ capacity to make sense of it all, leading to structural stupidity in our organisations and rewards for building organisations of bureaucracy. Take resource allocation: budgets,

Opex spending, Capex spending, sales, and marketing dollars. The correlation of the same business allocating roughly the same dollar to the same executives yearly is exceptionally high because bureaucracy is sticky like glue, and there’s inertia in the system. Four billion pieces of paper are used daily, and the number of words in the U.S. Tax Code has increased from 400,000 to 4 million in the last 20 years.

San Francisco City Hall is pushing a new initiative to speed up its glacial hiring process for city workers, which currently takes an average of 255 days. We move closer to ‘Zombie Leadership’, leading with dead ideas every time we need to remember to unlearn the old ways, whether attending too many pointless meetings or rules that become the proxy for how we work.

Does bureaucracy serve us, or do we serve bureaucracy? We stop looking at outcomes and ensure we do the bureaucratic processes correctly. The role of leaders should not be bureaucracy itself but protecting what creates value and serves the purpose. Every organisation would benefit from a bi-yearly ‘Marie Kondo exercise’ named after the eponymous Netflix star who detoxes and declutters messy homes; all employees need to be responsible for streamlining operations and trimming what authors Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini of Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them call the ‘Bureaucratic Mass index.

Given the high price humans pay in lost time and intelligence doing tasks that do not make a difference, it is time for leaders to prioritise intelligent work over bureaucratic work and ask, “Are we complexifiers or simplifiers?” Winning the future is no longer just about scale and efficiency. It is about ‘Return on Intelligence’—a cognitively enabled humanled, AI-enabled culture where humans are empowered to solve problems and co-create the future; a collective intelligence enabled by freedom, trust, and responsibility rather than control and excess bureaucracy.

Hack Future Lab’s research confirms that most leaders struggle with record levels of excess bureaucracy, leaving them less willpower to focus on their top priorities. No wonder most leaders cannot focus on what matters. Leaders are exhausted. Screen fatigue. Meetings fatigue.

Collaboration fatigue. Bureaucratic fatigue. With over $41 trillion of enterprise value at risk from disruption and $17 trillion yearly wasted globally on excess bureaucracy, 93 per cent of leaders believe that excess bureaucracy could be one of the most significant barriers to growth of our times. We have less energy to focus on highvalue leadership activities whenever we forget to unlearn the ‘Zombie ways’, whether too many meetings and emails that make the trivial seem urgent or annual performance reviews that become tick-boxing exercises. Bureaucracy is like costs. They always need to be cut. This is the essence of excess bureaucracy, a corporate disease from which leaders suffer and waste talent.

Talent crushed by bureaucracy*

1/3 of leaders spend 700 hours a year (33.3 per cent of their total hours worked a year) on excess bureaucracy.

1/3 of leaders devote more time to shallow leadership (Low Impact) versus deep leadership (High Impact) because of excess bureaucracy.

1/2 of leaders waste time using manual processes, ‘broken’ practices, and excess protocols that could be automated or eliminated.

1/2 of leaders agree that excess bureaucracy is a ‘leadership tax’ on speed, agility, and talent. The most significant risk to long-term performance, well-being, and resilient growth is not market volatility or the rise of exponential technologies but the failure to eliminate excess bureaucracy in our organisations that we have normalised.

The number one takeaway is that the higher your excess bureaucracy, the slower you make decisions, avoid risks, and lead for the future. So, what can you do differently to evolve from a leader of bureaucracy to a leader of intelligence? Bayer, the pioneering biopharma firm uses a ‘Dynamic Shared Ownership’ (DSO) model to maximise a bootstrap ethic and nimble management: flat, fast, and iterative despite legacy and complexity. If it were a formula, it would read ‘Leadership = trust + freedom x ownership’. Employees are expected to put common sense over bureaucracy and democratise ideas and decisions by asking, “Do our rules, meetings, and processes serve or sabotage us?

Do we reward and incentivise bureaucratic work and behaviours (doing things right) more than curiosity over conformity (doing the smart thing)? If the answer is “yes,” then it is time to simplify, eliminate, automate, or outsource (SEAO). Too many firms suffer ‘addition sickness’ with people adding more friction and slowing thinking and decisionmaking. “If you want to be a large company and not a dinosaur, you have to find a way to evolve quickly, to adapt, to change, to reinvent yourself,” says Bill Anderson, the CEO of Bayer.

The most significant risk to talent is not external threats such as competitors or market disruption. It is internal risks from excess bureaucracy and the normalisation of bureaucratic over intelligent work. Bureaucracy is a significant internal barrier to growth, and talent agrees, ranking excess bureaucracy as the number one barrier to learning and productivity.

As organisations become more bureaucratic, there creeps in a leadership bias to manage more proxies and ‘battles among the silos’. Bureaucratic work becomes essential in business at the expense of ideas, innovation, and leading change. This leads to an ‘organisational tragedy of the commons’, where individuals inadvertently produce collective harm.

The higher the excess bureaucracy, the slower the organisation becomes. Inertia. Excuses and procrastination are the norm, and in so doing, saps initiative and drive. Leaders stop looking at results or outcomes and fixate on teams doing the process right. The lesson is that we are all responsible for reducing the leadership tax of excess bureaucracy and rigid hierarchies to embrace the future and stay ahead of change